Thursday, November 13, 2025

Thursday Notes

 Cornell's game notes for Saturday's finale at Buddy Teevens Stadium have been posted HERE.

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The latest from FCS Football Central on SI regarding Ivy League prospects for the playoffs (LINK):

Ivy League
Locks: None
Should Be In: Harvard

Harvard moves into the "Should Be In" tier after moving to 8-0 and have beaten every team by 17 points or more. The Crimson still needs to take care of business against Penn and Yale to secure the auto bid, but if they finish 10-0, they should earn a Top 8 seed. Even at 9-1, the Crimson would be in position to get an at-large bid. 
Work To Do: Dartmouth, Yale

Yale stayed in the auto bid race with only one conference loss, and they have yet to play Harvard. The Bulldogs have played well, winning four straight games, but need to win out to secure the automatic bid. At this point, Dartmouth faces a challenging path forward and would need some assistance to stay on the bubble. An 8-2 Dartmouth would have a solid shot at getting an at-large spot due to non-conference wins over New Hampshire and potential NEC champion Central Connecticut State.

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From a HERO Sports piece headlined Week 12 Games To Watch Impacting FCS Playoff Seeds And Bubble (LINK): 

Ivy

Penn at No. 7/11 Harvard

At 8-0, Harvard could put itself in the Top 8 seed conversation if it beats Penn and Yale. It does not have any ranked wins, though.


Yale at Princeton

Yale is 6-2 overall and 4-1 in Ivy League play. If the Bulldogs beat Princeton and then upset Harvard, they would earn the auto-bid, and the Ivy League’s chance of getting two teams in would go up.


Cornell at Dartmouth

Dartmouth is 6-2 overall with a then-ranked win over New Hampshire, who could be on the playoff bubble. If it beats Cornell and Brown, an eight-win Dartmouth team would be considered by the committee.

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The Manchester Union Leader spends most of its weekend advance on New Hampshire but does have a little about Dartmouth in a capsule that includes this (LINK):

For Dartmouth, there’s a (slim) chance

Entering its final home game of the season on Saturday, Dartmouth is still in the conversation for the Ivy League title and an FCS playoff berth — albeit on the outskirts. 

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Dartmouth PR pulled this together:

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And finally, the design for Floren Varsity House was impacted by the narrow footprint between the Memorial Field track and the baseball field. I offered up this potential renovation once before and thought to toss my idea out again. Keeping in mind that I'm clearly not an architect nor, as the attempts below show, a graphic designer, here's my concept to give the building more room:

Click graphic for a better look.

The idea is to expand the first floor of the building out to the edge of the track and raise the stands onto the roof of the expansion. That  would dramatically increase the space in the building, making room for an actual hallway along the length of the facility and perhaps allowing the weight room to be moved from the second floor down to the first – with glass windows and doors looking onto the field. 

The concept
Players, trainers and equipment staff could access the field directly rather than having to walk around to the sides or back of the building, or as the trainers sometimes do, without climbing up and over the railing at the front of the stands.

Fans would be the same distance from the field as they are now, but with an angle down to the field that many might prefer. Is a renovation like that possible? I don't know but it was fun to imagine.

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EXTRA POINT

Earlier this week a friend sent an AI-generated recap of his local high school's tremendous success on the football field in recent years. Per the report the school won its second state title in a row last year and their fourth in seven seasons. 


For the record, the school hasn't fielded a football team since World War II.


Obviously, you have to be very careful with AI. Trust but verify. Or maybe, not quite trust and verify.


That said, AI can still be helpful. Mrs. BGA and I have been watching the Jack Ryan TV series from a few years ago and given the number of characters and the story rapidly jumping from scene to scene – sometimes seemingly randomly – it can be more than a bit confusing. That being the case, I asked ChatGPT a couple of days ago to summarize the episodes to date and provide bios of important characters, all without any spoilers. It offered up easy-to-follow outlines of each episode that helped with our enjoyment of the series.

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