THE SCHEDULE
Sept. 15 Georgetown 1:30
Sept. 22 at Holy Cross 1:05
Sept. 29 Penn 1:30
Oct. 5 at Yale 6:00 (Friday)
Oct. 13 Sacred Heart 6:00
Oct. 20 at Columbia 1:30
Oct. 27 Harvard 1:30
Nov. 3 at Princeton TBA
Nov. 10 at Cornell 1:30
Nov. 17 Brown 1:30
Green Alert Take: The guess here is that Dartmouth at least thought about playing Georgetown or Penn at night, but neither of the two most-distant opponents on the Big Green's home slate figured to be excited about traveling into the wee hours to get home. From that perspective, Sacred Heart makes the most sense for a home night game given that playing the Homecoming game (Harvard) at night wouldn't have been very well-received by a lot of alumni.
Green Alert Take II: A Friday night in New Haven? Argh :-(
Green Alert Take III: The last time the Ivy League rejiggered the schedule it flipped the Penn road game to odd-numbered years, which eased the Big Green's arduous travel schedule. No longer were all of the longest possible conference trips in the same year. Unfortunately, the new schedule, which sees Dartmouth ending with Brown instead of Princeton beginning this fall, makes the second half of the 2018 schedule particularly grueling. Think about it. Oct. 20 at Columbia. That's a long trip against a team that's clearly on the rise. Oct. 27 Harvard at home. OK, home is good but Harvard is Harvard, and if it wasn't necessarily Harvard last year, don't expect that to continue. One week later it's a game at Princeton. If Yale isn't the Ivy preseason favorite when the media poll comes out Aug. 8, Princeton probably will be. One week after that it's the long trip to improving Cornell. Add it up and that's three really long trips in four weeks, a span broken up only by a home game against a team Buddy Teevens hasn't beaten in his second stint in Hanover. Oh, and for good measure, the last game before the Murderer's Row is at Yale, the defending champion which will have a little extra incentive against the only team to beat it last year. The nonconference schedule might be a little soft again this fall, but given the second half of the season that's probably a good thing.
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The official NCAA home attendance figures from last year are out (LINK):Average Ivy League Home Attendance
Yale 18,940
Harvard 10, 411
Princeton 7,366
Cornell 6,793
Columbia 6,672
Dartmouth 5,512
Penn 5,275
Brown 2,999
Average Patriot League Home Attendance
Holy Cross 7,200
Lehigh 7,138
Lafayette 5,589
Colgate 4,788
Fordham 4,681
Bucknell 2,886
Georgetown 2,166
Others Of Interest
Sacred Heart 3,075
New Hampshire 11,024
Massachusetts 10,707
Green Alert Take: As bad as Brown's attendance was, the shocker is Penn. First the Palestra becomes a ghost town now Franklin Field. Yikes. And then there's UMass. They leave behind old rivals like UNH to go "big time" and then draw fewer fans. How much to you think they wish they could have a do over?
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Potential Ivy League recruits would do well to heed some advice about the use of social media from new Nebraska football coach Scott Frost. This is from the Omaha World-Herald:"I’ll tell you this right now — if there’s anything negative about women, if there’s anything racial or about sexuality, if there’s anything about guns or anything like that, we’re just not going to recruit you, period. Piece of advice for you — what you put on social media, that’s your résumé to the world. That’s what you’re trying to tell the world you’re all about. That’s how you’re advertising yourself. Be smart with that stuff.”
Frost said prospects shouldn’t tweet anything their mom wouldn’t be OK with reading.
“We will quickly drop somebody if there’s something bad on there,” Frost reiterated about social media.Green Alert Take: I watch Twitter pretty closely to dig up recruiting information and sometimes I shudder, and not just as those potential recruits who refer to Dartmouth University. There absolutely have been kids who ended up in the Ivy League who Scott Frost would have walked away from based on their social media résumés.
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Catch former Dartmouth tailback Ryder Stone and the Montreal Alouettes tonight on ESPN2 at 7.
