News that Niko Lalos had been signed to the New York Giants 53-man squad (Dartmouth release) got me thinking about former tight end Casey Cramer, the most recent Big Green player to earn a regular NFL roster spot after toiling on a practice squad.
Drafted by Tampa Bay in 2004, Cramer spent time with five NFL organizations, converting to fullback and making his biggest impact on special teams with the Tennessee Titans, where he had three different stints. He was named the NFL’s Special Teams Player of the Week in 2006 after blocking a punt and recovering a fumble against Washington. His pro career came to a close when he was waived by the Titans in 2009.
At a youth clinic he worked at the University of New Haven during his playing days Cramer talked about his journey from Middleton, Wis., star to Dartmouth standout to the NFL:
What is he doing now? He spoke about that HERE and you can hear from him last Sunday HERE.
•
Last week BGA Daily linked to this VIDEO explaining that the entire senior class of football players at Princeton has taken the fall semester off to be able to return and play the 2021 season. The Yale Daily News, meanwhile, has a story about choices Bulldog athletes made for their fall studies and it notes that 55.1 percent of Yale football players took the fall off. (LINK)
Unfortunately, there isn't a breakdown showing how many of those players are seniors aiming to return next season.
•
The Columbia Spectator has a story under the headline, The ‘inescapable’ effect of off-campus athletics: How the distance to Baker has shaped Columbia’s recruiting, performance, and sports culture (LINK)
The story tells us this about a former linebacker for the Lions, who made hundreds of 5.8-mile trips from campus to the school's Baker Field complex on the northern tip of Manhattan:
In his four years at Columbia, with an average one-way commute of around 25 minutes, Spectator calculated that (Michael) Murphy spent around 2,100 hours on a bus, not counting away games.
The story lists these times for football players to get to the football facilities:
Penn 3 minutes
Dartmouth 4 minutes
Brown 7 minutes
Princeton 7 minutes
Cornell 12 minutes
Harvard 17 minutes
Yale 18 minutes
Columbia 25 minutes
Green Alert Take: What the story fails to take into account regarding Dartmouth is the gaggle of motorized scooters the shows up each day at Floren Varsity House and zips a lot of players back and forth in record time.
•
ESPN headline: LSU football self-imposes one-year bowl ban for 2020 season. (LINK)
Green Alert Take: As we used to say when I was a kid, "That's mighty big of them." I mean, seriously. LSU is offering to bypass a bowl game while it is having a dumpster fire of a season in a dumpster fire season? And then they have the gall to say the action shows their "commitment to compliance with NCAA regulations and maintenance of institutional control."
Green Alert Take II: LSU offering to sit out the bowl season is akin to me offering to give up mayonnaise for the holiday season. (Yeah, even typing the word mayo turns my stomach.)
•
MLS Soccer looks back at Melrose Place star Andrew Shue '89 playing for the LA Galaxy and what that did for soccer in this country. (LINK)
Green Alert Take: I've written a ton of stories about Dartmouth athletes over the past three-plus decades and the interview I did with "Shoobie" before he was going to Zimbabwe to play was one of the most memorable. If I ever have a Mount Rushmore of athletes I've known at Dartmouth, he'll be on it.
Green Alert Take II: This might have been for a story about Shue coming back to play in an alumni game at Dartmouth after he was a big TV star. I honestly can't remember. What I can remember is coming up empty trying to track him down. I didn't think he was big-timing me or anything, but there were a lot of demands on his time. Anyway, I emailed Bobby Clark, his coach when Shue played here, and told him I needed to track Andrew down. Within five minutes my phone rang with Shue on the other end. That said a lot about the relationship between player and coach.
•
A Dartmouth news release notes that "Out of about 600 reported violations in the fall, 86 students were sent home." (LINK)
This from the release will be a relief to a few coaches whose athletes were among the 86:
A change in the revocation policy, retroactive to fall term, for students found to have violated the COVID-19 Community Expectations Agreement, to decrease the time they will have to be away from campus from four terms to two terms, and instituting an informal review process so students can ask questions and share their side of the story.
The release also offers these peace offerings to students willing to spend the winter in Hanover:
• New rules to allow students to visit friends in residence halls other than their own.
• Simplified access to the Dartmouth Library's Baker-Berry Library, including expanded hours and an occupancy-monitoring system that will do away with the need for reservations
Green Alert Take: Me? I'm not sure that would be incentive enough to study remotely in Hanover during a pandemic winter.
•
EXTRA POINT
First satellite provider DISH took away our local ABC affiliate because of a dispute with the owners of the station about fees. We haven't had ABC all fall. Now they've dropped our local Fox station for the same reason.
The good news is because our TV is "smart," I can still catch the ABC college football games through ESPN online, and there's nothing else on ABC of interest other than the news. Fortunately we watch the network news on NBC.
We can't get NFL games on Fox, which is too bad. And I don't know if I've every watched anything other than sports on Fox, so it's no great loss.
Still, unless they made an adjustment that I'm unaware of, we are paying a surcharge for local stations we don't get, and that rankles.
