Thursday, February 03, 2022

As The Portal Strikes

As widely anticipated, Dartmouth senior Jalen Mackie won't be returning as a fifth-year player next fall but instead the All-America linebacker is headed down I91 to play for former Dartmouth defensive coordinator Don Brown:

Green Alert Take: With Mackie gone and All-Ivy League corner Isaiah Johnson weighing offers to grad transfer into the Power 5 Dartmouth will have to replace two key players who had the option to return next fall.

#

Speaking of grad transfers who left a year on the Dartmouth table, the introduction to a player capsule in a Virginia Signing Day story nicely summarizes the offensive line John Paul Flores helped make formidable in Hanover (LINK):

Started all 20 games in his final two seasons (2019 & 2021) in which Dartmouth led the Ivy League in rushing and won back-to-back league championships … Dartmouth lost three games in his four years in Hanover including an 18-2 mark as a starter. 2021: Second Team All-Ivy League selection … started all 10 games at left tackle … Dartmouth ranked No. 1 in the Ivy League and No. 21 in FCS with 193.7 rushing yards per game … Dartmouth went 9-1 on the season, captured the 20th Ivy League title in program history and ranked 23rd in the final FCS Coaches Poll.

Virginia head coach Tony Elliott spoke about Flores and fellow transfer Mac Hollensteiner in a Signing Day story (LINK):

“You anticipate that they will be able to compete because of their experience. If you look at the situation, you’ve got one guy returning with some experience and then, that’s it. So, these guys are going to come in with multiple years of experience, multi-year starters and they have played at a high level. They were all-conference level players, but guys that went and developed, so physically and mentally they’re developed.”

#

A couple more Signing Day photos . . . 

Top right is Sean Williams, a 5-foot-11, 180-pound "athlete" out of Tennessee. And yes, it says BGA in the background but that's Battle Ground Academy of Franklin, Tenn., not Big Green Alert ;-) (Photo credit: Williamson Source)


Tailback Desmin Jackson, 5-10, 175, out of Orange Lutheran High School, in Orange, Calif..
#
Steelers Depot has a story about the Ivy League offensive player of the year asking, "Could E.J. Perry Be A Future Steelers' Quarterback?" Perry, of course, was a fifth-year senior at Brown last fall. (LINK) 
#
From a Boston Globe story about former Buddy Teevens teammate Robert Higgins headlined, New president of Brigham and Women’s Hospital makes medical staff diversity a top priority (LINK):

After graduating from high school in Albany, N.Y., and playing football at Dartmouth, Higgins went to medical school at Yale and began training as a cardiac and transplant surgeon. On his first day as a resident physician in Pittsburgh, he met a nurse who later became his wife. They have three adult children.

He has performed hundreds of heart and lung transplant operations over the course of his career. 

Higgins was Dartmouth Class of  1981 and his son, John '14, was a reserve running back for the Big Green.

#

EXTRA POINT

The opening of the Winter Olympics takes me back to my early days as a "cub" reporter when I had the good fortune to cover the Opening Ceremonies of the 1980 games at Lake Placid. Somewhere I have an intact ticket to the ceremonies that no gatekeeper tore off. The only event I saw was a luge preliminary and that ticket I was able to find.

Two memories. First, the Opening Ceremonies were nothing like the made-for-TV spectacle they are now. We sat in a huge, temporary Erector Set grandstand for the afternoon parade of athletes, lighting of the torch, etc. When it was over fans and athletes actually intermingled leaving the ceremony, and I vividly remember gently but intentionally bumping up against a Russian athlete in a fur coat and traditional Russian fur hat – just because I could.

The other memory was at the luge preliminaries. A bunch of us standing alongside the track heard a whoosh sound and then saw something streak by. All I could do was laugh and I was hardly the only one. Luge newbies that most of us were, we didn't have a clue just how fast the sleds would go, and standing that close to the track you risked whiplash trying to follow them. I shot a full roll of 36 pictures and when they were processed most of them showed just the track with no sled in sight. The few that had anything on them showed just a blob that obviously had been going way too fast to get in focus.

Here's a look at the Opening Ceremonies from Lake Placid. I'm somewhere in those stands ;-)


Green Alert Take: I'll take a Winter Olympics at a place like Lake Placid, Lillehammer, Albertville, Innsbruck or Grenoble over Beijing or Nagano any day, and a ceremony like this over a bizarre "artistic" performance with lasers and holograms seven days a week.
Posted by at