BGA Overtime is the successor to BGA Premium, a site that covered Dartmouth football with daily stories starting in 2005. The OT is written and edited by Bruce Wood, a former beat writer who has covered Dartmouth sports since the early 1980s. It is not affiliated with Dartmouth College and is supported by your generous donations..
Whether it is the school's sports publicity office not getting around to it, or coach Bob Surace working an angle, Princeton is the only Ivy team that has not posted a 2026 roster.
That leaves an open question at quarterback where there is, or there could be, an interesting mystery contender to fill the wide-open job.
Maybe new Penn coach Ricky Santos didn't get the memo. Or maybe he's just a little less paranoid than a lot of college football coaches.
Either way, the former New Hampshire quarterback standout and coach came right out and revealed on the Ivy League media day who was going to be the Quakers' No. 1 QB heading into camp.
Ah, but he did leave that door a little open for a new entry in the sweepstakes.
It's a safe bet that virtually no one saw Columbia winning a share of the Ivy League championship in 2024.
After the Lions slipped back to 1-6 overall and 2-8 last fall, the conference pundits reverted to form and picked them last this year. That was no surprise, but there could be one in store.
Like Brown and Columbia – not to mention Dartmouth and Yale – Cornell returns its starting quarterback, and he's a big one. Literally.
Stuck for his first two years behind Jameson Wang before breaking out in Week 3 last year, Garrett Bass-Sulpizio is a 6-foot-5, 231-pound senior who completed 64.4 percent of his attempts on the season. His best showing was a 37-for-45 (82.2 percent) outing against Dartmouth when he threw for 328 yards. Not just a passer, he ran for 91 yards against Colgate and was the first Big Red player to run for a score in seven consecutive games since the legendary Ed Marinaro in 1971.
Long-suffering Brown fans have been waiting patiently for the turnaround since bringing prodigal son quarterback James Perry back as coach in 2019. After just three Ivy League wins in his first the seasons back, that patience, at least judging by anonymous voices on the internet, was starting to wear thin.
Perry bought himself some time with a 28-21 upset of No. 10 Rhode Island in Week 3 last year, and while a four-game losing streak took some of the luster off a 3-1 start, back-to-back wins at the end – including a 35-28 victory over Dartmouth in the finale – have Perry and Co. thinking maybe the program has finally turned the corner.
HANOVER – The problem for football coaches in an intrasquad game is, if the offense is looking like world beaters, you start worrying about your defense.
And if the defense is dominating, you can’t help but worry about your offense.
All of which is why the series bridging the third and fourth quarters of Saturday’s highly entertaining Green-White Game played out almost perfectly in Dartmouth coach Sammy McCorkle’s view.
HANOVER – In part because it led to the poaching of their players in the transfer portal, a significant number of FBS football coaches stopped holding spring games and replaced them with one final practice.
The NCAA closed the second portal window this year but the number of spring games at the FBS level still continued to fall.
As they used to say in these parts, “It’s different at Dartmouth.”
HANOVER – The goal for Dartmouth’s final week of spring football is to reach a crescendo in Saturday’s Green-White Game.
Unfortunately, getting to that point might be a little easier than expected after the week kicked off Tuesday with practice coach Sammy McCorkle finding the offensive performance flat.
HANOVER – Sammy McCorkle came into the ninth practice of the spring with one clear objective and added a second along the way.
Mission accomplished.
Make that missions – plural – accomplished.
Over 15 seasons as Dartmouth’s defensive coordinator, Don Dobes posted up on Memorial Field’s home sideline for 75 Big Green games.
But he’s logged upwards of 1,000 practices – counting the spring, preseason and in season sessions – almost exclusively on the other side of the field.
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| Sammy McCorkle keeps an eye on the proceedings Tuesday. |
HANOVER – Sammy McCorkle's most forceful message to the Dartmouth football players Tuesday evening after they returned to the field following their "bye" week was much the same as it has been all spring.
And all last year.
And all through his tenure as head coach, for that matter.
HANOVER – If you’ve been following along, you read the other day that Dartmouth coach Sammy McCorkle made a point of avoiding the word “concern” while talking about rebuilding an offensive line that lost four of five starters to graduation.
After passing the midway point of spring practice Saturday morning, there was another word McCorkle avoided when talking about his coaches heading out recruiting during the team's week off.
Oops.
HANOVER – At the end of the first week of spring practice, Dartmouth coach Sammy McCorkle fielded a question about what positional “room” concerns him most at this juncture.
He pointed to one area, but cautioned against calling it a concern.
Dartmouth's fourth practice of the spring was moved to the early morning hours because the forecast in the usual 5 p.m. time slot indicated a strong possibility of a thunderstorm. As it turned out, the audible was a good idea because the forecast got it right.
Given pleasant weather at 6 a.m., the practice was held on Memorial Field where Zach Pierson, the Dartmouth program's manager of content services for football, put his camera to work and produced some epic photos.
These pictures were posted on the Dartmouth football Xwitter page as well as its Instagram page. Because a lot of Dartmouth fans do not visit those sites, the photos are reproduced here to help them get the viewership they deserve.
Huge kudos to Zach for his work producing these images from the first full-pad practice of the spring. Click on the photos for a better look.
BGA will be back at practice Thursday for a look at how full-padded sessions are going, and again Saturday for a breakdown of the first half of spring practice.
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| Jordan Belfori, linebackers coach and defensive coordinators, gives instruction to Sean Chester and the other Big Green linebackers. |
HANOVER – Dartmouth wrapped up the first week of spring football on a blustery Saturday morning, and coach Sammy McCorkle is hopeful the blue-chip prospects on campus doing official visits were impressed, because he was.
“We had a better day out here,” McCorkle said. “We were a little bit more of a well-oiled machine. You could see the growth from our first day. Each practice we’ve gotten better and better.
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| Offensive line coach Keith Clark watches a drill closely. |
HANOVER – There were a good number of high school juniors on unofficial visits gathered around the midfield huddle at the end of practice Thursday listening to the parting message Sammy McCorkle had for his players after the second of 12 spring sessions.
You didn’t need to be that close to hear what the head coach had to say.
HANOVER – Sammy McCorkle has no doubt been asked what kind of impact the many changes in the Dartmouth coaching staff will have on the Big Green this year.
What he may not have been asked – at least until Wednesday morning's delayed start of spring practice – is how bringing in no fewer than five new position coaches along with two new quality control coaches, impacts him.
