LOOKING AHEAD . . .
Roar Lions blogger Jake Novak, who follows Ivy League football closely, has an in depth look at how he thinks the race could play out this year. Here's how he sees it:
1. Yale
2. Penn
3. Columbia
4. Princeton
5. Dartmouth
6. Harvard
7. Brown
8. Cornell
Find the full story HERE.
Jake's bottom line for Dartmouth:
"(T)his defense also suffered from transfer portal activity, which is probably why I'm not expecting Dartmouth to make a serious run at the title this year. Ordinarily, they'd be a lock to do that after a rare down year. And that down year included razor-close losses to the top teams in the league.
LOOKING BACK . . .
He's right about Dartmouth's razor-close losses. On a day without a Big Green practice, BGA Premium considered just that last night in a final review of the 2022 season.
The story should serve as a reminder heading into 2023 that the Big Green wasn't that far away from a successful campaign a year ago. In fact, as the BGA story noted about last fall's 3-7, 2-5 finish, Dartmouth lost five games either in overtime or by four-or-fewer points. Turn those games around and the Big Green would have been 8-2 and 6-1 in the Ivy League with a share of the title for reversing the narrow Yale loss.
Here's the tale of the tape for Dartmouth a year ago:
• Two losses were in overtime.
Sacred Heart 38, Dartmouth 31 (ot)
Penn 23, Dartmouth 17 (2 ot)
• Two more losses were by three points.
Yale 24, Dartmouth 21
Princeton 17, Dartmouth 14
• One was loss was by four.
Cornell 17, Dartmouth 13
Granted, winning all of those games would be a stretch, but win just three of the five and the record is a much-more respectable 6-4 overall. Even split the four Ivy games and the record is 4-3 in conference.
Green Alert Take: Any wonder why there's a lot of work on doing the little things right during Dartmouth's preseason?
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LOOKING ELSEWHERE . . .
A College Confidential message board has a string headlined If the Ivy League expanded that is introduced this way:
There has been considerable re-shuffling of college athletic leagues of late, including substantial geographic broadening of several of them.
Granting that this is mostly a flight of fancy, if the Ivy League were looking to grow, adding as many as 8 members, which schools would make sense? (From both the perspective of the school to be added, and the Ivy League/current constituents…)
It’s tricky, because of course the Ivy League, to a far greater degree than other college sports leagues, is broadly about academics even if it’s narrowly about athletics. And the Ivy League likely doesn’t bring big revenue via TV deals and the like, that are the likely drivers of much of the rest of the re-alignment/growth of certain leagues.
That said, let’s have a little fun thinking about this.
In theory, new members don’t have to be D1 right now - they could grow into it. They could be affiliated with another league, but if they’re an athletic powerhouse elsewhere (especially in mens’ football/basketball), downgrading (athletically) to the Ivy League would be questionable.
Find the College Confidential discussion HERE.
The first schools that come up are Duke, MIT, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Vanderbilt and Washington U.
Green Alert Take: I'll stick to current FCS schools roughly in the region and take Colgate first, then any of the other Patriot League schools, followed by William & Mary or Richmond.
And if we're going to bring up DIII schools in the Northeast I'd choose among Amherst, Williams, Middlebury, Bates and Bowdoin.
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If you want to see a bizarre ending to a college football game, check out what happened when Virginia State tried to run the clock out against Norfolk State only to have a brain camp on the last play. Even then, though, the game wasn't over:
