Three players from the 2019 Ivy League championship Dartmouth football team are in the headlines . . .
Defensive tackle Seth Simmer will continue his career as a Bulldog (but not that Bulldog ;-)
These Bulldogs, members of the Southern Conference, open their spring season at East Tennessee State University on Feb. 20.
Given that the NCAA has ruled players will not lose a season of eligibility during this year's shortened seasons, Simmer should be able to play for Samford both in spring and again in the full fall season.
More good news: Simmer's family won't have to travel far to watch him play. The drive from his hometown of Powder Springs, Ga., to Samford in Birmingham, Ala., takes the same amount of time as the drive from Hanover to Boston.
Green Alert Take: Considering the battle Simmer had to fight to return to the football field (LINK) he absolutely earned this opportunity. Congratulations!
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No word yet on where wide receiver Drew Estrada will end up but a Noles247 story posted yesterday noted that the wide receiver position "figures to be a major priority for FSU," and that the program needs, "explosiveness and consistency throughout the room." (LINK)
Mentioned first among receivers is Estrada, with the story noting:
The graduate transfer was offered by FSU last month. He is coming off a 2019 campaign in which he amassed 815 receiving yards and 223 rushing yards to go along with 9 touchdowns...plus he averaged 17.0 yards per punt return. Estrada is also a standout in the classroom. In terms of raising the floor at the position, Estrada could do just that.
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You didn't think a day would go by without a Niko Lalos mention, did you?
WCAX TV has a story including quotes from Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens HERE.
And SI Giants Country has a story under the headline, Niko Lalos Hoping for Another Chance on Defense for Giants. From the story LINK:
(Lalos) has worked with both the defensive line and outside linebackers, the latter a position where senior defensive assistant Bret Bielema marveled over how well Lalos did on the weekly tests he gives to his players despite the youngster’s bouncing back and forth between classrooms.
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The Northeast Conference, whose members include 2021 Dartmouth opponent Sacred Heart, will play a four-game league schedule starting in early March and will be allowed to add non-conference contests per a league announcement. Games will be played on Sundays or midweek per the conference release (LINK).
The two top-seeded NEC teams will play a championship game to determine the conference's automatic qualifier to the NCAA playoffs.
Green Alert Take: A full preseason and then a modified schedule for Sacred Heart might give the Pioneers a significant advantage over Dartmouth, which plays the Pioneers in Week Two. That's might, depending on whether they stay healthy. (I'll let you know in the fall ;-)
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The Knight Commission, founded in 1989 "to promote reforms that lead transformational change to prioritize college athletes’ education, health, safety and success," is in favor of the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) breaking away from the NCAA. From an ESPN story (LINK):
"Every other sport looks like a duck and walks like a duck and probably is a duck," Knight Commission co-chair Arne Duncan told ESPN. "That one (football) looks like a pterodactyl. It's not like the others, and it's had a wildly disproportionate impact on everything else. It doesn't make sense."
Duncan is the former Harvard basketball player who served as secretary of education under President Obama. More from the story:
The commission's proposal to separate FBS football from the NCAA would leave those big-time football programs in charge of creating a new entity that would develop and enforce rules, determine eligibility requirements, set health and safety standards, and organize a national championship.
And . . .
Under this proposed plan, all other sports at those FBS schools would remain under the NCAA's governance system. That includes college basketball and its March Madness tournament, which remains the largest revenue source for the NCAA.
Lower levels of football would also remain under the NCAA's purview.
That last piece would seem to complete the Division IA-Division IAA split that was voted on in December of 1981. The lede from a Dec. 5, 1981 New York Times story by Gordon White headlined, Ivy League Is Forced To Lose Major-Team Football Status:
The action resulted from a special convention of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which voted to set criteria on home attendance and stadium-seating capacity that half the Ivy League teams cannot meet.
The story includes this:
The schools in Division I-A voted that its members must fulfill one of two requirements - an average home attendance of 17,000 over the last four years or a home stadium capacity of 30,000. Division I-AA, a group of less prestigious teams, thus grew from 50 members to nearly 100.
(F)our of the Ivy League teams meet one or both of the requirements, but must go with their four sister schools into Division I-AA if they want to maintain a formal football league. All eight Ivy League athletic directors were present for the vote and said they would stay together. The four Ivy League teams that qualify with big enough stadiums are Penn, Princeton, Yale and Harvard. Yale and Harvard also meet the attendance requirement. The other four are Brown, Columbia, Cornell and Dartmouth.
And . . .
The Ivy League teams are not expected to lose financially from the drop to Division I-AA in football. Their attendance is not expected to decline, and their television appearances, about one game a season, are expected to remain the same.
Green Alert Take: Attendance is not expected to decline? Uh . . .
And, sadly for the Ivy League, the story also included this:
There is an appeal clause in the new Division I-A football regulations by which a team may re-enter I-A if it is granted a waiver by a majority of Division I-A members. The Ivy League teams will move to be reinstated in Division I-A by such an appeal, according to Seaver Peters, Dartmouth's director of athletics.
But none of the Ivy officials were very optimistic since the appeal must be made before the Division I-A schools, the same ones that voted to oust the Ivy League today. A team can also qualify if it later meets the attendance or stadium-seating criteria.
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EXTRA POINT
Given that BGA Premium went dark this fall as did The Green Line, the newsletter that in a normal December would have me staring blurry-eyed at the computer, I was (unfortunately) free to watch the Wednesday afternoon NFL game between the Steelers and the Ravens.
One of the burrs in my saddle is televised football games where the noise from the crowd mic is so loud that you have a hard time hearing the announcers. I suppose I can give the networks a bit of a pass when it's a Seahawks game and the 12th man is going crazy or it's a Penn State whiteout game.
But when there's no crowd and NBC is piping in noise and you still have to pay complete attention to barely pick out the announcers' voices amid the cheering? Some crowd noise really does help. But that amount? Ridiculous.
