HANOVER – Dartmouth needed three things to happen Saturday to have a shot at a share of the Ivy League title.
The Big Green needed:
• Penn to beat Harvard
• Princeton to beat Yale, and
• to defeat Cornell
If only one of the three things could happen, and only one did, at least it was the one Dartmouth most wanted it to be.
DJ Crother carried 31 times for 197 yards and two touchdowns, and Grayson Saunier ran for 43 yards and a score as the Big Green used a 254-yard ground attack to wear Cornell down and post a 24-14 victory.
Dartmouth improved to 7-2 overall and 4-2 in the Ivy League, but Harvard’s miracle win over Penn kept the Crimson undefeated, eliminating the Big Green from championship contention. Still in play is a possible at-large bid to the FCS playoffs.
Cornell, which had won its last four games after an 0-4 start, falls to 4-5 overall and 3-3 in the Ivy League.
Although the Big Green’s hopes for a third consecutive conference championship were dashed by the slimmest of margins because of what happened elsewhere, coach Sammy McCorkle was more than glad things worked out in the last of the three critical games to finish.
“Very, very glad,” he said. “That was our goal today. We knew we couldn’t control other things. We could only control what we do, and our guys were focused on that.
“They didn’t worry about anything else. They didn’t look at the scoreboard. Nobody talked about it. We just had to handle our business here, and that’s what we did.”
To the visitors’ credit, Cornell did not make it easy. After the Big Red put together a 96-yard drive to take a 7-3 lead in the second quarter, and Dartmouth answered right back with a 67-yard Crowther touchdown run for a 10-7 lead, it was Cornell’s turn to try to hold serve.
Taking over at its own 40 with 1:05 left in the half, the Big Red drove to the 21 before setting up for a 38-yard field goal on the final play before the break with a chance to make it 10-10 going into the locker room.
“There’s this fleeting moment of where it’s like, Oh, we might get control of this game, and we get the ball coming out of the half,” said Cornell coach Dan Swanstrom. “We could be in a really good position here.”
But his young team’s field goal attempt missed, taking some of the air out of the Big Red.
“You’ve kind of thrown some really good punches and now you’re down 10-7,” said Swanstrom. “That’s a bad place to be.”
It would get worse as Dartmouth played the kind of complementary football McCorkle likes to see.
On the Big Red’s opening possession of the second half, Big Green safety Sean Williams came up and tackled All-America tight end Ryan Kurtz for a key four-yard loss as Dartmouth forced a quick three-and-out.
Then it was the turn of the offense, which drove 72 yards in 11 plays, the last a 20-yard touchdown run by Crother that made it 17-7.
Another big defensive stop – this time a Cameron Best-Alston tackle on a fourth-and-two at the Big Green 37 – triggered a 12-play, 63-yard drive capped by a one-yard Saunier keeper that made it 24-7 early in the fourth quarter.
“Really proud of the way the guys battled, the way they came out after halftime and kept plugging, and plugging and plugging,” said McCorkle. “. . . I thought in the first half we did what we needed to do, but we knew there were some plays we left out there on the field. And we did a really good job (in the second). Hats off to our coaching staff making some adjustments at halftime, and hats off to (the players) executing that.
“I really thought they came out there with the whole mindset of ‘attack mode.’ I thought we did that and it put us in a really good situation to put points on the board. And the defense did a heckuva job making some big stops and finishing the game off the way we needed to.”
Playing to win rather than keep the score close, Cornell went for it on fourth-and-one at its own 37 and trailing by three scores with just over 11 minutes remaining. The Big Red’s gamble paid dividends when its defense forced a 41-yard field goal attempt that missed, and its offense responded with a 77-yard drive culminated by TJ Hamilton’s highlight-reel tip-to-himself 30-yard touchdown grab in the side of the end zone.
With 5:10 remaining, Dartmouth’s lead was down 10 points. In a win over Princeton two weeks ago, Cornell erased an 11-point deficit in the final four minutes to force overtime but any chance of a repeat performance disappeared when Harrison Keith recovered the Big Red’s onside kick attempt and the Big Green turned the game over to Crowther.
On what would be the final drive of the game, the senior tailback carried nine times for 54 yards. Saunier sprinkled in a three-yard first-down run as Dartmouth literally ran off the final five-plus minutes of the game.
Credit goes to an offensive line that welcomed back tackles Delby Lemieux and Vasean Washington, who missed the previous two games with injuries. The line gave Saunier the time he needed to pass on 11 of Dartmouth's first 16 plays, and gave the ground game enough holes so that Saunier needed to air it out just once in the entire fourth quarter.
“It was definitely a great game,” said Crother, who enjoyed the 11th-most prolific rushing performance in Dartmouth history. “It was nice to have the guys back on the O-line, Vasean and Delby. I know they missed being out there. I missed them out there, too. Those are my guys.
“So it was just a great game. Coach talked about it all week. We needed to be physical. That was the mindset going into it. Establish the run and be physical, and that’s what we did.”
Because they did, they have a chance Saturday at Brown to finish off a second 8-2 season in as many years, and to put themselves squarely in the conversation for an at-large bid to the FCS playoffs.
But don’t ask anyone on the team or the coaching staff about anything beyond Sunday morning.
“We’ll celebrate the win tonight and then tomorrow come back in the facilities and it’s work time,” said Crother. “You have got to get ready for Brown. That’s the mentality. Going 1-0.”
Added Ratcliff, who finished with 10 tackles, “We can’t really look too far into the future, because if you start looking at all that stuff, you start getting distracted. Then what you need to do might not get done in the end.”
Which it did on Saturday as the Big Green closed out an undefeated home season in front of a hearty crowd of 3,523.