HANOVER – A baker’s half dozen opinions and observations after Week 9 of the Dartmouth football season:
1) Junior quarterback Grayson Saunier did another solid job protecting the football against Cornell. As Big Red coach Dan Swanstrom said, Saunier “never put the ball in jeopardy once.” After throwing four interceptions in the Big Green’s first three games this fall, Saunier now has gone six games without being picked off. As a team, Dartmouth hasn’t had a single turnover in the last four games after turning it over nine times in the first five. That's a sign of a very good team.
2) At one point, while listening to Swanstrom in the postgame press conference, I thought about the days when Pete Carril and the Princeton basketball team were slaying giants with three-pointers who were scared of backdoor layups. And with layups when they were scared of three-pointers. Swanstrom said it is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation,” deciding whether to concentrate on stopping the running game of Saunier and DJ Crowther, or the Big Green’s passing game. I remember an opposing coach using the exact same expression talking about the Princeton basketball team.
3) As you might have seen on BGA Overtime yesterday, Crowther needs 111 yards to become just the seventh Dartmouth player to run for 1,000 yards in a season. The feeling here is that if the Big Green takes control of Saturday's finale against Brown, the Dartmouth offensive line is going to do everything in its power to make sure the senior tailback reaches that record, and the coaches will give him the chance to do it. In case you are wondering, only Columbia allows more yardage on the ground than the 169.4 yards Brown surrenders.
4) Iowa is considered ”tight end U” (although Penn State may disagree), but the Ivy League belongs in the conversation as a proving ground for tight ends. Two of them were on display Saturday, and both produced. Dartmouth’s Chris Corbo caught a team-high five passes for 53 yards and now is tied with Grayson O’Bara at the top of the Big Green receiving charts with 37 catches. With Cornell putting the ball up 45 times, Ryder Kurtz had a team-high nine catches for 91 yards. Corbo’s long was 29 yards, and Kurtz’s was 26. Dartmouth got a look a couple of weeks ago at Harvard tight end Seamus Gilmartin, who has 29 catches this fall and was on the receiving end of two of the three touchdown passes caught by Crimson tight ends.
Speaking of Harvard tight ends, Kyle Juszczyk is an All-Pro fixture with the 49ers, and the recently retired Cameron Brate stuck around the league for almost a decade. Tyler Ott was a tight end at Harvard and has carved out a decade-long career as a long snapper. Yale’s Jackson Hawes is a tight end with the Bills. Dartmouth’s last draft choice was Casey Cramer ’04, and while he was mostly a fullback in the NFL, he was a tight end with the Big Green. Cramer was drafted by the Buccaneers in the seventh round, one round after the team took Nate Lawrie out of Yale. His position? Tight end.
5) Dartmouth threw the ball just 15 times against Columbia and 15 against Princeton two weeks later. The Big Green aired the ball out 11 times in less than 10 minutes at the start of Saturday’s game. Coach Sammy McCorkle confirmed the emphasis on throwing the ball early was intended to open up the run game and was facilitated by the return to the lineup of starting offensive linemen Delby Lemieux and Vasean Washington, as well as by having blocking tight end Sean Ward back. The result: Dartmouth finished with 254 yards on the ground, easily topping the previous season high of 209 yards against Yale. It’s the most yards the Big Green has had rushing since going for 271 at Columbia last year.
6) The whole rejiggering of the Ivy League schedule that has had Big Green finishing at Brown since 2018 was brought about by a change in Dartmouth’s academic calendar that resulted in exams starting in the final week of the season instead of right after it was over. The thought was that traveling to Providence every other year would be less of a strain on Dartmouth players than making the long trip to Princeton. While it makes sense on the surface, if players had been asked, history tells me most would have preferred the scheduling status quo. Here’s the sad thing. While this is anecdotal, a very high percentage of Big Green players have told me the past few years that if they had any exams left before the Brown game, they were take-home. Maybe the schedule change to play the Bears in Week 10 didn’t have to be made after all.
And this week’s bonus . . .
7) You won’t often find Dartmouth people rooting for Harvard, but if they hope to see the Big Green’s season extended after Saturday, they may want to root for the Crimson to defeat Yale. That's because if the Bulldogs win, they will tie with Harvard for the Ivy League title and earn the conference’s automatic qualifier for the FCS playoffs for winning the head-to-head matchup. In that case scenario, a Harvard team currently in the nation’s top-10 would likely get an at-large bid to the postseason. If the Crimson wins Saturday, the chance for the Ivy to land an at-large bid is diminished somewhat, but if the call comes Dartmouth would have the inside track for winning the head-to-head matchup with Yale. So, Big Green fans, hold your noses and root for the Cantabrigians.