Still More Practice Like Pros

ESPNBoston has a story about the Practice Like Pros presentation in Worcester, Mass., that included this:

(Dartmouth coach Buddy) Teevens became a convert to the new ideology after watching a minicamp practice of the St. Louis Rams, under the direction of Jeff Fisher. 

Former Bishop Feehan and Big Green standout Nick Schwieger was invited to camp on a tryout contract and Teevens was eager to catch up with Fisher, an old coaching friend. 

"I couldn't believe what I was seeing," Teevens said. Although players were practicing at full speed, with pads and helmets, there were no car-wreck collisions -- just a seamless ballet of skill. Teevens, who had already begun scaling back hitting practices, was sold. 

The benefits of limited contact in practice, Teevens says, have been multifold. He asked an assistant to compile a statistical abstract of missed tackles, comparing the Big Green's performance last season to that of previous years. What they found was that the rate of missed tackles had decreased by about 50 percent. Teevens attributes that trend to the greater attention paid to fundamentals in practice.

"Plus, the reduction of shoulder injuries, knee injuries and concussive injuries has been remarkable," he said.

Find the full story here.

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Week Three opponent Bucknell has opened practice. Find a story here.

Game One opponent Butler, which visits South Dakota State two weeks from Saturday, is also practicing. Holy Cross, which kicks off the same day against Bryant, has been in camp for a full week.

Dartmouth camp opens two weeks from Wednesday.

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College Sporting News, one of the websites that does a pretty good job covering FCS football, has released its preseason poll and there's no Ivy League team in the top 25, or in the "others receiving votes" category.

Patriot League powers Lehigh (No. 30) and Colgate (31) make an appearance, as does New Hampshire (11).

Green Alert Take: It should be no surprise that the Ivies are being overlooked in the preseason. The logical choice to receive votes would be the defending champion, but with Penn going 6-4 overall last year that wasn't going to happen. Harvard's 8-2 mark a year ago might have gotten voters' attention but the Crimson has two strikes on its resume: It didn't win the championship and it doesn't have the star quarterback that opens voter eyes.

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Teams of Dartmouth hikers left campus Friday for "The 50," the legendary Appalachian Trail hike from the college "to the treeless summit of Mt. Moosilauke," a through-the-night marathon that usually takes 24-30 hours. Read a story about what the hike is all about and how it feels here.

Anyway, as I was coming down from the South Peak of Moose Mountain at the end of my own Friday afternoon hike I ran into one of the Dartmouth teams heading the other way. I actually heard the four before I saw them because they were singing, believe it or not, the Columbia fight song, Roar Lion Roar. By the time I saw them they had morphed the tune into the Dartmouth standby As The Backs Go Tearing By (below). I'm not sure they were still singing 24 hours of hiking later ;-)

For what it's worth, that Certain '14 would have liked to take part in the hike but instead worked on the support crew at the 10-mile mark that just-so-happened to be about one-tenth of a mile up the road from our house. After the final team of hikers made it past, she helped clean up the support station and then joined another student to "sweep" the next 10 miles to the Dartmouth Skiway to make sure no one got lost or left behind. That Certain '14 and another hiker finished their sweep over the mountains in the pitch black at about 9:30.

Inspired by The 50, I connived Mrs. BGA into replicating the start of the Moosilauke trek and hiking the Appalachian Trail from campus to our home here on the shoulder of Moose Mountain yesterday. It's a beautiful, nine-mile hike that crosses just two roads. We took it relatively easy but still had to laugh when we realized that if one of us had hopped in a car and one of us had set off on foot at the same time, the one in the car could have arrived in New York City about the same time the other arrived at our front door ;-)