BGA Overtime

  BGA (Oct. 15) – The Optimist arrives at the usual place at the usual time only to find something un usual at his usual seat opposite The Pessimist . It is a bag of SweeTARTS candies. The Optimist : I haven’t seen these things in years. The Pessimist: Found them on Amazon and I couldn’t help myself. The Optimist : Let me guess. Sour at the start and sweet at the finish. Our Yale game in a nutshell, right? The Pessimist: Actually, it’s your last three games in a candy. The Optimist : Funny. Look, it would be great to take control earlier in each of those games, but you have to admit, no matter how we did it, we won them all. And the Yale game was awesome. I mean, beating one of the defending Ivy League champions on their home field without our starting quarterback? Now that really is sweet. The Pessimist: No doubt. The win was big and the comeback was dramatic, but you barely dodged a tart ending. Only a blown field goal near the end and an overthrow on the two-point conversion in

  BGA (Oct. 14) – It’s Monday and that can mean only one thing. OK, it also means the start of the work week but for our purposes right now it means the BGA Overtime Six-Pack (plus one). Read on. 1) Let’s start at the beginning. I mean the end. That was as crazy a Dartmouth football game as I can remember in a long time. Honestly, I had the “flush it” lede that was italicized in my game story written when the mistake-prone Big Green was down 21 points and looking like it was going to lose even worse than that. In what had to be one of the more challenging halftimes since he became head coach there was no panic in Sammy McCorkle, and that says a lot about him. Here’s what he recalled telling his player in the locker room: “Hey, don't look at the scoreboard. Let's just go out there and go one play at a time. Chip away at this. Chip away.” It’s not like there were ever any reservations about McCorkle being promoted to head coach last year, but the Yale comeback was yet another rem

BGA (Oct. 12) – You can't make this stuff up for one simple reason. No one would believe it. With starting quarterback Jackson Proctor sidelined by an undisclosed injury and Woods Ray struggling, Dartmouth turns to third QB Grayson Saunier and the sophomore whose resumé entering the game consisted of exactly zero career pass attempts rallies the Big Green from a 30-7 second-half deficit to a back-from-the-dead, 44-43, overtime victory in the biggest comeback win in school history. “We never stopped having confidence in ourselves," said Saunier, who looked like a savvy veteran while completing 20-of-34 passes for 276 yards and three touchdowns and running for 84 yards and two more scores. “We were going to give it our all until the end of the game." Where to begin to try to explain a win straight out of Ripley’s? How about we start with what it looked like you would be reading after a Yale touchdown with 7:33 left in the third quarter put the Big Green in a 23-point hole t

BGA Oct. 11 – Tony Reno has been head coach at Yale since 2012 and in his first nine games against Dartmouth he had a 1-8 record. The lone win in those first nine meetings came when the Bulldogs intercepted a Jack Heneghan pass at the 3-yard line with 57 seconds left to preserve a 21-13 victory. To their credit Yale and Reno have turned things around with wins over Dartmouth the past two season. But while the Bulldogs were able to claim consecutive series wins on the way to back-to-back Ivy League titles, both games deserve an asterisk. In 2022 Dartmouth came into the Yale game ranked second in the country in rushing among FCS teams but played without hard-running quarterback Nick Howard, who had carried 48 times for 294 yards and four touchdowns over the previous two games. With Dartmouth missing its battering-ram QB a ground attack averaging 298 yards per game limped its way to just 20 yards – and still Yale barely escaped with a 24-21 win. Given how much Howard had been worn down ru

  HANOVER (Oct. 8 BGA) – The Optimist arrives at the usual place a little earlier than usual. He’s very much looking forward to this week’s back-and-forth with The Pessimist , although he has been around long enough to know the other guy isn't going to roll over. The Optimist: Well that was fun. Another down-to-the-wire win against Penn. We are on a roll. Bring on Yale! The Pessimist: As the great Lee Corso would say, “Not so fast, my friend.” The Optimist: C’mon. I grant you the final margin against the Quakers was just three points, but it’s always a tough, competitive game with those guys. That’s a very good team. The Pessimist: I have one word for you. Two. The Optimist: Do you mean one word or two. The Pessimist: Just one word and it is this: Two. The Optimist: OK, I give up. Two what? The Pessimist: Two touchdowns. That’s all you managed against Penn. You’ve now scored a whopping three touchdowns in your last two games combined. That’s not going to cut it. The Optimist: Well