No game notes up for either Central Connecticut or Dartmouth as of Thursday morning, but the Bristol Press has a general preview of Saturday's game from the Central Connecticut perspective HERE.
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Dartmouth social media reports the Big Green will be wearing black-over-black on Saturday:
⚪️⚫️⚫️#TheWoods #GoBigGreen pic.twitter.com/oBNV3hpIwd
— Dartmouth Football (@DartmouthFTBL) October 16, 2024
Green Alert Take: You didn't ask, but I'll give you my grades on Dartmouth uniform combinations anyway. Once again, your mileage can (and will) vary:
• Green shirts/white pants: A+
• White shirts/white pants: A
• White shirts/black pants: C-
• Green shirts/black pants: D
• Black shirts/black pants: D-
The thankfully retired green pants garnered an F married up with green shirts, but at least green is the school color. Black is not.
Green Alert Take II: The players like the black-on-black. I get it. They wear them. I just come from a place that lives by the motto: "Black Shoes. Basic Blues. No Names. All Game."
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If you want to sneak a look at the Central Connecticut team and don't have ESPN+ you can check out last week's win over Mercyhurst on the NEC Front Row archives free of charge HERE.
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The Sagarin Ratings have Dartmouth as a 15-point favorite over Central Connecticut Saturday. Here's where Sagarin sees Ivy League teams among the 263 schools classified as Division I:
148 Harvard
160 Dartmouth
171 Penn
173 Yale
186 Columbia
199 Brown
205 Princeton
223 Cornell
As for Dartmouth's non-league opponents, the venerable computer ranking looks like this:
216 Merrimack
225 Central Connecticut
238 Fordham
For the record, Sagarin has Texas at No. 1 and Mississippi Valley State as No. 263.
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Jake Novak down at the Columbia Roar Lions 2024 blog has his Power Ratings up and they look like this (LINK):
1 Dartmouth
2 Harvard
3 Columbia
4 Penn
5 Brown
6 Yale
7 Cornell
8 Princeton
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Harvard Magazine has a story in the current issue headlined, The End of the Ivy League? How changes in college sports affect the Crimson. Of note from the story (LINK):
Some Harvardians see NIL as an opportunity to deemphasize athletics. Now that Harvard’s national competition is acting differently, Holman professor of business administration Paul Gompers would explore dropping down to Division III (the lowest NCAA tier). There, member-institutions tend to have NIL policies more in line with Harvard’s. Leaving Division I, he says, would reduce pressure on coaches to compete with NIL-laden programs and reaffirm the importance of student-athletes’ academic work.
And . . .
As other schools adapt more radically to the new athletic landscape, does Harvard still have a place within Division I, the most competitive of the NCAA’s three tiers? (Athletic Director Erin) McDermott believes so. She does not envision Harvard leaving the division “unless there are some really exclusionary things that happen that we are not anticipating,” such as mandatory revenue sharing, or power conferences like the Big Ten or SEC splintering off from the NCAA.
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By now you've probably heard how Oregon used a loophole in the rules to run a few critically important seconds off the clock in the final minute of its win over Ohio State by drawing a penalty for having a 12th player on the field. Much to the chagrin of the Buckeyes, the NCAA is closing the loophole after the fact. From an AP story (LINK):
Steve Shaw, NCAA coordinator of football officials, said in a statement that a “guiding principle of the NCAA Football Rules Committee is that there should be no benefit when a team commits a penalty.”
And . . .
“After the Two-Minute Timeout in either half, if the defense commits a substitution foul and 12 or more players are on the field and participate in a down, officials will penalize the defense for the foul and at the option of the offended team, reset the game clock back to the time displayed at the snap,” the guidance said.
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It's been some time since there was a field hockey note on this site – if ever – but leave it to the always interesting TigerBlog to come up with something that deserves a mention. In advance of Princeton's Saturday game at Harvard, TB writes (LINK):
Since the start of the 2017 season, the Princeton and Harvard field hockey teams are a combined 77-1 against the rest of the Ivy League.
Green Alert Take: Wow! But I have a question. Who was the 1?
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EXTRA POINT
Although the so-called experts expected one, this hasn't been the most dramatic of foliage seasons. The "reds" just haven't popped. We're actually a little past "peak" by now but the view off our front porch was pretty nice yesterday afternoon:
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| Click the pic for a better look. |
