Saturday, May 17, 2014

Out Of The Country: Out Of The Ordinary

When spring practice was kicking off, Buddy Teevens talked about the strides his players made in their winter conditioning and suggested he might be the only college football coach in America who not only allows his players to do overseas study, but actively promotes it. A video produced by the Dartmouth football office picks up on that idea:



Remember when teams broke the huddle with a left halfback, a right halfback and a fullback? OK, maybe not, but that being said, football has changed.

A study that charted 30,000 plays nationally last year found that:

• 49 percent of plays took place without a huddle.
• 66 percent of plays started with one running back in the backfield

Check out this page from the 2013 Charting Project to see much, much more about tendencies. Learn more about the Charting Project here and here.
We hear a lot about players transferring from the FBS level to the FCS level. A defensive end from Gardner-Webb is going the other way, transferring to West Virginia as a graduate student. LINK
If unionization resulted in paying athletes and making them employees of their colleges, at least one FCS school president thinks his school would likely move to a club-sports format. Delaware president Patrick Harker has this to say on the terrific public radio program Here & Now:
I'll tell you what we would do at the University of Delaware. Most likely we would drop all our varsity sports down to club status because we simply could not afford to provide varsity athletics.
Learn more about his reasoning from the Here & Now transcript. Harker also wrote a New York Times opinion piece under the headline, Student Athletes Shouldn't Unionize.
Tuned in to ESPNU last evening to watch the Dartmouth softball team stay close to No. 4 Arizona State until the Sun Devils broke open a 2-0 game late on the way to an 8-0 decision in the first game of the NCAA Tournament. LINK

The Big Green will try to stay alive in the double-elimination tournament when it plays San Diego State tonight at 8:30 Eastern.
And finally, two triple plays in one game? Penn State became just the second college baseball team ever to turn the trick yesterday. Watch here: