NCAA.com has a story under the headline, Way-too-early 2022 FCS playoff bracket predictions. In addition to playoff participants, the piece predicts "Other conference winners."
As for the Ivy League, it sees Dartmouth finishing off a three-peat this fall. (LINK)
Green Alert Take: That "way-too-early" bit is spot on. Guaranteed, writer Stan Becton hasn't a clue which "super seniors" are returning at the eight Ivies and very likely isn't aware of all of the defections as grad transfers. That said, the fact that he's picking Dartmouth speaks to the respect the Big Green program has earned in the football community.
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A consensus first-team All-American as a senior at the University of Florida, Carter, taken sixth overall, was the first defensive player chosen in the 1995 NFL Draft.
Carter tells the site . . .
"The NFL is not the easiest way to make a living. It's hard on your life, it's hard on your kids, your marriage and everything else. And when the music stops, we all have to transition to being regular people and find our way economically, socially. And as history has shown, that's not always the easiest transition for football players to make."
Carter, who has been married to his wife, Shima, for 26 years, and has a son, Zion, who will be a senior at Dartmouth in the fall and plays tight end for the Ivy League university, has made the transition, and is a college football studio analyst for CBS Sports.
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A note tacked on to last night's BGA Premium story a note about some fun the Big Green had at the end of the final regular practice of spring football:
ONE MORE THING
At the end of the final regular spring practice (Coach Buddy) Teevens had the boom box on the field play Take Me Out to the Ballgame and the baseball song, Put Me In Coach while sending his team to the corner of the field near Leverone Field House. Then he had a baseball “L” screen wheeled onto the field, stationing undergrad recruiting assistant Mia Bagatourian behind it with a glove on her left hand and a yellow softball in her right.
Bagatourian, a recruited pitcher for the Dartmouth softball team before choosing to pursue other interests, fired several pitches at an impromptu backstop before a few football players stepped in to see if they could hit her offerings.
Whether intentionally or not, Bagatourian got the players’ attention when her first fastball soared over the backstop as well as the heads of the players huddled behind it. The first player to make contact swung late, lashing a low drive that would have ended up in the home team dugout. That sent a "giggle gaggle" of football players scrambling to the safe haven behind the screen.
Perhaps a half dozen players took cuts against Bagatourian with a lot more whiffs than foul balls and just two had hard hits. One was a liner to center and the other a towering fly ball Tyron Herring hit over the wall and into the home grandstand. With that he ran the imaginary bases along with a phalanx of teammates, finishing in a mosh pit at the imaginary home plate as Bagatourian laughed.
EXTRA POINT
Although I do this page and the BGA Premium site, I'm not a social media person. Yes, I have a Twitter account but since the first year or so I've posted on it about two or three times a year and look at it only for work purposes. I don't have a Facebook account and while I have Instagram, I've never posted on it and use it only for finding blurbs for this page.
That said, there's one sorta social media account I check with regularity and it's That Certain Dartmouth '14's Strava page. For the uninitiated, here's how Wikipedia describes Strava (which by the way has roots in Hanover):
Strava is an American internet service for tracking physical exercise which incorporates social network features. It is mostly used for cycling and running using GPS data.
I went to the page earlier this week and was interested to see the 5.5-mile trail TCD'14 ran while in Utah for work. It's called the Athena Missile Loop. Here's how the trail is described (LINK):
The Athena Loop is located at the old White Sands Missile Range on the west side of Interstate 70 near Green River, Utah. The trail, which gets its name from one of the Cold War Era missiles that was launched from the Green River Site, was designed with mountain bikers in mind but gets a lot of use from hikers and horseback riders.
Running at distance powerhouse Hanover High School and then for a bit at Dartmouth, TCD'14 has put thousands of miles under her feet but it's probably a pretty good bet this is the first time she's run in the shadow of a missile range ;-)
For what it's worth, she's training for Colorado's San Juan Solstice 50, a 50-mile jaunt described as "one of the most beautiful loops you'll ever do, replete with all those adventurous components that go along with a long day in the high mountains: stream crossings; ridge running; mega-altitude; huge views; heat and/or rain, sleet, and snow; route finding; and, of course, potentially life-threatening thunderstorms.”
Probably no missile base there, but the FAQ's for the race (which you need to qualify to enter) include this:
Will I get lost or die? You may get off trail, but if you've studied the map and have a reasonably good sense of direction, you probably won't die.
And yeah, I'll be checking her Strava after that . . .
