And The Starting QBs Will Be . . . Or May Be?

An SB Nation story headlined Projecting Every FCS Starting QB for 2026 includes this (LINK):

Dartmouth: Grayson Saunier – Saunier comes into his senior season at Dartmouth with 2,676 career passing yards, 644 rushing yards and 33 touchdowns. He was a second-team All-Ivy League selection last season.

The article has a paragraph on each of it's projected Ivy League starters:

Brown: James Murphy
Columbia: Chase Goodwin
Cornell: Garrett Bass-Sulpizio
Harvard: Dante Torre
Penn: Karson Siqueiros-Lasky
Princeton: Weston Smith
Yale: Dante Reno

Green Alert Take: Like Saunier, Reno and Murphy are sure things and someone will have to really step up to replace Goodwin or Bass-Sulpizio. Harvard, Penn and Princeton could be anybody's guess.

As for the nonconference quarterbacks Dartmouth will face, Lehigh's is a lock and Monmouth's h may be as well. Here's what the SB story has to say about those two:

Lehigh: Hayden Johnson – Johnson took the Mountain Hawks to their first ever top eight seed in school history last year as a sophomore. The first-team All-Patriot League signal-caller is completing passes at a 64% clip on his career.

Monmouth: Frankie Weaver – The Hawks found their guy when star Derek Robertson went down last year. Frankie Weaver stepped in and stepped up as a redshirt freshman, throwing for 1,355 yards and 14 TDs coming off the bench. Now Robertson is gone and the keys to the offense get handed over to Weaver for good.

The third nonconference opponent has an interesting option behind center, to be sure:

Merrimack: A.J. Hairston Jr. – The ex-UMass signal caller threw for nearly 1,000 yards as a redshirt freshman with the Minutemen last year. He'll likely be the one to take the reins at Merrimack now after Ayden Pereira left the team.

And one more projected starter of interest:

South Dakota: Jackson Proctor – Proctor comes in after not playing last season at Northern Illinois and is in a QB battle to see who takes over for Aidan Bouman. He's most known for his success at Dartmouth where he threw for 2,355 yards and accounted for 23 scores over three seasons.

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The Boston Globe has a story behind its paywall headlined Meet Bedford's Ryan Paganetti, a former NFL coach bringing analytics from the headset to the masses. From the story about the onetime walk-on Dartmouth running back in the Class of 2014 whose career was derailed by injury (LINK):

Ryan Paganetti is no longer coaching on an NFL sideline; he’s switched to media and consulting, using his public posts (and recent podcast appearances) to share NFL analytics and decision-making insights.

If you don't have access to the Globe, Paganetti's website has all the details HERE.

You can hear an interview with Paganetti in the podcast linked below. The intro begins this way:

He is a Dartmouth grad. He's cooked up some unbelievable special sauce that got him hired. His NFL research is strategy. Game management tendencies got him hired by the Eagles, Jaguars Raiders. He was on the headset for that Eagles team that won the Super Bowl. 

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The Harvard Crimson had a column a couple of weeks ago under the headline NCAA Ratifies Age-Based Eligibility Guidelines, Reshaping Postgraduate Opportunities for Harvard’s Athletes (LINK) and the Daily Pennsylvanian has one today headlined The NCAA eligibility change levels the playing field for the Ivy League (LINK). Both argue that the five-for-five rule will benefit Ivy League athletes even if they can't participate in the Ivies for five years.

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Click HERE for Dartmouth 's bio of the 6-foot-6, 235-pound Nate Isler, who was a junior in the spring.

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EXTRA POINT

Click photos for a closer look.

Even with our '84 VW poptop camper left at home because of mechanical concerns, we had a wonderful weekend tent camping at the annual West River Westies bus meetup in southern Vermont. Because there river was running low the tubing wasn't what we hoped, but the water was warm, so there was that.

Not sure the official bus count but it was probably right around the usual 100 or so. Most were from around the northeast, although our closest neighbors were from Virginia and Montreal.

In addition to tubing, the weekend included a pot luck supper, a raffle of all kinds of VW and camping paraphernalia, campfire sing-alongs, interesting smells (think about it), and a lot of technical talk about these treasured antiques that you can be absolutely sure went completely over my head.