Corner DJ Avery, who was limited to two games as a junior but posted 24 tackles last fall, is joined in the portal by former offensive lineman Zach Sammartino, a member of the All-Ivy League team last year. Sammartino missed his sophomore season due to injury and appeared in just one varsity game as a freshman.
From Twitter:
More #IvyLeague news; two #Dartmouth grad transfers today enter portal, DB DJ Avery and OL Zach Sammartino, who was 1st team All-Conference in 2019 at 6'3" 295 lbs @rivalsmike @RivalsWoody
— NCAA Transfer Portal (@RivalsPortal) July 11, 2020
Also announcing for the transfer portal is Columbia offensive lineman Joe Scowden, who has started 16 games.
Green Alert Take: These won't be the last Ivy Leaguers to enter their names in the portal but there's a bit of a Catch-22 at play. While you can withdraw your name from the portal and return to your previous school, you obviously can't be a grad transfer without graduating. But if an Ivy Leaguer graduates, he can't play in the Ivy League as a graduate student.
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Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens is quoted in The New York Times in a story headlined, College Football Season Teeters on the Brink. From the story (LINK):
Teevens, previously the head coach at Stanford and Tulane, admitted that reality had been seeping in, slowly swamping hope.
“It’s been kind of like Santa Claus and the Easter bunny,” Teevens said. “You kind of knew they didn’t exist, and then finally you were told.”
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Teevens also spoke to WRUF, the Gainesville, Fla., ESPN station, saying (LINK):
If the majors do have a season, we will learn an awful lot watching what they do. For football, they have talked about a spring opportunity but nothing is definitive.
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It's behind a paywall but Connecticut's News-Times has a story headlined Area athletes react to suspended Ivy League season that under photos of Dartmouth quarterback Gavin Muir begins this way:
Greenwich’s Gavin Muir was slated to compete for the backup quarterback job at Dartmouth. Instead he, too, will have to wait as the Ivy League figures out its next steps amid the pandemic.
Muir, the 2018 Walter Camp Connecticut Player of the Year, remains at home, where he’s working out with former high school teammate and Penn running back Tysen Comizio and communicating with coaches via Zoom.
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Top academic schools continue to call off fall sports with the entire New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC), Carleton and Washington and Lee all pulling the plug.
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The Pac-12, whose commissioner Larry Scott has tested positive for COVID-19, has joined the Big 10 in switching to an all-conference football schedule. Among the marquee games coming off the schedule are USC-Alabama, USC-Notre Dame and Stanford-Notre Dame (LINK).
With the Big 10 and Pac-12 punting nonconference games BYU has had five of its 12 games canceled in 48 hours. (LINK).
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The Big 10 and Pac-12 aside, not everyone agrees with a CBS story under the headline, Power Five deciders may deny its impact, but Ivy League again proves itself a leader in delaying football. Here's the lede (LINK):
A Power Five athletic director was asked this week what impact the Ivy League's decision would have on major college's football return to action.
He texted: Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Loosely translated, that Latin phrase means: Just because a rooster crows at sunrise doesn't mean the rooster caused the sunrise.
"In other words," the AD said, "the Ivy has no impact."
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EXTRA POINT
I heard a commercial on a little country music station around here announcing that a truck stop up the interstate from here is now "open for dining with reservations."
I had to laugh thinking, "I'm sure a lot of the Connecticutians I see driving up I-91 would probably have reservations about dining there."
Truth be told, though, the food at P&H Truckstop is pretty good (reviews here) and we're not the only ones to stop and buy a loaf or two of their signature signature cinnamon raisin bread to bring home.
