No word yet on Dartmouth's other NFL hopefuls being offered contracts.
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If you are curious who else around New England signed with NFL teams, there's a list of list of New England Football: Undrafted Free Agent Signings.
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Don't read too much into no Ivy Leaguers being selected in the draft in a year in which an all-time low six FCS players were chosen. How much difference the cancelation of Pro Days and campus visits by NFL scouts made for Ivy hopefuls can be debated. That the changes brought about by the pandemic affected the FCS yield cannot.HERO sports compiled a list of the number of FCS draft picks by year since 1993. The high-water mark was 29 in 1996. The average entering this year was 18.4. The last five years:
2016 – 20In case you are wondering, the Ivy League has had 20 players chosen since 2000.
2017 – 15
2018 – 19
2019 – 13
2020 – 6
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NFL Hall of Famer Gil Brandt, the former vice president of player personnel for the Dallas Cowboys and today senior analyst for NFL Media, has a position-by-position ranking of undrafted free agents after Saturday. Two Ivy Leaguers made his cut (LINK):• Princeton's Kevin Davidson was Brandt's No. 7 undrafted quarterback. Davidson signed with the Cleveland Browns.
• The Big Green's Swann was Brandt's 30th-ranked unsigned corner. He signed with the Bengals making him one of just nine corners on Brandt's list to have gotten a contract as of this morning.
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Craig Haley of STATS lists his Top 40 undrafted FCS players with Princeton's Davidson at No. 20 being the only Ivy Leaguer to earn a mention.
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Researchers out of Purdue University looking into concussions used science to reach a common-sense conclusion: If offensive linemen are required to start plays in an upright two-point stance instead of the traditional three-point stance that has them leading with their helmets it would reduce the number of blows to the head.Buried near the end of the story in The Exponent, an independent student publication at the school:
“We’ve got some collaborations we’re doing with Dartmouth (College) where we can evaluate some of their training techniques and get some data from them,” (Purdue professor Eric) Nauman said. “That’s one of the most progressive teams, in the sense that they don’t allow any tackling at all in practice, and that actually makes a ton of sense to me.”
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Excerpts from an opinion piece Brown president Christina Paxson had in the New York Times (LINK):"I am cautiously optimistic that campuses can reopen in the fall, but only if careful planning is done now. Fortunately, evidence-based public health protocols for the control of infectious disease have been known for decades. They can be applied to college campuses provided the right resources are in place and administrators are willing to make bold changes to how they manage their campuses.
Testing is an absolute prerequisite. All campuses must be able to conduct rapid testing for the coronavirus for all students, when they first arrive on campus and at regular intervals throughout the year. Testing only those with symptoms will not be sufficient. We now know that many people who have the disease are asymptomatic. Regular testing is the only way to prevent the disease from spreading silently through dormitories and classrooms.And then the money quote for Ivy League football fans (italics are mine):
Our students will have to understand that until a vaccine is developed, campus life will be different. Students and employees may have to wear masks on campus. Large lecture classes may remain online even after campuses open. Traditional aspects of collegiate life — athletic competitions, concerts and yes, parties — may occur, but in much different fashions. Imagine athletics events taking place in empty stadiums, recital halls with patrons spaced rows apart and virtual social activities replacing parties.
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EXTRA POINTMy usual wardrobe is, shall we say, limited. I wear LL Bean khakis roughly eight days a week and blue jeans on the other days. (That's a joke, but you get the idea.) When the weather is nice I'll rotate through a collection of golf shirts and when it's cold I'll wear a sweater. On my feet for half the year are sneakers and for the other half it's flip-flops.
Things have changed with the stay-at-home order. I haven't worn my nice LL Bean khakis even one time in at least five weeks. It's been sweat pants day after day, interrupted on the rarest of occasions by a pair of pants with zippers around the legs that allow them to be converted to shorts. I've got a pair of pajama pants with red and black checks that look like the kind of flannel pants Vermont hunters wear, and on Saturday, when Mrs. BGA had a video conference down at the hospital, I wore 'em almost all day and thought seriously about wearing them to the post office.
On the few days when it's been warm enough I've dug out gym shorts. I have worn blue jeans exactly once and a sweater not at all in the past five-plus weeks. Most days it is a hoodie pulled over a T-shirt. For variety some days I choose from a couple of green giveaway pullovers with swooshes on them. Bare feet or just socks on our radiant-heated floor is the order of the day (in no small part because flip-flops have resulted in ridiculous static electric shocks.)
True confession. Because apart from walking to the post office with Griff the Wonder Dog, I'm not going anywhere I just pull off the sweats and hoodie at the end of the day, toss them on a chair in the bedroom and pull them on again in the morning.
Like a lot of you, we've been saving money like crazy on gas. As it turns out, we're saving a lot on laundry detergent as well. ;-)
