One More?

The Dartmouth football office is starting to turn out graphics with photos of standout Big Green players at various positions including this one that looks at prominent quarterbacks past and present:

Clockwise from the top center are Derek Kyler '21, head coach Buddy Teevens '79, Jack Heneghan '18 in preseason action with the 49ers, Dalyn Williams '16, in camp with the Bears, Jared Gerbino '20, former Dolphins starter Jay Fiedler '94 and quarterback coach Kevin Daft.

Given the three QBs in NFL uniforms there's one more quarterback who probably should have been included. Jeff Kemp '81, played in the NFL from 1981-91, posting a solid 16-12-1 record in 29 starts with the Rams, 49ers and Seahawks before finishing up with the Eagles.

 

Kemp and current Dartmouth receivers coach David Shula, his teammate and target at Dartmouth, were the subjects of a 1980 Sports Illustrated story The Sons Have Also Risen. That story, introduced with the subhead Dartmouth Quarterback Jeff Kemp And Receiver Dave Shula, Offspring Of Famous Dads Jack And Don, Are Proving They Are Chips Off The Old Block And Tackle, can be read HERE.

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Speaking of the NFL, GiantsWire has a piece headlined, 7 Giants with the strangest season-ending PFF grades that says "analytical and statistical data sometimes features strange anomalies and for the 2020 New York Giants, that certainly proved to be true." (LINK)

The last of those anomalies? It has to do with the rookie team's free-agent defensive end from Dartmouth. From the piece:

Niko Lalos had the team’s highest coverage grade (85.5)

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With the NCAA championship game in the books and the Super Bowl three weeks from tomorrow, are you starting to worry about feeding your football Jones? Worry not according to the Associated Press, which writes:

One college football season just ended, and another one starts in just over a month.

All but a few teams in the Football Championship Subdivision shut down in the fall because of the COVID-19 pandemic and will play a spring season culminating with the NCAA playoffs in April and May.

As has been the case across the sports landscape for months, nothing is set in stone and more than 20 FCS programs — including all eight in the Ivy League — are not playing spring football at all.

Find the full story, with a capsule look at all of the FCS conferences, HERE. 

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As the story above says, nothing is set in stone, something the 406 MT Sports headline Montana, Montana State opt out of Big Sky spring football season due to health, safety concerns reminds us. From the story (LINK):

Montana and Montana State won't be playing a Big Sky Conference football schedule this spring.

The schools announced jointly Friday morning that they will potentially play a "modified" spring schedule of nonconference games due to health and safety concerns related to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the proximity to the fall 2021 season and weather.

And . . .

The teams were set to participate in the league's six-game spring season from Feb. 27 to April 10. Neither team will now be eligible for a spring Big Sky championship or the FCS playoffs.

In a joint release, both Montana schools now look to develop a slate that allows each team to schedule up to two live competitions, falling in line more closely with the traditional spring practice period. 

Green Alert Take: In my last conversation with Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens after the Ivy League called off its fall 2020 season I brought up the possibility of the Ancient Eight teams doing exactly that kind of thing in an expanded spring practice to take the place of the lost season, scrimmaging Harvard and Brown perhaps.

Green Alert Take II: While Teevens was intrigued by the idea of a spring scrimmage or two it would seem the arc of the pandemic might be putting any idea of even a traditional spring practice in jeopardy.

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If you get a chance check out a slick new series produced by the Dartmouth Sports Publicity office introduced this way:

A lot has happened over the past year, though unfortunately for the Big Green and the Ivy League, not on the fields of competition. To fill that void, Dartmouth Athletics is taking a look back at the first two decades of the 2000s and ranking the top 10 moments/events/accomplishments from a few of the winter teams during that time frame. 

The series starts with a look at the men's basketball top-10 since 2000 HERE.

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EXTRA POINT
A little less than two years ago we bought a so-called "smart" television. It allows access to ESPN+, YouTube, Netflix and other streaming services directly from the TV. We don't have Netflix and I dropped ESPN+s when the Ivy canceled sports, but a smart TV is still handy for online versions of other stations (although don't get me started about the sudden proliferation of all of those $4.99 streaming services).

Here's what bugs me (apart from the aforementioned $4.99 services). If you want to use the search function with a standard remote control you need to hunt and peck, letter by letter and click each one That's annoying enough when the letters on the screen are in alphabetical order. It's much worse when the search function brings up a QWERTY keyboard.

Understand, I type all the time. I mean, all the time. It's how I made my living, if you could call it that, back before the pandemic put my writing career on the IR. I have worn the print off the keys on my keyboard and on a former computer I literally, and I mean literally, wore holes in several keys and had to replace them.

But here's the deal. My fingers know where the keys are. My brain? Not so much. It's all about muscle memory.

I'm not kidding when I tell you that if you put a diagram of a keyboard in front of me and ask me to find where a particular key is, I will struggle unless I can put my hands on the diagram.

All of which is whey I find a QWERTY style hunt-and-peck search function so absurd. Trust me, while I may not know that keyboard I've had a pretty good grasp of the alphabet for a few years now ;-)

Green Alert Take: Egad. It's scaring me how much I'm starting to sound like THIS GUY.