Wednesday, October 22, 2025

Another Look

For those of you who, like me, prefer highlights from above that show the full play, here are some clips from Dartmouth’s win over Fordham on Saturday afternoon:


#

This week’s game, as The Optimist had to remind The Pessimist last night, will be on Friday night, teeing off at 6. It’s Dartmouth’s only appearance in the ESPNU Friday night Ivy League football series. Dartmouth football created this graphic to remind you to tune in:

#

The weekly Sagarin Ratings are out and Dartmouth, Yale and Princeton all made significant moves upward, while Brown plummeted. The number in (parentheses) is last week’s ranking.

101 Harvard (98)

141 Yale (158)

157 Dartmouth (170)

162 Penn (168)

178 Princeton (197)

204 Brown (182)

229 Columbia (225)

233 Cornell (233)


169 New Hampshire (185)

214 Central Connecticut (211)

244 Fordham (242)

Sagarin has Dartmouth as a 14-point favorite over Columbia this week. The service had the Big Green winning by nine points last week at Fordham, and the difference was 17.

#

Here’s how the Massey ratings see the Ivies in the FCS:

8 Harvard (9)

26 Dartmouth (32)

31 Yale (38)

37 Penn (52)

52 Princeton (65)

58 Brown (43)

85 Columbia (81)

93 Cornell (105)


32 New Hampshire (40)

80 Central Connecticut (84)

97 Fordham (93)

Massey has Dartmouth winning, 28-14, with 88 percent confidence. 

Here’s how Massey sees the rest of the season playing out:

• Harvard 34, Dartmouth  20 with 81 percent confidence

• Dartmouth 30, Princeton 23 with 68 percent confidence

• Dartmouth 31, Cornell 17 with 86 percent confidence

• Dartmouth 29, Brown  24 with 65 percent confidence

#

Jake Novak’s power ranking at his Roar Lions site:

1 Harvard

2 Dartmouth

3 Yale

4 Penn

5 Princeton

6 Brown

7 Cornell

8 Columbia

#

This is kind of fun.

Thunder Keck (his real name, by the way) played linebacker at Stanford. His father, Eric, was a 245-pound member of the U.S. Ski Team before turning to football, first at Saddleback Junior College and then at Columbia, where he was a 27-year-old defensive tackle. (The New York Daily News had a story about Eric Keck when he was playing HERE).

So why bring all that up? Because today Thunder Keck is a professional wrestler who goes by the name Shiloh Hill, and a story in the Rutland Herald tips us off that Dartmouth football once had a shot at him. The story begins this way:

To WWE fans he’s Shiloh Hill, the “Hellraiser” mentored by the Undertaker up to the production company’s NXT brand. He’s someone who has cultivated a massive online fan base and is known for his dark web explorations.

From the story (LINK):

“I was really interested in computer science during my early years of high school, so I wanted to do a cyber security camp — and I saw there was a free one at Dartmouth,” Hill/Keck said. “So I went, stayed with one of my high school track teammates who lived in the Dartmouth area, and he was like ‘Hey, you’ve running track. I know you’re really fast. You should come to this football camp at Dartmouth, which is at the same time and do their combine testing.’ ...My dad also played college football, so he gave me some pointers before, like ‘Just be really physical and try to do really well.’ It was a three-day football camp and a three-day computer science camp at Dartmouth. And I was doing both of them."

Keck ended up instead at Stanford, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a master’s degree in Sustainability Science and Practice. Find his Stanford bio HERE.

#

EXTRA POINT

Remember the PAT earlier this month about the ladybug infestation in these parts? I wrote about ladybugs in our house and being swarmed by the things atop our nearby mountain (LINK).


After a few sub-freezing days the problem has largely subsided in our house so I was surprised yesterday afternoon when on my daily hike to the mountain peak I had to keep waving my arms to keep the ladybugs away from my face. Heres just a section of siding on the cabin at the peak that was absolutely covered with ladybugs enjoying the warmth of the late afternoon sunshine: