The FCS season kicks off one month from today with seven games. The only team from the Northeast playing that day is Duquesne, which will collect a big check at Florida State.
The first game for a Dartmouth opponent is Sept. 1, when New Hampshire will play host to Monmouth. That's in 37 days. Valparaiso and Sacred Heart open upin 39 days (Sept. 3) with the Beacon entertaining Indiana Wesleyan and Sacred Heart traveling to Lafayette.
Dartmouth and the rest of the Ivy League begin play in 53 days, on Sept. 17.
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There's a thread on the message board Any Given Saturday under the headline 2022 Ivy and Patriot Leagues Megathread that has worked its way around to what it terms the "resurgence" of Dartmouth football. Here is the latest post as of this writing, with the italicized part quoted from the previous message (LINK):
This may be a bit of a hot take, but (then-Dartmouth president) Jim Yong Kim is just as responsible (if not more) for Dartmouth's football resurgence as Buddy Teevens.
Kim definitely helped. But he happened to show up pretty much at the time that Dartmouth football got its act together. Within a year (either way) of Kim's arrival, Dartmouth
(1) built a new football varsity house. The old one was very outdated. The new one rivaled or exceeded the locker/weight rooms of some BCS schools that were looking at the same recruits we were.
(2) hired two excellent assistant coaches who still are on staff and who have produced numerous All-Ivy players. Coaches Dobes and Clark were respectively let go in coaching shakeups at Princeton and Yale. Teevens was more than happy to offer them landing spots. The rest is history.
(3) got rid of a killer nonconference schedule that saw us go 0-3 or (at best) 1-2 out of conference every year. We signed 15-year deals with Colgate, Holy Cross, and UNH at a time when all three of them were highly competitive teams. For a team trying to get back on its feet, playing tough opponents to open the season every year was a recipe for disaster.
Kim was definitely a great cheerleader and that certainly makes a difference. But I'd put the above three as more impactful items for Dartmouth's turnaround.
Here's what is missing from a pretty solid summary of how Dartmouth climbed the Ivy League standings – Rick Taylor.
With a lot of newbies stopping by this electronic precinct who weren't here during the difficult times for the Big Green this is as good a time as any for a little history lesson.
After a strong run culminating with a 10-0 record in 1996 and an 8-2 mark the next year, the Big Green program imploded. The win totals in consecutive years starting in 1998 were 2, 2, 2, 1, 3, 5, and 1 in 2004.
Buddy Teevens was brought back to Hanover in 2005 to turn the program around, but after the struggles continued with records of 2-8, 2-8, 3-7, and 0-10 in 2008, Dartmouth paid Rick Taylor to conduct a review of the football program and make recommendations.
Taylor certainly knew his way around a football field, the Ivy League and athletic administration. He had been a Dartmouth assistant from 1971-76 and then a successful head coach at Boston University from 1977-84 before going on to serve as athletic director at BU, Cincinnati and finally Northwestern from 1994-2003.
In August of 2009, coming off a winless season and saddled with a 7-33 record over Buddy Teevens first four years back, Acting Athletic Director Bob Ceplikas shared a letter about the state of Dartmouth football program (find the full letter HERE) that spoke to Taylor's role. From that letter:
This past spring, we engaged Rick Taylor to conduct an external review of the entire football program. Rick was an assistant coach at Dartmouth in the 1970s, went on to be head coach at Boston University, and then was a highly-respected Athletic Director at BU, Cincinnati, and Northwestern. Rick made two visits to the campus and met with Buddy, his assistants, current players, senior athletics administrators, support personnel, Dean Crady, Dean of Admissions Maria Laskaris '84, Vice-President for Development Carrie Pelzel '54a, and alumni representatives, including former Dartmouth AD Seaver Peters '54 and former Big Green coach and longtime Syracuse AD Jake Crouthamel '60. Rick also consulted with the current Ivy athletic directors and researched our competitors' programs. Rick's thorough report concluded that we are closer to success than our recent record suggests — especially with the improved facilities and admissions landscape — but also made some recommendations on which we are now acting . . .
The rest is history.
In 2009, the first year after the report – and before any of the recommendations could be implemented – Dartmouth was 2-8. The Big Green went 6-4 in 2010 and there’s been just one losing season since (4-6 in 2016). Dartmouth has gone 35-5 over the past four years and 9-1 in each of the past three.
Newbies might be interested to know that Columbia, having seen how things progressed in Hanover, would follow the Dartmouth blueprint and bring in Rick Taylor to review its football program. That led to the hiring of Al Bagnoli and the remarkable turnaround in the Big Apple.
Green Alert Take: The wonder is that at least one more stumbling Ivy League program hasn't put in a call to Rick Taylor.
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The Patriot League preseason poll is out and not at all surprisingly, Holy Cross is a strong favorite, garnering 11 of 14 first-place votes. Here's the poll with points and (firsts):
1. Holy Cross, 71 (11)
2. Fordham, 61 (2)
3. Colgate, 50 (1)
4. Lafayette, 42
5. Lehigh, 35
6. Georgetown, 21
7. Bucknell, 14
Green Alert Take: The Patriot League poll should be of a lot more interest to Dartmouth but given a change in scheduling philosophy it's of little interest. It's too bad the Pioneer Football League poll is more germane for the Big Green.
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The Manchester Union Leader has a story noting a significant number of player defections in the upcoming Shrine Maple Sugar Bowl game between graduated seniors from New Hampshire and Vermont. Long a highlight of the summer here in the Twin States, it's dried up into almost an afterthought since the renovation of Dartmouth's Memorial Field led to it losing its longtime home.
Of note in the story (LINK) is the mention of a former Dartmouth player holding a Shrine record:
• Most extra points made: Hanover’s Dan Gorman (eight/2012)
Gorman '16 went on to play wide receiver for the Big Green, winning the Manners Makyth Man Award as a senior.
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Dartmouth football's Meet the Freshman series continues with 6-foot-5, 280-pound offensive lineman Vasean Washington of Springfield High School in Springfield, Ohio, and Abayomi Babalola, a 6-2, 230 linebacker from Enochs HS and Riverbank, Calif.
It was an absolutely gorgeous morning for a hike with the temperature hovering around 50 degrees, no humidity to speak of and the fog burning off rivers, ponds and lakes below. The rocky outcropping I was on here cast a clear shadow over the landscape below.
