Wednesday, October 30, 2024

How About That!

Kudos to the Harvard sports information office (or whatever they call it down there) for getting football game notes up earlier in the week. Highly unusual and much appreciated.

Find the Crimson's game notes HERE.
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Miss good old-fashioned game highlights? Here's a look at what happened down at Columbia last weekend taken from the ESPN+ broadcast:


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The Pro Football Focus (PFF) weekly grading continues to baffle me but a couple of Dartmouth offensive linemen graded out well. Here's how they ranked nationally in this week's PFF report (LINK):

Interior Offensive Line
2. Kyle Brown (Dartmouth; 82.6)
Offensive Tackle
5. Delby Lemieux (Dartmouth; 82.5)

Green Alert Take: Somehow Q Jones didn't even make the running back top 10 after running for 182 yards and one touchdown on 19 carries.

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Jake Novak down at the Columbia Roar Lions 2024 blog now has had a chance to see Dartmouth up-close-and-personal and while the score Saturday in NYC was deceptively close, it did nothing to change where he has the Big Green slotted in his weekly power ranking. Here's how he sees it:
1 Dartmouth 
2 Harvard 
3 Yale 
4 Columbia 
5 Brown 
6 Princeton 
7 Cornell 
8 Penn 
Jake writes of Dartmouth:
They're the top team until someone knocks them off.

Find his full power ranking HERE. 

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A posting in the Ivy League thread on the Any Given Saturday message board reminds us that the Ancient Eight race has a color wars aspect to it (LINK):

The only 2 ranked Ivy teams in the AGS poll battle to find out what is the best color in the league. The Big Green can take control of the league title race, while the Crimson can get back in the title race after stumbling early in the year against Brown, and recovering to defeat the Big Red.

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Say what you will about Friday night Ivy League football games, they certainly don't hurt TV  viewership with so little competition. Check out these numbers from ESPNU's coverage of FCS games last weekend:

To see a full chart of TV games ranked by viewers (starting with the most-watched game between Ohio State and Nebraska) click HERE. Yale-Penn was 26th of 31 games ranked.

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Another of the great losses when Dartmouth (and most other Ivies) stopped producing football programs was the sometimes really imaginative cover art. A good friend of BGA shared this perfect example of the kind of thing that has been lost:

Click the screenshot for a better look.

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EXTRA POINT
Hiking up the mountain down the road from our Vermont hillside home I've come across various items dropped by others on the trail. A few weeks ago it was baby's sock, kicked off by the little one. I came across it, left it on a post at the bottom of the trail and several days later met the folks whose child had lost it. I've found a glove, a rubber pull-on ice cleat, a handkerchief, a dog's leash, a water bottle and more.

I've lost a few things as well. I fully expected to find my own ice cleat when the snow melted last spring, but wasn't that lucky. A couple of days ago I backtracked a bit to find one of the gloves that had fallen from my pocket A couple of winters ago I pulled my ear buds out after finishing a podcast and I'm pretty sure I missed my pocket with one of them. For weeks I had my eyes peeled for them, alas to no avail.

Earlier this week I hiked the trail with Griff the Wonder Dog and with hunting season heating up I had an orange vest tied around his midsection. At some point in our ± 3-mile hike the vest fell off and because we hike together so frequently and he looked like he usually did, I never noticed until we got back to the trailhead.

Yesterday Mrs. BGA joined us on the hike and we kept our eyes open for the vest. I had expected someone would have found the vest and either brought it to the top or hung it from a tree alongside the trail where it could be seen. When we reached the peak and hadn't found it, Mrs. BGA and Griff turned and headed back down the way we had come up while I continued on the longer back loop Griff and I had done when the vest was lost.

I'd just about finished the loop and given up hope when I spotted the vest sitting in the middle of the trail. I'm pretty sure no one had done the longer loop since Griff and I had completed it.

If only finding that lost ear bud was so easy. ;-)

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