Today what little football news I have will need to wait as regular Dartmouth news takes precedence, led by this eye-opener per the Associated Press (LINK):
Dartmouth College students barely will be able to venture off campus when they return this fall.
According to the latest travel restrictions, undergraduate students will not be permitted to travel beyond the local area, which is defined as the towns of Hanover, Enfield, Lebanon, Lyme and West Lebanon in New Hampshire, and Norwich and Hartford in Vermont.
Graduate students, faculty and staff have more leeway. But those traveling outside New England, even for day trips, will be prohibited from accessing campus buildings for 14 days after they return.
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And there's this from The Dartmouth (LINK):
The release of details regarding the arrival of students on campus and housing for the fall term will be delayed by several days as the College observes how reopening progresses on other college campuses, Provost Joseph Helble announced in Wednesday’s “Community Conversations” video stream.
Helble said that Dartmouth is considering how other universities offering in-residence programs this fall are handling COVID-19 when deciding if and how students will be returning to Hanover for the fall. The additional few days, he said, will allow the College to track the positive cases at other schools over the first two weeks of their operations.
And . . .
Over 750 returning graduate and professional students have been tested this summer, Helble said, with zero positive tests so far. This result, he suggested, means that bringing students back under the current plan is feasible, but Helble added that the College is “watching very closely” to see if levels of COVID-19 infection rise at universities that have brought students back to campus in the past two weeks.
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Now a little football tidbit of local interest passed along by a longtime friend of BGA updates us on the next stop for a peripatetic former Dartmouth assistant. From the Tyler (Texas) Morning Telegraph (LINK):
Jarrail Jackson, a former Oklahoma standout and more recently an assistant with the Dallas Renegades of the XFL, is joining the football staff at Tyler Junior College, Apaches head coach Thomas Rocco said.
JJ will be the team's offensive coordinator. It will be his sixth stop since leaving Dartmouth after the 2011 season. The story details his career:
Jackson’s coaching career began in 2004 when he coached wide receivers at Chickasha High School in Oklahoma. In 2005, he was a volunteer assistant coach at the University of Central Oklahoma. In 2006, he began a six-year stint at the Ivy League’s Dartmouth College. Jackson then spent three years at the University of Washington (director of player relations), followed by stops at Davidson College (quarterbacks coach), Mississippi State (offensive analyst) and back to Central Oklahoma (before joining the XFL).
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As expected, in a virtual meeting for the Division I Council yesterday the NCAA "recommended the board give all fall sport student-athletes both an additional year of eligibility and an additional year in which to complete it." (NCAA release)
From the AP (LINK):
College athletes who play fall sports, including football, will be given a free year of eligibility no matter how much they compete over the next 10 months if an NCAA recommendation is approved later this week.
FootballScoop weighed in on the recommendation with a look at potential unintended consequences not that dissimilar to what BGA posted yesterday about how Ivy League rosters could end up swelling. From the Scoop (LINK):
(N)ot only do all 2020 seniors receive the opportunity to play a second senior year in 2021, all 2020 juniors get to be juniors again in 2021, etc. And while 2020 freshmen get to repeat their freshmen year in 2021, another crop of freshmen will arrive behind them in 2021 as well. The Council essentially just created one mega-freshman class of 2021, and either schools will have to respond by signing tiny classes in 2022 and ’23, or the NCAA will have to relax the 85-man scholarship limit until the 2020-21 classes exhaust their eligibility.
Green Alert Take: It's completely understandable because there's no roadmap for the NCAA to follow, but no matter how well-intentioned the organization might be it is going to be a mess.
Also from the NCAA (LINK):
The Division I Council recommended the Division I Board of Directors pursue moving all the division’s fall championships to the spring because more than 50 percent of schools participating in each NCAA fall championship sport canceled or postponed their seasons. The Council met virtually Wednesday.
In accordance with the NCAA Board of Governors directive, the Council recommended that fall championships should be played in the spring only if they can be conducted safely and in accordance with federal, state and local health guidelines.
Green Alert Take: That certainly makes it sound as if the NCAA is approving the shift of fall sports to the spring. If the NCAA soccer and field hockey tournaments, for example, are conducted in the spring it would put the Ivy League in a tricky position given the difficulty a conference that fields more teams than any in the nation would have conducting two full seasons of sports in one Northeast season.
Green Alert Take II: If I'm a spring sport athlete I might wonder why there was no talk last spring – before we knew the pandemic wasn't going to abate – about rescheduling my NCAA tournament to the fall. And frankly, while I'm happy for my classmates in fall sports that they will have a chance this spring, I sure hope I take precedence and get to use my regular locker room, have my normal practice times and venues, and have first dibs on training room, lifting and services.
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EXTRA POINT
As tempting as it can be when reading the headlines or watching the evening news makes me want to scream, I try to keep BGA Daily free of politics. I'm no activist, but if I were one of the planks in my platform would be to make this, performed here by former Dartmouth football players Gordi Quist , Trevor Nealon and The Band of Heathens, our National Anthem:
