Look who made the middle of the front page of the OptaAnalyst FCS site with a raised hand!
From the story (LINK):
Don’t tell Yale, but Dartmouth (5-1, 2-1) at No. 12 Harvard (6-0, 3-0) on Saturday may be the game of the 2025 Ivy League season. The Ancient Eight has an FCS playoff bid for the first time, and the two programs with the most all-time titles (Dartmouth, 22; Harvard, 19) have been a part of three-way shares of the last two crowns. Since 2013, 11 of their 13 meetings have been decided by eight or fewer points, and the other two had that margin until the final nine minutes. The Crimson stand one Ivy win shy of becoming the first to reach 300 all time.
#
There’s good news and disappointing news out of Harvard this week. The good news? The game notes are not only out this morning, they were out yesterday morning. Good job, Harvard.
 |
| Click HERE for the notes. |
The disappointing news? I’ve been told Harvard has changed its policy and will no longer be holding a postgame press conference, opting instead to have media do interviews outside the team locker rooms.
Green Alert Take: I’ve covered every Dartmouth-Harvard game for more than 20 years and there’s always been a postgame press conference. The visiting coach and a couple of players hold court for 10 minutes or so, and then the home coach and players take over. In place of an orderly press conference it will be a free-for-all outside the locker rooms Saturday. Invariably, by the time the media finishes outside one locker room there’s no one left outside the other. Or if there is, the coach and players have to answer many of the same questions they’ve already been asked by other media members. It’s disappointing that a league that can use all the publicity it can get is making it so difficult to get two sides of the story after arguably the biggest game of the Ivy League season to date.
#
Weekly power rankings from Jake Novak, the Roar Lions blogger who follows Ivy League football as closely as anyone:
1. Harvard
2. Dartmouth
3. Yale
4. Penn
5. Princeton
6. Cornell
7. Brown
8. Columbia
Listen to Jake’s reasoning on his substack HERE.
#
Here are this week’s Sagarin Ratings of the nation’s 265 Division I (FBS and FCS) teams, with last week’s rating in (parentheses):
96 Harvard (101)
131 Yale (141)
140 Dartmouth (157)
172 Penn (162)
190 Princeton (178)
213 Brown (204)
224 Cornell (233)
241 Columbia (229)
164 New Hampshire (169)
211 Central Connecticut (214)
244 Fordham (244)
Sagarin has Harvard as an 11½-point favorite over Dartmouth this week. The rankings had the Big Green as a 14-point favorite last week over Columbia.
#
The Massey Ratings see Dartmouth falling to Harvard, 31-21, with 78 percent confidence. Massey had Dartmouth defeating Columbia last week, 28-14, with 88 percent confidence.
Here’s how Massey predicts this week that the Ivy standings will ultimately play out:
Harvard 7-0, 10-0
Dartmouth 5-2, 8-2
Yale 5-2, 7-3
Penn 5-2, 7-3
Princeton 3-4, 4-6
Cornell 2-5, 3-7
Brown 1-6, 4-6Columbia 0-7, 1-9
#
And before I forget, BGA Overtime will follow last night’s posting of The Optimist and The Pessimist with a Halloween-week treat tonight. Be sure to stop by.
EXTRA POINT
I brought a 9/12 manila envelope with several sheets of paper in it to the post office yesterday and was floored when the postage was $1.90. Next time I’ll fold the 8x11 sheets down and use one of the Forever stamps we bought last year for 73 cents.
