The Ivy League media poll came out yesterday and yet again I found myself shaking my head at the placement of several teams.
There was a time when the Ivy League would have each school compile a spring/preseason prospectus with starters returning and lost, letterwinners returning and lost, the previous year's statistics and a basic outlook. Granted, that last piece was written by the individual schools but as long as you remembered that it was helpful.
I can tell you if the Ivy League would have its schools do that again it would have made the vote more informed. And it would have saved me a lot of time. I mean, a lot.
I spent days poring over last year's rosters and this year's rosters, ferreting out which players were coming back for a fifth year, crosschecking the positions and years of players in team statistics, and reading individual player bios for the Dartmouth opponent preview series that starts tomorrow on BGA Premium.
The BGA previews for each team, in case you were wondering, include a brief intro and then capsules headlined:
• Quarterbacks
• Running Backs and Receivers
• Offensive Line
• Defensive Line
• Linebackers
• Defensive Backs
• Kicking Game
• Why They Will Have Success This Year
• Why They Will Struggle This Year
• The Bottom Line
There are also charts with each school's five-year record (overall, league, league place, scores vs. Dartmouth over five seasons), last year's results and this year's schedule.
The preview series begins tomorrow with a look at Colgate, followed by Lehigh and then New Hampshire on successive days.
Then it's on to the Ivy League, with the teams taken in alphabetical order.
Starting tomorrow there will be a story posted seven days a week until Nov. 20. Practice reports begin one week from Saturday and there will be ± 1,000 words posted on practices and games every . . . single . . . day.
If you haven't yet signed up for BGA Premium or want to learn more CLICK HERE.
One more thing. Your subscription also helps keep BGA Daily going. ;-)
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Ruiz noses out Wildcats teammate Josiah Silver here, but we’ll recognize Silver as well in this way: Part of the appeal of Ruiz, who is impressive in his own right, is his climb in stats while playing with a huge, proven tackler in Silver elsewhere on the D-line. Ruiz took a leap in 2022, totaling 60 tackles with two forced fumbles as a sophomore while finishing as UNH’s leader in sacks (12) and quarterback hurries (seven). He’s not to be overlooked in returning to UNH’s top-5-CAA rushing defense.
In case you are wondering, Dartmouth will be New Hampshire's third game. The Wildcats open at Stonehill on Sept. 2 and then collect a reported $350,000 for playing at Central Michigan one week later before hosting Dartmouth in their first home game.
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EXTRA POINT
At the start of mowing season last year I successfully pulled the batteries in my tractor and replaced them. Sounds pretty simple but I promise you it was not. I followed a YouTube instructional video pulled together by a fellow in northern Canada to get through that procedure and have the wiring right.
Now I have a significantly more troubling issue with the tractor. The blades still engage and turn at full speed but the tractor won't move. I tip the toggle switch to forward or reverse and nothing happens.
A little online research reveals I'm not exactly the first one to have this problem. Calls to support for the tractor are like the tractor itself. They have gone nowhere. I was able to download a schematic for the machine that might be helpful to someone with a postgrad degree from MIT (or maybe Ivy Tech) but to borrow from the Bard, "For mine own part, it (is) Greek to me."
The problem with the electric tractor is there's no one locally to work on it. I can't just take it across the river to be serviced by our local John Deere dealer the way I do with our walk-behind. Speaking of which, it would appear I'm going to be spending a lot of hours walking behind that one before the grass stops growing (something it shows no indication of wanting to do this rainy summer). Ugh.
