Marist coach Mike Willis, the former assistant head coach and offensive coordinator at Princeton, already has one former Dartmouth player headed to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., as a grad transfer, and has targeted two others.
All-Ivy League lineman Nick Schwitzgebel and tight end Nic Sani are both now reporting offers from Marist on their Xwitter accounts.
Wide receiver Isaac Boston posted earlier that he has accepted an offer from the school.
Marist, which went 4-7 a year ago, is a member of the non-scholarship Pioneer Football League and so, as is the case in the Ivy League, athletic scholarships are not part of the offers.
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Given that 2024 is the final year of players being able to take a COVID super senior season life is still a little tricky for Ivy League coaches who may not be 100 percent certain which of this year's seniors are returning and which are moving on. But that's nothing compared to what college football coaches at the FBS level are dealing with until the NCAA cleans up the mess.
Consider these thoughts offered to the On3 site by Jeff Hafley before he picked up and left Boston College to join the Green Bay Packers' staff (LINK):
“How do you define tampering, right? Agents calling kids and telling kids that they can get them at this school for this amount of money and this school is interested. What’s true and what’s not true? I’ve had an example of hearsay. This school will take me out of the portal right now and give me this amount of money. And then I pick up the phone and call that school, call a buddy of mine, and it’s, ‘No, we don’t even know who that kid is.'”
And . . .
"There’s kids that are leaving good academic schools with a semester or two semesters left, where they’re going to get a life-changing degree, and instead, they’re getting convinced to transfer."
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Wednesday is the traditional National Signing Day. The BGA Daily list of players headed this way (LINK) has stalled at 21 names, meaning there should be another handful or so still out there. I'll be keeping an eye out this week for additions to the class, but invite those of you with eagle eyes who spot them first to send them along via the Contact Form over there to the right.
Or if you prefer, you can email names to BGA directly by CLICKING HERE. That will address an email to me with the subject line, Recruiting.
Also, although the early Signing Day has taken much of the luster out of Wednesday's proceedings, some schools will still be holding ceremonies. Readers are invited to share photos via the link above and I'll post any that come along. (There was a time when I would be at the keyboard posting hourly updates with new photos on Signing Day, but searching for them has been a relatively futile exercise since the introduction of the early date.)
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Message boards can be cruel.
Scanning the Ivy League message board after the Dartmouth men's and women's basketball teams were both swept over the weekend to fall to 1-5 and 0-7 in the league respectively, I found a discussion about the strong home court advantage enjoyed by the host team in the Ivy League tournament that determines which school will go to the NCAA's.
One commenter suggested that playing at a neutral site such as Lehigh's Stabler Arena or Mohegan Sun Arena would guarantee a host team doesn't have the home-court advantage in the tournament, which features only the top four regular season finishers in the men's and women's Ivy League standings.
Another commenter offered this: "Or they could just hold it annually at Dartmouth."
Ouch.
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EXTRA POINT
I'm not much of one for posting photos of myself in this electronic precinct but after the first sunny day in weeks I shot one yesterday. This is from my hike:
