Dartmouth grad Micah Croom, who rolled the dice and sat out his senior year at Dartmouth for a chance to play as a grad transfer at the FBS level, seems to have come up a winner, earning the backup strong safety spot at USC for today's opener against Arizona per the Trojan depth chart. (LINK)
Although he struggled to get on the field with the Big Green, making all of his seven career tackles as a junior, he impressed the USC coaching staff. From a story on the USCfootballteam.com website:
Croom, the walk-on graduate transfer from the Ivy League, shows he was for real in camp and grabs the backup job over TWO scholarship guys.
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Lance Brackee '93, the former two-time All-Ivy League offensive lineman who died last summer, gets a sweet mention in a story about his son Hunter, a 6-foot-4, 250-pound senior lineman at Chaska High School in Minnesota. From the story (LINK):
For Brackee, he was met post-game by his mother, Melissa. Missing was the comedian of the family. The larger than life figure, who could be heard cheering on Hunter whether he was on the football field, or on the wrestling mat. . . .
"He taught me when I'm out on that field playing any sport, or really anything in life, go out there and let loose. Don't overthink things. Don't wonder if you can really do something. Have the mindset of pushing forward, doing your job the next play, Brackee said.
"When I walk off the field and I look in the stands and he's not there, I know he's here (pounding his chest). Every time I stick my hand in the dirt, that's for him. That's for everything he taught me," Brackee added.
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Streaming video of today's Woods Watch Party replay of the 2017 game against Brown at Fenway Park can be found HERE.
What follows is the BGA Premium preview, as it appeared on the site. I don't usually re-read these things before posting them each week, in part because I don't like reading my own stuff after the fact, and in part because I would be tempted to clean them up and I really do want to help relive the game as it was.
This one, however, I did scan down and I had to admit, I really laughed at the Animal House reference, which was perfect ;-)
Nov. 9 – Big Green Hoping Fenway Is Friendly
HANOVER – How do you get your team up for a game against a 2-7 opponent that is 0-5 in your conference and has been outscored in its last four games, 138-21?
How do you convince your team to respect an opponent that is averaging a woeful 9.8 points per game in league play when no one else is averaging less than 18.6? And that is last in conference games in scoring defense, allowing a whopping 36.6 points per game, fully 10 points more than anyone else in the league?
What do you tell your players to get them charged up to play a team that is last in total offense, total defense, rushing offense, rushing defense, passing offense, passing efficiency, passing defense efficiency, punt return average, interceptions, touchdowns, field goals, first downs, third down conversions and time of possession?
A team that lost to Stetson, for crying out loud?
It’s quite simple, really.
You remind them that friends and family have flown in from all over the country to see them play at Fenway Park.
You remind them the game is on national television.
You remind them that you still have championship hopes.
You remind them that on its senior night there is nothing the opponent would rather do than extinguish those hopes.
And, if you are Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens, you remind them of what happened a year ago when Brown walked off Memorial Field a 24-21 winner over the Big Green.
After Wednesday’s practice Teevens offered a glimpse at the message he has been imparting to his players this week, starting with some seriously hyperbolic coach-speak.
“They are a very good football team,” Teevens said with a straight face. “We know that from last year. Their record this season hasn’t gone quite the way they like, but the guys that play for them are the guys that beat us last year.”
Actually, Brown’s top two rushers in last year’s game against Dartmouth have graduated. So have their top three receivers from that game, as well as their two leading tacklers against the Big Green. Their offensive line also took a big hit, which is part of the reason why their quarterback took unfathomable punishment in last week’s 34-7 loss to Yale.
But as Boon famously said after Bluto blamed the Germans for bombing Pearl Harbor, “Forget it, he’s rolling.”
Teevens went on: “We’ve got to play a good football game against a team that has talent. That’s just the bottom line. A lot of people look at their record and say they aren’t a good team. They are good team, they just haven’t found a way to win yet.”
Part of the reason they haven’t found a way to win in the Ivy League is quarterback play, something of inordinate importance in the Ivies. In an era when the Mendoza line for a quarterback is 60 percent accuracy and the quarterback Dartmouth will see in its finale is hitting 74.4 percent for the season, Brown has started three different quarterbacks this fall and not one has completed 50 percent of his throws in league play.
With two other QBs hurt, TJ Linta got the start last week against Yale and it wasn’t pretty. The senior stood in bravely against a hard rush but managed to complete just 12-of-39 passes for 144 yards. Before the Bears’ scoring drive against the Yale subs on its last possession Linta was a woeful 8-for-33 for 73 yards.
Even Brown’s game notes – not usually this forthright – acknowledged the difficulty the Bears had keeping Linta on his feet, writing: “Brown’s offense continued to struggle to gain traction, with Linta being hit often by the Yale defense.”
Freshman Darius Daies leads Brown’s struggling ground game with 254 yards while David Moodie has 204 yards. The Bears are the only team not to have a player in the Ivy League top-10 in conference rushing. They are averaging just 60.2 yards per game on the ground against league opponents.
Jakob Prall leads Brown with 42 catches – more than twice the 20 Jaelon Blandburg has made. Prall had 13 grabs for 120 yards against Harvard.
If the Bear offense is toothless, their defense features easily the best player on the team in Richard Jarvis, a defensive end who is having another outstanding year after making the All-Ivy League first team a year ago. The 6-foot-2, 230-pound senior leads Brown with 55 tackles, six sacks, four forced fumbles and four quarterback hurries. He is third all-time in sacks at Brown with 15.5 Just behind him with 15 sacks is James Develin, today a fullback for the New England Patriots.
Senior defensive end Keegan O’Hern has four sacks for the Bears and sophomore defensive tackle Michael Hoecht has seven tackles for loss. Free safety Connor Coughlin is second on the team with 48 tackles with six breakups and one of Brown’s three interceptions.
While Brown gave up points by the bushel in losses to Princeton (53-0) and Harvard (45-28) and the Bears were torched by Yale last week (34-7) before the Bulldogs were called off, Teevens is wary.
“They are going to be ready to play,” he said. “We fully expect that. They are tough, physical team. They’re well coached. They play hard. They compete hard.
“And they have had success against Dartmouth through the years.”
While the Big Green had won three straight in the series before last year’s loss, Brown coach Phil Estes is 13-6 all-time against Dartmouth.
The goal, according to Teevens, is to erase any hope the underBears have from the start.
“That’s the whole push,” he said. “To get out and do what we did versus Penn, to what we did versus Harvard. And to continue to play. I’m still looking for a four-quarter complete game by our entire football team.”
While Dartmouth still has championship aspirations Teevens isn’t expecting Brown to lay down.
“We are still playing for something,” he said. “It’s a big game us us. But they are playing for something, too. To ruin any plans that we may have.
“It’s a big thing at Fenway. This will be a very memorable event for the team that wins.”
NOTES
The game marks Dartmouth’s sixth appearance at Fenway Park, and the first since a 64-0 loss to Notre Dame in 1944. The Big Green is 5-1 in the home of the Boston Red Sox including wins over Brown in 1922 (7-0) and 1923 (16-14). … In last year’s loss to the Bears Dartmouth’s Jack Heneghan passed for a school record 440 yards (37-of-53), Hunter Hagdorn had 13 catches for 171 yards and Miles Smith ran 17 times for 111 yards. The Big Green hurt its cause with three interceptions, two fumbles and a blocked field goal attempt. … Heneghan has thrown at least one touchdown pass each game this fall and is bidding to join Jay Fiedler as the only Dartmouth quarterback ever to have a scoring pass in all 10 games. … Heneghan needs just 71 yards to move into fourth place in the Dartmouth annals for career passing yardage with 4,500. That’s as high as he can go, however, with Dalyn Williams (7,458), Jay Fiedler (6,684) and Brian Mann (5,912) ahead of him. Fiedler played before the advent of freshman eligibility.
The Fenway game is a home-way-from-home game for Brown, which will recognize 25 seniors prior to kickoff. … Brown graduate Chris Berman ’77 of ESPN fame and Dartmouth graduate Jake Tapper ’91 of CNN will be honorary captains for the teams. … Brown’s wins came in the opener against Bryant, 28-23, and two weeks later against Rhode Island, 24-21. Bryant is in its first year under former Brown quarterback James Perry, the architect of the high-powered Princeton offense the past few years and someone Brown alums will clamor for as its next head coach when Estes’ tenure wraps up.
The projected weather conditions at kickoff Friday: 27 degrees with 19 mph wind making it feel like 14 degrees.
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EXTRA POINT
When we moved out of Hanover (Etna) about a year-and-a-half ago, Mrs. BGA quickly ordered up sheet or two of pretty generic looking, black-on-white return address mailing labels. When I asked why she spent hard-earned coin on something we'd surely be getting in the mail for free, she reminded me there were change-of-address responsibilities to take care of before the freebies started to arrive.
She was right of course, which she usually is. Of course, if we had done it the old-fashioned way and scribbled our new return addresses on envelopes for a couple of months – and to be sure there weren't very many in an era of email – our return label cup would have started overflowing.
Yesterday's mail delivered still another large (and unsolicited) sheet of colorful mailing labels featuring endangered animals and plants. It never made it home because I ripped it into pieces and dropped it into the recycling tub at our little post office. Maybe I'm exaggerating – and maybe I'm not – when I tell you we get mailing labels every two or three weeks. Even with my recycling efforts, we have a pile of them in the same drawer where the generic labels Mrs. BGA bought last year sit unused and forlorn.
And here's the thing I don't get. Most of the thick packets of mail we get containing labels comes from various conservancy organizations that, among other causes, try to protect the trees that are cut down to provide paper for these solicitations.
