Author:
An Observer
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Date Posted: 10:02:08 11/08/24 Fri
It's a shame that the Princeton-Dartmouth rivalry has lost some of its luster. I put the blame on Dartmouth for requesting that the game be moved from the season finale so that players would not have the long road trip just before fall semester final exams. I think that's short-sighted.
Ten and twenty years after they graduate, do you think that Dartmouth players will wish they had an extra day to study for final exams or do you think that they will wish the program had finished the Big Green season against Princeton, its most logical archrival?
Dartmouth and Princeton are the two smallest Ivies, both at the undergraduate level and by far overall. They are the most conservative politically. They are the only two that really feel like elite liberal arts colleges which happen to have excellent graduate schools appended.
It's a shame to lose Princeton-Dartmouth as a "big game." That's Dartmouth's fault.
Of course, the old saying and ongoing model at Yale is, "The alumni want to beat Harvard, the players want to beat Princeton, but the coaches want to beat Dartmouth."
There's no reason that a successful, thriving program can only consider one opponent as its Rival, with a capital "R."
The alumni are the simplest thinkers. They are most likely to have tunnel vision when it comes to rivalries, in part because elite institutions and their alumni express their elitism by downplaying and poo-poo'ing as many opponents as possible as beneath being their rival. That's how human beings are; we like thinking that we're above considering others as our peers. You know the saying about Boston society: "Welcome to Boston, town of the bean and the cod, where the Lowells speak only to the Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God." Sad, but eternal.
The players know whom they respect as talented, tough and worthwhile competitors because the players are in the trenches doing battle. They know who deserves respect. But the players are only there for four years. They come and go. Then they become alumni.
The coaches are the ones who have the continuing institutional memory. They know which of their opposing coaching staffs are the most skilled, they know which rivals need to be outperformed year in and year out in order to win conference championships.
I strongly suspect that when Surace says Dartmouth is just another game on the schedule, he is speaking as a Princeton alumnus with all the emotional implications of that status. They will always prioritize HYP emotionally.
But I'm confident that Surace the coach knows which opponents make him worry the most over the years. Ivy League football seems to be in a transition period with all the coaching turnover, but I'll bet Surace the coach puts Dartmouth right up there with Harvard and Yale. A couple of years from now, it might be Columbia, Dartmouth and Harvard.
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