Welcome!

It was a pleasure meeting parents and freshmen last night. The next four years should be a lot of fun ;-)

A couple of questions I've been asked heading into the season:

1) Will you be having a pregame hike this year?

2) Will you bring the mobile BGA office to practice?

The answer to the first is I'm thinking about two hikes. The first, a very, very moderate hike just outside of town. It might be good for the morning before any game. It's maybe 15 minutes each way with a surprisingly nice view.

The second hike would be up the Appalachian Trail here on Moose Mountain. That one is more strenuous and could take three hours round trip. That would be best for the 3 p.m. Columbia game on Oct. 24. Or maybe the Cornell game on Nov. 7 if it's not too cold by then. We'd wrap it up with light refreshments here at BGA headquarters ;-)

Here are a couple of pictures to whet your appetite. (These have been on this site before but I thought I'd toss 'em up again for new folks.) Click the pix to enlarge them.

This is the view west  from across the road here at the Moose Mountain world headquarters of BGA ;-)

This is the view from atop Moose Mountain looking to the east.

And here's the mobile BGA headquarters, which will be making an appearance at a few practices before being put up for the winter.

It's a 1984 VW Westfalia Vanagon with fridge, stove, sink and desk. It sleeps two in the loft and two on the "first floor." No, it's not for sale and never will be. (Our kids would disown us if we sold it!)

In addition to the little bit of background I gave you last night on BGA, you can visit my freelance writing website to poke around and learn more about who I am and what I do when I'm not doing BGA, which is a full-time job for four months of the year. There's even a corny bio. To check out that site click HERE.

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The Sacred Heart preview was posted last night on BGA Premium. The Central Connecticut preview goes up tonight, closing out the preview series. Tomorrow the daily practice reports will start.

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OK, this is something I've been thinking about with Dartmouth having legitimate title hopes this fall.

There are eight Ivy League schools. That means each team plays seven Ivy League games. And that means some schools have four home conference games this fall while others have just three. As you would expect, that flip-flops each year.

How much difference it makes is debatable, but certainly it's better to have four conference games at home and Dartmouth is one of the schools with four Ivy games at home this year. Preseason media favorite Harvard is another with four games at home.

Here's the breakdown for the league:

Ivy Games Home/Away in 2015
Dartmouth 4/3
Harvard 4/3
Penn 4/3
Yale 4/3
Brown 3/4
Columbia 3/4
Cornell 3/4
Princeton 3/4

Taking it a step further, it seems to make sense to have your toughest Ivy games at home. That being the case, I worked up breakdown of home/away games each Ivy team has against the top three teams in the preseason media poll. (In the case of the teams in the top three – Harvard, Dartmouth and Yale – I included the next team in the poll.) Here's how that turned out:

Home/Away Games Vs. Top Teams In 2015 Poll
Dartmouth 2/1
Harvard 2/1
Penn 2/1
Brown 1/2
Columbia 1/2
Cornell 1/2
Princeton 1/2
Yale 1/2

In other words, Dartmouth has two games against top teams at home (Yale, Princeton) and one on the road (Harvard).

Yale, meanwhile, has one game against a top team at home (Harvard) and two on the road (Dartmouth, Princeton).

What does it all mean? Hey, it's something to talk about.

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WMUR TV, the ABC affiliate in Manchester, N.H., has done a short piece on Dartmouth's mobile tackling dummy.

Watch the full piece HERE.