Sunday, July 23, 2023

From The Video Archives

It's the weekend and you have the time, so click through and watch highlights of what might well be the most hard-fought loss, and most remarkable win since Big Green Alert came online in 2005. Interestingly, they came in back-to back seasons.

In 2018 it was undefeated and 10th-ranked Dartmouth playing at undefeated and 14th-ranked Princeton in Week 7 of the season. The shame is that the low-scoring affair wasn't played in the series' traditional Week 10 slot because it might have gone down as one of the best games in Ivy League history.

 

One year later it was the 6-0 Big Green visiting Harvard in an even lower-scoring affair. There are clips on the internet of the Hail Mary pass that won it for Dartmouth, but here you can watch the entire final drive that brought the win and ultimately kept the Big Green's Ivy League title hopes alive.

 

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There are no full practices allowed during the summer until start of the preseason but largely for safety concerns strength and conditioning coaches are allowed to work with football players. Dartmouth is lucky to have one of the best in Spencer Brown, who has been with the program since 2016.

Not that he needs it, but the former Lafayette linebacker will have a little extra incentive this year with his charges having the opportunity to play Lehigh, the school every Lafayette person always wants to beat. Here Brown runs players thought a few drills in a post from Dartmouth's social media:

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Lehigh, by the way, used to be the Engineers. They were the only team by that name in the FCS (nee IAA). They are now the Mountain Hawks and while they are the only Mountain variety, they are joined in the Hawk world by the Monmouth Hawks, North Dakota Fighting Hawks, Stonehill Skyhawks, Tennessee-Martin Skyhawks, Wagner Seahawks and Southeast Missouri Redhawks.

Of Dartmouth's other opponents this fall . . .

Yale is joined by eight other Bulldogs.
Brown is one of seven Bears.
Columbia is one of six Lions.
Princeton is one of six Tigers.
New Hampshire is one of six Wildcats.

There's just one team of Quakers, one Crimson, one Big Red and yes, one Big Green.

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No surprise that Dartmouth comes out on top in a story headlined 10 Best Colleges for Smart Skiers and Snowboarders in North America but it's worth clicking through to read what the Admissions.blog  has to say about the college. It's pretty well done.

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And again because you have the time, check out a lengthy Valley News one-one-one interview with new Dartmouth president Sian Beilock HERE. No mention of athletics, but a worthwhile read.

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EXTRA POINT
I am not a big one for cleaning up quotes in my stories. OK, maybe what was a run-on sentence in a torrid postgame soliloquy will earn a period or two, and I've been known to stick in my share of ellipses when someone goes way off topic, but those are for reasons of clarity.

Here's my question: When a clearly intelligent Ivy League student-athlete says, "I should have went left instead of right," would you cut the kid a break and change it to "should have gone left?" Would you change, "I would have ran faster if I knew he was behind me," to "run faster?" 

Maybe it's no big thing but including those quotes verbatim always makes me uncomfortable. My solution is I usually don't use the quote. What would you do?

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