ICGrad wrote: ↑Fri Jan 20, 2023 2:55 pm
Bearfan wrote: ↑Fri Jan 20, 2023 2:19 pm
No disrespect to Dartmouth but before they leapfrog any IVY team they will need to record their first IVY win in how many years?
Their last Ivy win was against Harvard in March of 2015.
On the plus side, with the pandemic they actually went 2+ years without losing an Ivy game.
we'll take the no Ivy losses in 2 years...!
Seriously, we do need to start occasionally knocking off the teams that are in the top tier nationally before we can expect Dartmouth to move up even one spot in the League with any sort of regularity. All of the rest of Ivies have been having that sort of national success (not every year, but at least intermittently) so that's the caliber of play that we will need to achieve.
I've seen very marked improvement in the quality of play, the coaching, the athleticism from the Dartmouth teams over the past 5 years, yet the League as a whole has made just as much overall progress towards elite status, making it incredibly difficult to break through. A couple of bounces differently and there'd be several League wins over those years, but unless we're truly competitive at a national level, can't expect those bounces to go the 'right' way for Dartmouth.
re 2015, Dartmouth won 22 FO's to HU's 5...tremendous game by FO man Phil Hession who scored 2 goals and also caused 4 TO's. 12-11 in double OT.
So, a great FO performance can indeed create the opportunity for an upset.