HANOVER – On the first night of the World Series, the Dartmouth football team hit for the cycle, and wasted no time doing it.
The Big Green got first-quarter touchdowns from its offense, from its defense and from its special teams Friday while posting a 49-3 win over Columbia in front of 3,471 at chilly and wet Buddy Teevens Stadium and a national TV audience.
The final score represented Dartmouth's most lopsided win since 2013.
“Just really, really happy and excited for the way the guys came out ready to play today,” said coach Sammy McCorkle. “I really thought in all three phases we executed the way we needed to.”
Phase 1: The Defense
Dartmouth got a 75-yard interception return for a touchdown to short-circuit a solid opening drive by Columbia and take a 7-0 lead. The Big Green pass rush flustered quarterback Caleb Sanchez, who finished a woeful 10-of-25 passing for just 105 yards one week after throwing for 311 yards against Penn. Dartmouth limited Columbia to just 271 yards of total offense.
Phase 2: The Offense
The Big Green got an über-efficient performance from quarterback Grayson Saunier. The junior completed 12-of-13 passes for 162 yards and one touchdown. He ran only six times but made the carries count with three touchdown runs, including the 24-yarder that made it 14-0 midway through the second quarter.
Phase 3: The Special Teams
No’koi Maddox blocked a Columbia punt, collecting the ball on a bounce and running it back 19 yards for a touchdown to put the finishing touch on a 21-0 first quarter. He followed that with the recovery of a fumbled 46-yard Luke Armistead punt midway through the second quarter. That set up Saunier’s second TD run, a 13-yarder off right tackle that stretched the lead to 28-0.
And still Dartmouth’s big opening half wasn’t done. After a Columbia three-and-out gave Dartmouth the ball wit 4:09 left, DJ Crother ran for 29 yards on the first play. The big run triggered a 10-play, 75-yard march, with Saunier’s one-yard run with 11 seconds left making it 35-0 lead at the break.
It was Dartmouth’s biggest halftime lead since it went up on Marist by the same score in 2019, but McCorkle wasn’t taking anything for granted.
“You can’t worry what the score is,” he said. “We came in at halftime and, ‘It’s zero-zero.’ You’ve got to go out there and treat it like that.”
Which they did, building on the margin right out of the gate. The Big Green took the third-quarter kickoff and proceeded to march 75 yards in just six plays, the last a perfectly thrown 35-yard touchdown strike down the middle from Saunier to Corbo for a 42-0 lead.
Dartmouth closed out the scoring on its next possession, going 69 yards in 16 plays – 13 of them on the ground – with Desmin Jackson getting the points on a two-yard run.
Columbia dodged a shutout with a 26-yard Hugo Merry field goal with 8:05 remaining, but that did little to appease coach Jon Poppe, whose team started drives on its own 7, 8, 15, 18, 19 and 22 because of one mistake or bad decision after another returning – or in one case dropping – Matisse Weaver’s well-placed kickoffs.
“A hell of a job by Dartmouth and their squad tonight,” Poppe said. “Coaching, players and everything. Obviously, we did the exact opposite of that. That’s embarrassing for me, personally and (for us) as coaches.
“I take full responsibility for that. I’ve never walked off a field and felt like I feel right now. That’s not to take anything away from Dartmouth. We gave them 21 points early in the game and we just weren’t able to respond with enough consistent execution even to put ourselves in position to make it an entertaining football game tonight.”
Forcing mistakes while playing a clean game was a focus during Dartmouth’s preparation for Columbia according to McCorkle.
“We talk about it all the time,” he said. “You’ve got to protect the football. You’ve got to win the turnover margin. That was a big thing we talked about all week. Let’s win the turnover margin and let’s (not) give the other team easy opportunities.
“Columbia . . . against Penn had 21 points and 14 of it was off turnovers early in the game. So we know they are a team that creates that, and we had to do a good job making sure that didn’t happen. I thought our guys did a good job protecting the ball. Grayson made good decisions. And then our play calling didn’t put Grayson in a tough situation to have to try to force things. He did a good job of that, and to me that’s huge.”
In addition to Saunier’s production, Dartmouth got 103 yards rushing from Crowther on 18 carries. Nick Lemon caught three passes for 61 yards while Ky’Dric Fisher caught thee for 33 yards and Grayson O’Bara three for 18. Corbo grabbed two for 41 yards.
Defensively, linebacker Zyion Freer-Brown had 12 tackles while fellow backer Nico Schwikal had seven. Steve Simpkins and Sean Chester had six apiece as McCorkle took advantage of the big lead to substitute liberally in the final quarter.
“It’s great,” he said of the chance to get more players time. “They work their butts off. We’ve got a group of guys who sometimes don’t get the opportunity. It was nice to get them out there and they performed.”
Dartmouth will now take a 5-1 overall record and a 2-1 mark in the Ivy League into next week’s showdown at Harvard, which brings a 5-0 record into Saturday’s game at Princeton.
“Harvard’s a big game because it’s the next game,” McCorkle said, emphasizing next. “We’re going to lock in and focus and we’ve got to prepare ourselves. They are a very solid football team, a very good football team and we’re excited for the opportunity.”
Columbia, which shared the Ivy League title with the Big Green and the Crimson last year, is now 1-5 and 0-3 in the conference.