Friday, July 16, 2021

Honoring The Difference Dartmouth Made

This was posted a couple of days ago and is well worth a look:

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The Analyst, the new sobriquet for STATS, has a piece headlined Back in the Saddle: FCS Programs Returning After Skipping 2020 Season. Writer Craig Haley touches a lot of bases with this paragraph about the Ivy League (LINK):

There’s great unknown in the only FCS league whose entire membership cancelled its 2020 season, with the games set to return on Sept. 18. Dartmouth and Yale are the defending co-champs, and return experienced quarterbacks in Derek Kyler and Griffin O’Connor, respectively. Brown returns the Ivy’s top offensive talent, quarterback E.J. Perry, who set the league’s single-season record for total offense two years ago, and Princeton may have the top defensive talent in linebacker Jeremiah Tyler. Columbia’s Al Bagnoli isn’t just the dean of Ivy coaches, he’s the winningest active coach in college football with 256 victories. Penn (18) and Harvard (17) only trail Dartmouth (19) in all-time Ivy titles. That Cornell, which last had a winning season in 2005, spoiled Dartmouth’s perfect record in the second-to-last week of the 2019 season, suggests the potential depth in the title race.

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The latest additions to the meet-the-freshmen series being posted by the Dartmouth football office introduce us to Derrell Porter-Smith, a 6-foot-1, 260-pound defensive lineman from Pittsburgh via Worcester Academy, and Zach Lytle, a 6-4, 225 defensive lineman from Winnepeg, Manitoba. 

For what it's worth, Dartmouth football has had great success in recent years with Canadian players. Tailback Ryder Stone '18 came in from Calgary and ran for 1,502 yards with the Big Green before playing several years for the Montreal Alouettes. And Montreal's David Smith '18 brought stability to the kicking game, making 17-of-25 field goal attempts and 53-of-54 PATs for the Big Green, joining Stone on the All-Ivy League honorable mention team as a senior.

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This is a little random but someone has posted a long-snapping video from Dartmouth's recent "specialists camp" HERE.

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EXTRA POINT
Several weeks ago in this space I wrote about a woman I saw jogging early each morning as I made the two-mile drive to the trailhead for my daily hike. I actually have no idea what brought her to run on the hilly dirt road so early each morning over a span of a few months. For my own amusement, when I didn't see her for several weeks I invented my own story about her having started to run to slim down for her daughter's wedding, or perhaps her high school reunion, and then choosing to sleep in when her big day was over.

Whatever it was, she's been back on the road each morning for the past week or so. But she's not running these days. Instead she's walking up and down the road with a large brown dog. I still slow down, wave and smile each time I pass her on the narrow road. But today was a little different.

I used to see her each day walking toward me as I drove to the trail. Today, for the first time, I saw her an hour or so later as I drove back from the trail.

Just as I imagined what brought her to run each morning, I found myself wondering if she invented her own story about the fellow who waved each morning as he passed by. Until today she might have assumed I was just someone headed off to work. But my return this morning after only an hour might have brought her to rethink that.

I'm going to imagine she has decided I'm a newspaper carrier, and that after finishing my route on the other side of the mountain I'm simply returning the way I came. 

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