Yale Week Heats Up

Dartmouth Bowling Pin Awards for top performances against Penn:

RB/TE: John Gallagher
WR/QB: Conner Kempe
OL: Ryan O'Neill
DL: Lane Shipley
LB: Garrett Wymore
DB: Chase Womack
ST: Connor Phillips

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It was Phillips, coach Buddy Teevens confirmed yesterday, who blocked the potential gamewinning Penn field goal attempt near the end of regulation Saturday. The final statistics package handed out at the end of the game had the wrong name.

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The Portal 31 Yale football blog offers up some injury information regarding Yale players and Saturday's game at Dartmouth. Your mileage may vary.

If there's one thing I've learned in covering college football for a long time it is this: Believe someone is going to play when they are on the field playing, and believe they are not going to play when you see them on the sidelines in civvies.

That said, here's the skinny out of New Haven:

Yale senior defensive end Tom McCarthy (Achilles, calf strains) and sophomore running back Mordecai Cargill (hip flexor) are back at practice and should be good to go for Saturday's game at Dartmouth.

McCarthy hasn't played since the first quarter of the season opener against Georgetown and with a knee injury expected to keep the other starting defensive end Matt Battaglia out of Saturday's game, the timing of McCarthy's return could not be more ideal.

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Yale's game notes for Saturday have been posted here. A note of interest:

Yale’s rushing defense ranks third among FCS teams with an 80.33 average, while the Elis are 17th in sacks (2.67) per game. Both stats are tops among Ivy schools.

Also ...

Despite a tough Albany game, Alex Thomas (17-30) leads the Ancient Eight with 81 rushing yards per game this fall ...

Green Alert Take: Be sure to check out yesterday afternoon's blog note down below ;-)

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Audio from the Ivy League football teleconference has been posted here.

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If you follow Ivy League football you might have been asking yourself after Harvard's game Saturday, who in the heck is Rich Zajeski? The Harvard Crimson writes about another in the stable of Harvard running backs.

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Colgate running back Nate Eachus has been added to the Payton Award Watch List for the best offensive player in the FCS. All Eachus did last week was carry 44 times for 214 yards and four touchdowns. He leads the nation with 160 rushing yards per game. Dartmouth still hasn't seen Eachus up close because he was playing linebacker when the Big Green faced Colgate in his freshman year, he was hurt last fall when the teams played, and this year's game was canceled. Colgate and Dartmouth are expected to play next fall in Eachus' senior year.

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The Boston Globe has a story about colleges adding football programs. From the story:

While schools such as Northeastern, Boston University, and Hofstra dropped football, saying the price tag was too high, Old Dominion and 20 other schools (six at the FCS level) reached the opposite conclusion. Along with Old Dominion, four schools launched football programs in 2009 and six followed this season. Another six plan to start play in 2011, two in 2012, and two in 2013.

And why do they do it? Not to make money the Globe story says, noting that just, "two of 125 FCS football-playing schools made a profit on the sport, according to the NCAA." They do it at least partly for another reason:

“No other sport galvanizes campuses like football,’’ said CAA commissioner Tom Yeager. “Incoming students may judge whether a school is a real school or not based on whether they have football.’’

Thanks for the link ...