Be sure to check out BGA Overtime this evening for a preview of tomorrow's Dartmouth-Cornell game (or I froze my fingers off at practice yesterday for no reason. ;-)
As an aside: Among others on the sidelines after practice was College Football Hall of Famer Murry Bowden '71.
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Something you may not realize: With Dartmouth win tomorrow and a Harvard loss at Penn the Big Green would claim at least a share of the title.
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The local Valley News has a preview HERE (and all the usual warnings about being able to read the story only if you are an infrequent visitor to the site apply).
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There's not much new in this Cornell-Dartmouth preview but CLICK HERE or on the screenshot above to check it out.
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Jake Novak down at his Roar Lions 2024 blog picks Dartmouth to defeat Cornell with this warning (LINK):
This can be a tricky one, as Cornell has been a sticky opponent for the Big Green over the years. But I think the Dartmouth defense will rise to the occasion even as Jameson Wang plays his final home game.
Jake also has his weekly power ranking up and it looks like this:
1. Harvard
2. Dartmouth
3. Columbia
4. Yale
5. Penn
6. Brown
7. Cornell
8. Princeton
Of Dartmouth he writes:
It just feels like the Big Green have dropped down a bit over the last few weeks. A strong defensive performance vs. Cornell could shake things up a bit.
And of Harvard:
The Crimson offense has been good all year, now the defense seems to be stepping up too. Bad news for the rest of the league.
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John Feinstein's book The Ancient Eight; College Football's Ivy League And The Game They Play Today is out and you can listen to 11 minutes of the author reading it HERE. At the outset he dedicates the book to a Yalie friend, but also, he writes:
And it is for Buddy Teevens, who exemplified what the Ivy League is all about. I never got to see him coach a game in 2023, but he inspired me throughout the project.
The Amazon page for Feinstein's book features a "read sample" section HERE that includes details of Teevens' horrific accident that never went public.
It also includes something that those of you who know where I stand on the issue of playoffs cannot be surprised I'm excerpting:
The Ivy League wasn't formally created until 1956, and the league presidents eventually got together to create rules and restrictions that guaranteed the one-time national powers would no longer be national powers. Now, Ivy League teams are often ranked in the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) rankings, but unlike in other sports, the Ivy League champions don't get to participate in postseason play.
"It makes no sense," Yale coach Tony Reno said, echoing all the coaches and players in the league. "We only play 10 games to start with. Why not let the kids who win the league championship get a chance to show people how good they are?"
This is yet another example of administrators mouthing cliches about "doing what's best for the student-athletes, then doing nothing to help the, quote, student-athletes." Yup, even in the Ivy League, hypocrisy lives.
Green Alert Take: I haven't read the full book yet but even the little bit I was able to read reminded me that for as annoying as I found the fact checkers to be when I wrote the Ivy League section of the ESPN Football Encyclopedia, they can save you from errors like using someone's wrong first name. . . .
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And finally, it's always fun to catch up on former football players making good and today that's former linebacker Brian Fordon '17, now a vice president of investor relations at Chicago Atlantic, which rang the bell late last month at the NASDAQ.
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EXTRA POINT
I updated my Mac operating system and it offers a "summary" at the start of a lot of web pages. In case you are curious, here's how its new AI feature summarized what you just read:
Cornell On Tap previews the Dartmouth-Cornell game, highlighting the potential for a Big Green title share. John Feinstein’s book on Ivy League football discusses the league’s lack of postseason play and the hypocrisy of administrators. Former Dartmouth linebacker Brian Fordon ’17 is now a vice president at Chicago Atlantic, which recently rang the NASDAQ bell.