Monday, November 17, 2025

A Look Back

While we wait for highlights from the ESPN+ "broadcast" of Dartmouth-Cornell, here's what it looked like from field level:  

#

Usually on the Monday after a game, I'll share links to stories from the Valley News, The Dartmouth, the visiting school paper, and anyone else who might have covered the game. Here's today's link (        ).

That's not a typo. No one was there but BGA. In fact, not even the visiting SID made the trip.

#

BGA Overtime posted a follow story last night and will have some thoughts and observations this evening.

#

Your Week Nine Ivy League standings and schedule:

#
Craig Haley of The Analyst has his FCS playoff bracket up and Dartmouth does not make the cut as an at-large team. Nor does Yale. Or New Hampshire, which is making a late run.

Haley has Harvard as the Ivy League champion earning a No. 7 seed and facing the Monmouth-North Dakota winner.

Also from Haley:

First Teams Outside the Bracket: South Dakota State (7-4), Dartmouth (7-2), New Hampshire (7-4), Sacramento State (7-4)

#

From a College Sports Madness bracket story (LINK):

The winner of Harvard-Yale gets the auto bid. Harvard would be hosting a game with a win. However, with a loss they should be in anyway. Yale’s only way in is the auto bid. Dartmouth deserves to be in the conversation as well. They did lose to Penn and Harvard, but they have a big win over New Hampshire on the resume and would presumably finish 8-2 overall. 

CSM has Harvard as a 12-seed playing Northern Arizona, with the winner facing 4 Tarleton State.

#

For what it's worth, the Playoff Selection Show is slated for ESPNU on Sunday, starting at noon eastern. Also, all first-round games will be carried on one of the ESPN networks on Nov. 29. 

#


If you've been around for a bit, you know what's coming.

Each year, as we head into Week 10 of the season I scroll through the BGA archives and reprise something I've written previously in a fruitless attempt to inject a little excitement into the season-ending Dartmouth-Brown game.

If you are a regular reader, feel free to skip down to the PAT. Newbies, read on . . .

For years, the Big Green ended the year with a much-anticipated showdown with Princeton, but that game fell by the wayside when the Ivy League rearranged its schedule a few years back. To the Ivy's credit, it came up with three season-enders that have some juice. Dartmouth-Brown wasn't one of them. From the BGA archives:

OK, we all know that the Dartmouth-Brown football game isn't a season-ending rivalry along the lines of Penn-Princeton (in basketball and geography at least), or Columbia-Cornell (the Empire State Bowl), or Harvard-Yale (just because). No matter how the Ivy League tried to portray it, Dartmouth and Brown ended up being the red headed stepchildren of the schedule change. (Apologies to all you gingers out there.)

While most message board posters and emailers understandably lament the end of the Week 10 series with Princeton it's not going to come back. Now it's Brown, so deal with it. 

To drum up a little excitement the game needs a nickname. You know, like the Red River Shootout (Texas-Oklahoma), The Backyard Brawl (Pitt-West Virginia), The Civil War (Oregon-Oregon State), The Rivalry (Lehigh-Lafayette) and my personal favorite, The Brawl of the Wild (Montana- Montana State).

With that in mind the Dartmouth-Brown series is now called The Tussle in honor of a man important to the programs of both schools as well as the sport of college football.

Why? Because College Football Hall of Famer Tuss McLaughry served as head coach at Brown from 1926-1940 and then moved on to Dartmouth from 1941-1954. And because the man called they called Tuss was much more than just a coach.

Consider that, in recognition of his service as the longtime secretary-treasurer of the American Football Coaches Association, the AFCA each year presents the Tuss McLaughry Award, which is "given to a distinguished American (or Americans) for the highest distinction in service to others."

Among the winners since the award was instituted in 1964 have been Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Bob Hope, Lyndon B. Johnson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, The Reverend Billy Graham, Pete Rozelle, Gen. Chuck Yeager and Tom Osborne.

Works for me. How about you? 

#

EXTRA POINT

From Wikipedia (italics are mine):

A ZIP+4 Code uses the basic five-digit code plus four additional digits to identify a geographic segment within the five-digit delivery area, such as a city block, a group of apartments, an individual high-volume receiver of mail, a post office box, or any other unit that could use an extra identifier to aid in efficient mail sorting and delivery.

I learned last week when a package that should have been placed in our PO Box was instead returned to the shipper that not everyone who should know, that does know that.

Posted by at