And The Pick Is In . . .

Street & Smith's magazine

Street & Smith's has hit the shelves and BGA's special correspondent, a football collector extraordinaire, has shared the publication's Ivy League and Patriot League predictions. Without further ado . . .

Street & Smith's 2020 Ivy League Football Prediction

1. Dartmouth

2. Yale

3. Princeton

4. Harvard

5. Penn

6. Cornell

7. Columbia

8. Brown

Green Alert Take I: Precious few preseason prognosticators go very far out on a limb and such is the case annually with Street & Smith's. The most significant movement from the 2019 standings in S&S's view will be Harvard moving from sixth last year to fourth in 2020, and frankly, picking the Crimson sixth would have been a bigger surprise. Fully half of Street & Smith's picks have teams projected to finish exactly where they finished last year and all of the others – except Harvard – are pegged to finish within one post of where they ended last year.

Green Alert Take II: Seeing Brown picked last makes me wonder if Street & Smith's doesn't appreciate the hard-to-overstate value of a premier quarterback in the Ivy League. I clearly recall a former coach at another school going to great lengths explaining to me how and why the QB is more important in the Ivies than in less academic conferences. In a nutshell, he called the Academic Index the salary cap of the Ivy League. Having seen QB EJ Perry in his first year at Brown and how that team played against Dartmouth in the final game of its initial season under James Perry, the feeling here is that Brown is the team most likely to surprise Street & Smith's.

A Look Back At Street & Smith's 2019 Ivy League Football Prediction

1. Princeton
2. Dartmouth
3. Harvard
4. Columbia
5. Yale
6. Penn
7. Cornell
8. Brown

And How They Actually Finished
1. Dartmouth 6-1, 9-1
1. Yale 6-1, 9-1
3. Princeton 5-2, 8-2
4. Penn 3-4, 5-5
4. Cornell 3-4, 4-6
6. Harvard 2-5, 4-6
6. Columbia 2-5, 3-7
8. Brown  1-6, 2-8

As for the Ivy League's sister conference . . .

Street & Smith's 2020 Patriot League Prediction
1. Holy Cross
2. Colgate
3. Lafayette
4. Fordham
5. Bucknell
6. Lehigh
7. Georgetown

And finally, here's what S&S thinks of Dartmouth's nonconference opponents:
Towson –  4th in the powerhouse CAA
Marist – 7th in the (non)powerhouse Pioneer Football League
New Haven – Only the DII Top-25 is listed and Chargers do not make the cut

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EXTRA POINT
Those of you who have been hanging around this electronic precinct have watched That Certain Dartmouth '14 go from playing Little League with the boys to earning 12 varsity letters at Hanover High School, to graduating from Dartmouth, to putting her earth science major/education minor to work as a ranger at Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Glacier Bay and Everglades National Parks. Here's the latest video she did from her current national park – Colorado's Black Canyon of the Gunnison – as she helps kids studying at home learn a little about geology: