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Jay Greenberg of Princeton Tigers Football has written a two-part series ranking the school's 40 greatest wins since the start of formal Ivy League play. Working backward from No. 40 to No 21 in the first part he has two games against Dartmouth ranked. (LINK)
Coming in at No. 36 was the Tigers’ 34-3 win over the Big Green on Memorial Field in the first game of the 1987 season following the death of Princeton head coach Ron Rogerson to an August heart attack.
At No. 25 was a 16-0 win over the defending champion and preseason Ivy favorite Big Green in 1979, again on Memorial Field.
Green Alert Take: Princeton's 14-9 win over Dartmouth in the 2018 battle of the unbeatens has to be in the top five, right?
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Washington and Lee officially announced former Dartmouth quality control assistant Vaughn Johnson as its linebacker and special teams coach. (LINK)
As an aside, the W&L release referenced the school's "Michael F. Walsh Director of Athletics," which sent me scurrying to find a post announcing the endowment of the position in honor of Mike Walsh, the school's athletic director from 1989-2006. (LINK)
Walsh was a onetime Dartmouth assistant basketball coach who moved over to become head baseball coach from 1982-89. Walsh led the Big Green to the 1987 Ivy League championship and a 4-0 win over Michigan in the first game of the NCAA Regionals that spring behind a 13-strikeout performance by Mike Remlinger.
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A story in The Morning Call of eastern Pennsylvania points out that the Patriot League decision to cancel fall sports has the Lafayette-Lehigh game – the longest continuously played series in the country – in jeopardy. The series, contested every year since 1896 (with just one year missed since 1884) might be continued in the spring. Or could it? The issues the Patriot faces thinking about shifting seasons are similar to those the Ivy would face.
From the story (LINK):
Now that the league won’t conduct fall sports, the focus turns to the spring and the challenges of running fall and spring sports at the same time.
The usage of team facilities, deployment of training and medical staffs and weather considerations all will be crucial to making an unprecedented situation like that work. . . .
“Hopefully we can provide our fall athletes with a chance to compete,” (Lehigh University director of Athletics Joe) Sterrett said. “We’ve identified all the questions but we haven’t solved them with the answers yet. ... We’re going to have to figure out a different way to manage activities and figure out how it’s best for everybody.”
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The Patriot League decision cost old friend Colgate the opportunity to play in the 2020 opener of the Syracuse Carrier Dome, which will have a new roof and the largest center-hung scoreboard in college sports this fall as part of a $118 million renovation. From Syracuse.com:
“That’s a special event for your players,” (Colgate coach Dan) Hunt said Monday afternoon. “That’s a game you never forget in an environment you never forget. That would have been special. You say, ‘I’m going to open that up.‘”
And . . .
Electric whistles! How about an Oakley Mouth Shield? (LINK)Hunt said he and his staff worked up a number of strategies to try and make a fall season work if the league gave a green light. He was going to buy some electric whistles, the kind that sound with a squeeze instead of a puff of air. The Raiders would have conducted team meetings by Zoom even though everyone was on campus. Hunt said he would have made sure to keep his quarterbacks separate in case one got sick.
Also from the Patriot League: Fordham has been replaced on the Hawaii schedule by Robert Morris.
And Hampton University has canceled its fall sports season. (LINK).
Of note: Hampton is the first Division I school outside of the Ivy or Patriot Leagues to call off its fall athletic season.
Elsewhere, the SEC is now saying it will make decisions regarding football at the end of July.
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From Yahoo Sports (LINK):
The National Junior College Athletic Association voted on Monday to move most of its sports, including football, to the spring amid the COVID-19 pandemic.Men’s and women’s basketball will start practices on Jan. 11, with their seasons starting later that month.
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The pandemic has put a halt to some Dartmouth dormitory and renovation projects, per the school newspaper. (LINK)
Green Alert Take: The college's athletic folks must be thanking their lucky stars that the much-delayed indoor practice facility (The Greenhouse? The Woodshed?) is finished. If you've been around for a while you will recall that renovation of football's Memorial Field was delayed for years by the financial crisis.
Green Alert Take II: One result of the delay will be having to look at the eyesore erected alongside Davis Varsity House for a while longer. Here it is, pictured in The D:
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The Daily Pennsylvanian has an interactive map on which you can learn the status of various colleges around the country regarding classes in the coming fall and year. Check it out HERE.
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A huge thank you to the Dartmouth football parents and to those who have clicked on the donation button on the right side over the past several weeks. The hardest part of being a freelancer can be finding the work and between BGA Premium, The Green Line newsletter and a healthy assortment of writing assignments from the college that hasn't been a big problem for me the past 15 years. With all of that work having been dashed by COVID-19 your help is tremendously appreciated as I try to figure out my next step.
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EXTRA POINT
I awoke a little after 4 this morning to loud and constant thunder and lightning. The rain is continuing and the fireworks in the sky are still happening at 9:15.
As I do each morning, I turned on the local news a little before 7 to see the headlines and the weather. Scrolling across the top of the screen was a warning about lightning and flooding in our county's "urban areas."
Orange County, whose population of 28,936 in the last census, is spread over 692 square miles. It has one traffic light.
