Saturday, June 15, 2019

Fore!


The 22nd annual Friends of Dartmouth Football annual golf tournament is slated for this afternoon at Hanover Country Club and despite a little drizzle this morning the forecast looks good. Whatever precipitation is in the air is expected to stop by 10:30 and it should be in the low 70s and mostly sunny when the players take to the course.
I didn't expect this ;-)

Eurasia Review bills itself as, "an independent Journal and Think Tank that provides a venue for analysts and experts to disseminate content on a wide-range of subjects that are often overlooked or under-represented by Western dominated media."

I happened to be perusing Eurasia Review this morning (yeah, sure) and came across a story headlined American Football: The First Quarter Is Crucial. What caught my attention was the lede:
Researchers from Dartmouth College, New Hampshire have found evidence that players born in the first quarter of the year are more likely to play in the National Football League.
That didn't really surprise me.

Here's what did surprise me from the story (and the italics are mine):
(The) research is presented in the article “Relative age effects in American professional football” published in De Gruyter’s Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, by authors Michael C. Herron and Jack F. Heneghan.
Former Dartmouth Jack Francis Heneghan, who spent last summer with the San Francisco 49ers, was born Feb. 13, in the first quarter of the year.

(In case you are wondering, Michael Herron is a professor of government at Dartmouth.)
Ryder Stone didn't have any statistics last night in the Montreal Alouettes' 32-25 loss at the Edmonton Eskimos, but the onetime Dartmouth tailback did see action. Opportunities to carry the ball are few and far between in the CFL but Stone was the second-leading Montreal rusher in the final preseason game against Ottawa with three carries for 12 yards. He also had a tackle.