Dartmouth: Afraid To Win?

[DFW HOYA]

“There is absolutely no educational redeeming qualities in chronic losing,” said Ted Leland, who served as Dartmouth's athletic director from 1983-89. “You've got to give athletes the opportunity to be successful. They must feel that they have a chance to win.”

Do they?

http://www.vnews.com/03312010/6498405.htm

[Bogus Megapardus]

Dr. Jim Yong Kim, Dartmouth's newly-installed president, was valedictorian and president of his high school class, and played both quarterback for the football team and point guard on the basketball team. Perhaps it will take a successful student-athlete to help recognize Dartmouth's potential.

[DJOM]

Dartmouth some good hires to position themselves for a winning season. Don Dobes will have the defense ready to bring it.

[Go...gate]

Dartmouth, like Colgate, has some wild hairs in its administration that would love nothing more than to see it in the NESCAC, whether it be well or ill for the school. DC's former Director of Admissions was one of them, openly desiring the discontinuation of football, among other things.

[Model Citizen]

“They are afraid to succeed there, and it shows,” one Ivy athletic official told me.

I'm calling BS.

[49RFootballNow]

Leland recalled a time just after Dartmouth had scored a remarkable second place finish at the NCAA Cross Country Championships. Leland was walking across the green when he was hailed by a faculty member who congratulated him on the team's success.

“I thanked him, and then he added, ‘but do we really want to be that good?' I said, Yes, we do. And there's a whole building of students and coaches who think it’s just great.

“And that's the culture the athletic director must understand.”

And this is why I'll never be an athletics director. I would have smacked that ignorant egg-head across the back of his scalp!

[DFW HOYA]

And this is why I'll never be an athletics director. I would have smacked that ignorant egg-head across the back of his scalp!

Dartmouth also suffers by a still-simmering battle over political correctness and the image of football as redolent of the days when Dartmouth was a frat-friendly all-male institution (the inspiration for the movie National Lampoon's Animal House) but which routinely dominated in football, finishing in the AP Top 20 as late as 1971.

This was the place where its own (former) admissions director wrote that "Football programs represent a sacrifice to the academic quality and diversity of entering first-year classes...I wish this were not true but sadly football, and the culture that surrounds it, is antithetical to the academic mission of colleges such as ours."

This is also the place where two students were actually thrown out of school for a year for showing up at a Dartmouth hockey game wearing American Indian garb, but the school would have done nothing if those same students were streaking or even wearing a burqa.

[Wildcat80]

We hope they start to win. We'd love an annual big game in NH...like the old days. Penn-nova. URI-Brown. UNH-Dartmouth. Makes sense. xsmiley_wix

[Lehigh Football Nation]

"Leland recalled a time just after Dartmouth had scored a remarkable second place finish at the NCAA Cross Country Championships. Leland was walking across the green when he was hailed by a faculty member who congratulated him on the team's success.

“I thanked him, and then he added, ‘but do we really want to be that good?' I said, Yes, we do. And there's a whole building of students and coaches who think it’s just great.

“And that's the culture the athletic director must understand.”

Wow. Where do you start with a "culture" like that?

[CFBfan]

Wow. Where do you start with a "culture" like that?

propeller heads that have no understanding of the value of the life lessons that only sports can teach, competition, team play, fighting thru adversity, etc, etc, etc!!
it's very sad!

[DFW HOYA]

Part 2:

"Now, what was once a flagship athletic program in the Ivy League with a national following is sinking into obscurity. Losses mounted from program to program, disillusioned coaches are leaving and recruited athletes are choosing other schools.

“It's a bit of a mess,” said one current Dartmouth coach. “And I don't see any hope in sight. It's awful. It’s like going round and round in circles, heading nowhere. “The general mood is to keep your head down, don't say much and don't expect much.”

http://www.vnews.com/04012010/6500457.htm

[DFW HOYA]

Part 3:

"Part of that is due to a change in Dartmouth's Academic Index band (the statistical system that defines the makeup of the school's freshman class) that rose in the same period of time to the point that the football team's ability to recruit was dramatically reduced. So much so, that since the new AI band went into effect after the 1996 football season -- when Dartmouth went undefeated -- the Big Green has had only one more winning record (1997) on the gridiron. You could say that football certainly wasn't Harvard-ized, but rather Columbia-ized."

http://www.vnews.com/04022010/6503457.htm

[Lehigh Football Nation]

Part 3:

"Part of that is due to a change in Dartmouth's Academic Index band (the statistical system that defines the makeup of the school's freshman class) that rose in the same period of time to the point that the football team's ability to recruit was dramatically reduced. So much so, that since the new AI band went into effect after the 1996 football season -- when Dartmouth went undefeated -- the Big Green has had only one more winning record (1997) on the gridiron. You could say that football certainly wasn't Harvard-ized, but rather Columbia-ized."

http://www.vnews.com/04022010/6503457.htm

This piece does confirm what I had long suspected - but it doesn't paint the whole picture. IMO, it's not the AI bands that were necessarily the issue: it was a more aggressive admissions department that had a open - even documented, on a Dartmouth letterhead - disdain for football. The AI seemed to me like more of an excuse for admissions to put the screws to football.

[Ivytalk]

The infamous Furstenberg letter still rankles Dartmouth football alums after 10 years. The columnist is dead on in arguing that the new Dartmouth AD should report directly to the president and that they need an effective athletic fundraiser at the administrative level. C'mon, Big Green!

[ngineer]

With the new Prez being a scholar-jock himself, I would hope he begins a new era of striving to be the best in whatever one attempts. When I was at Lehigh, we had a Prez (Deming Lewis) who was perceived as an egg-head (had about 30+ patents and was involved in development of radar and the space program), but was a world class squash player (the reason the squash courts exist next to the Varsity House in Goodman Campus). He understood the role of athletics and gave his AD, the former football HC (Leckonby) free reign within what ever dollars existed to 'Win'. The hiring of Fred Dunlap and the beginning of a new era of winning football was created. The Prez's successor, Peter Likins, was an all-american wrestler at Stanford, so he appreciated first hand the role of athletics even at highly competitive academic schools.
So the leadership does come from the top. Lewis was very 'hands off', while Likins was much more involved, but each sent the signal as to how important athletics was going be to the University.