The original plan had been to run the 2022 Dartmouth Defense graphic today, but that will have to wait a day or two after a stop by the always interesting Tiger Blog yesterday sent me scurrying to check on the final Learfield Directors' Cup standings.
For the uninitiated, the Learfield standings purport to identify the most successful overall Division I athletic department in the nation. The explanation atop the standings reads like this: 19 total teams can be scored for the final standings (Four of which MUST BE M-W Basketball Baseball and Volleyball).
With women's rugby not yet a full Ivy League sport, Dartmouth's lone conference championship in the 2021-22 school year was won by the football team. Keeping in mind that it is very, very easy to quibble with Learfield's formula, the picture the standings paint is even worse than those who have expressed concern about the health of the Big Green athletic program might have thought.
Here's how the Ivy League graded out this year according to Learfield:
18. Princeton
39. Harvard
56. Yale
60. Penn
75. Columbia
83. Cornell
95. Brown
218. Dartmouth
Green Alert Take: I had a discussion last week with someone whose wealth of knowledge of Dartmouth and Ivy League sports dwarfs mine and we debated the question, "Has the Dartmouth athletic program finally fallen below Brown's?" If you believe Learfield, yes it has, and it's not even close. Best of luck to Mike Harrity, the college's newly named athletic director.
In case you are wondering, here's Learfield's national Top 20:
1. Texas
2. Stanford
3. Michigan
4. Ohio State
5. Florida
6. North Carolina
7. Arkansas
8. Notre Dame
9. Kentucky
10. Oklahoma
11. Virginia
12. USC
13. Tennessee
14. Florida State
15. UCLA
16. LSU
17. North Carolina State
18. Princeton
19. Georgia
20. Ole Miss
And for good measure . . .
21. Duke
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Spotted this on The Analyst HERE:
Green Alert Take: There's a little apples and oranges going on here because James Madison, for example, played a spring schedule in 2020 while Dartmouth was sidelined. And because virtually all schools play more games that Ivy League schools play, they have more opportunities to amass road wins. JMU played 24 regular-season road games between 2017 and 2021 while the Big Green played 20.
Green Alert Take II: Dartmouth actually had 18 wins away from Memorial Field in the 2017-21 time frame but the victory over Princeton at Yankee Stadium was a neutral field game (although the Big Green was nominally the home team).
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Coming off a bye week, the Calgary Stampeders have a story headlined Division Derby about their 3-0 start heading into tomorrow night's game at Edmonton. (LINK) The story is built around an interview with defensive lineman Flo Orimolade '17 and includes this (italics are mine):
“We’ve played two East teams so far and we played them really close,” recalled the Ivy League’s defensive player of the year in 2016 while with the Dartmouth Mean Green. “On any given night, an East team can beat a West team. So this is just how it’s going right now.”
Why do people continually think the Green is mean?
Orimolade, by the way, has the old-pro cliché thing going with this quote:
"We’re just taking it a game at a time and we’ll see how we are in this next game.”
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When you have star running backs the offensive line deserves credit and so it is at Week 2 opponent Sacred Heart where preseason All-America tailback Malik Grant gets help up front from the "Best player who wears No. 64" in the HERO Sports countdown. That would be 6-foot-4, 300-pound Jon Muccio, which the graphic notes, "graded by PFF as the No. 6 FCS guard."
Dartmouth receiver Paxton Scott was HERO's choice three weeks ago as the nation's best 86. (LINK)
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EXTRA POINT
Listening to a podcast while on my hike early this morning the subject of trophies came up. That being the case, when I got back home and sat down at the keyboard I found myself looking up at all the hardware collecting dust on a bookshelf here the BGA World Headquarters. Fortunately (the way I see it now) I played on a bunch of pretty bad teams growing up, so the only trophies I still have from "back in the day" are a particularly ugly one for softball that somehow made it onto the shelf, and one for horseshoes, if you can believe it. I have no idea where that one is.
Because we had it going pretty good when I was coaching Little League in Hanover I'm looking up at no fewer than five trophies from our powerhouse team, the Green Machine.
While I'm at it, packed away in boxes down in our basement are more trophies and plaques awarded to That Certain Dartmouth '14 and That Certain Nittany Lion '16, who don't seem particularly interested in collecting them, which has me thinking.
Sorry if your business is making trophies but have you thought about recycling? Instead of making new trophies, just peel off those engraved plates on the front, polish 'em on up and ship them off to the next unsuspecting young athlete. Heck, you can charge youth sports teams just as much as you charge for the trophies you buy from China and no one will be the wiser.
Parents across the country who are trying to downsize now that their kids are grown will be eternally grateful.
