Hanover
The unbeaten rivals, each 7-0 overall and 4-0 in Ancient Eight play, kick off at 1 p.m. It’s the first meeting this late in the season between undefeated Ivy teams since Harvard and Pennsylvania, each 7-0, clashed in 2001. It’s also just the sixth league contest featuring two unbeaten teams at least seven games into a season.
Wednesday’s Dartmouth practice was boisterous and fast-paced, presumably a sign that a veteran Big Green team is neither consumed by nerves nor in need of a pep talk.
“I’ll make a comment here and there, but they’re pretty inspired themselves,” Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens said of his players. “They’re focused on what to do.”
The coach said congratulations have rolled in since last weekend’s victory over Harvard, Dartmouth’s first over the Crimson since 2003. There also have been numerous wishes for luck against a Tigers team that boasts the NCAA Football Championship Subdivision’s best offense and which has beaten all but one opponent by at least 35 points. So is Teevens himself excited?
“I’m human, and I’m excited for it and excited for our guys,” the coach said. “There’s obviously a great degree of importance on it, but we’re not playing it today. We have to gradually move into it.”
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Princeton’s main man is senior quarterback John Lovett, the Ivies’ 2016 offensive player of the year who missed last season because of injury. At 6-foot-3 and 225 pounds, he’s a graduate of Maryland sports powerhouse DeMatha Catholic High School, which he led to a state title and top 20 ranking.
Lovett is seventh among FCS players with an average of 313 yards per game, 212 through the air. He’s got a pair of 6-4 receivers for whom to aim in Jesper Horsted and Stephen Carlson, who have combined for 87 catches, 1,310 yards and 14 touchdowns. Running back Charlie Volker averages 7.3 yards per carry and has scored 13 touchdowns.
Princeton is second in the FCS in scoring defense and seventh in total defense, and safety T.J. Floyd has six interceptions. The Tigers beat Cornell, 66-0, last week and led, 45-0, at halftime. Seventy players saw action for Princeton during the game.
A familiar face has popped up at Dartmouth practices from time to time this season. It belongs to former four-year starter Vernon Harris, a cornerback who spent practice time with the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs and Tampa Bay Buccaneers after exhausting his collegiate eligibility three years ago.
Harris left before graduating but returned each of the past two winters to earn an undergraduate electrical engineering degree and is on track to snag a graduate version after the coming winter term. During days where he has enough time, he’s out on Memorial Field, helping tutor Big Green defensive backs. Harris and several protégées were the last ones on the turf Tuesday and Wednesday nights, still working with everyone else in the locker room.
“When you take time off from learning, it’s hard to readjust your mind,” said Harris, a Floridian whose parents work in the computer technology industry. “Each time I come back, I have to reteach myself some things. But that’s actually helped, because I’m relearning some things that maybe I was in too much of a hurry to really master the first time.”
Harris, who helped Dartmouth share the 2015 Ivy League championship his senior season, suffered a serious shoulder injury during his first pro season with Kansas City and was cut by Tampa Bay at the end of the next season’s training camp.
A correction from last week’s post-Harvard notes: Dartmouth and Princeton have twice met with undefeated records in November. Not just Princeton’s 26-6 victory in 1935, as we previously noted, but also in the 1965 season finale, when Dartmouth won, 28-14, and which snapped the Tigers’ 17-game winning streak.
The 1935 clash, played in heavy snow before 56,000, took a late, bizarre turn with the hosts up, 19-6, and on Dartmouth’s 6-yard line. A fan rushed on to the field and joined the Big Green front for a play that took the ball to the 1-yard line.
Said Dartmouth tackle Dave Camerer in a Sports Illustrated account from November 1962: “He stumbled into our line between Joe Handrahan and me. He roared, ‘Kill them Princeton bastards!’ and with that he lunged across the scrimmage line — the ball hadn’t even been snapped — and piled into the (nearest) man and fell on his face.
“That whole Princeton line manhandled the poor slob unmercifully until the cops collared him and dragged him off, his toes dragging a trail in the snow. I was truly sorry to see him leave. The way they were ripping through us, we needed all the help we could get.”
The man’s identity was never fully confirmed, although Michael Mesco, a short-order cook at a New Jersey diner, insisted for a time that he was the culprit.
In 1965, Dartmouth’s victory gave it a 9-0 finish and earned it the Lambert Trophy outright as the best team in the East, the first Ivy League team to do so since 1951. A Palmer Stadium crowd of 45,000 was augmented by remote viewing of the game in Dartmouth’s Spaulding Auditorium.
Big Green quarterback Mickey Beard completed 12 of 17 passes and Princeton was denied back-to-back undefeated seasons and Ivy League titles. Dartmouth coach Bob Blackman, who was honored as New England coach of the year for a third time, was carried off the field on his players’ shoulders.
Notes: Saturday’s game will be televised live on both NBC Sports Philadelphia and NBC Sports Boston, and it will be streamed live on ESPN Plus. … This is the first time since 1989 that the teams have not played each other during the season finale. … Dartmouth freshman Connor Davis has made six of 13 field-goal attempts and 31 of 33 extra-point tries. … Dartmouth, Princeton, North Dakota State and Colgate are the FCS’ remaining undefeated teams. … The only men to have won Ivy League football championships as players and coaches? Current Dartmouth and Princeton bench bosses Buddy Teevens and Bob Surace. … Between 2001 and 2009, Princeton won eight of nine meetings against Dartmouth. Between 2010 and 2017, Dartmouth won seven of eight contests. The lone exception was 2016, when Princeton clinched the Ivy title with a 38-21 home victory. … Teevens said he considered attending Princeton as a prep school student but that he never got as far as applying. He said a trip to Dartmouth’s Winter Carnival, during which he hitchhiked in a coat with the buttons eaten off by his dog, sealed his desire to attend Dartmouth, where he graduated in 1979. … Receivers coach David Shula, head coach of the NFL’s Cincinnati Bengals from 1992-96, has been wearing a pair of winter athletic gloves he said date back to that time. … The Dartmouth junior varsity defeated Maine’s Bridgton Academy, 42-25, on Sunday at Memorial Field. Buffalo Bills running back LeSean McCoy played there against the Big Green in 2006 as a member of Milford (N.Y.) Academy. … Making a positive impression this fall, his first as a defensive backs coach, is former Dartmouth player Kyle Cavanaugh. A quality control coach last season, the 2009 graduate was promoted before the current campaign and has also been entrusted with the punt return unit, Teevens said.
Tris Wykes can be reached at twykes@vnews.com or 603-727-3227.