An Unexpected Pleasure
"D ARTMOUTHSWEEPS 12THIVYLEAGUE CHAMPIONSHIP," trumpeted the campus headline writer. Sweeping hyperbole aside, the football team is a champion again sharing the Ivy title with Yale again. Both teams won their last games, Dartmouth beating Pennsylvania, 33-13, before a sparse crowd at Franklin Field and Yale defeating Harvard, 28-0, before 73,500 fans at the Bowl.
While both teams finished with 6-1 league records, Yale's sweep to the shared championship was somewhat more artistic than Dartmouth's sweep. By way of evidence, Yale lost but one game all year and Dartmouth lost four, including a 24-3 beating by, yes, Yale. Still, when it was all over, the Dartmouth players had a championship, too, and they seemed to feel just as gleeful about it as the Yale players. If there was a difference, it was that Yale finished where almost everyone expected it to finish. Not very many people expected Dartmouth to be celebrating more than just an end-ofseason victory on Franklin Field.
Against Penn, Dartmouth built a 17-0 first-half lead on a field goal by Tim Geibel and runs of 11 yards by Sean Maher and three yards by Rich Lena. Penn, now coached by Jerry Berndt, a former assistant at Dartmouth, came back with 13 points in the second half, but Dartmouth countered with 16 points by way of another Geibel field goal, a 14-yard pass from Frank Polsinello to Jack Daly, and a 42-yard interception return by defensive back Charles Williams.
With Williams' final touchdown, the Dartmouth defense scored a crucial 26 points this year. That figure, taken with a points-allowed average of 13.7, is not a bad measure of how the defenders led the team out of the wilderness of what Joe Yukica called "the difficult losses of September and October." Williams tied Dartmouth's single-season interception mark, set by Joe Sullivan in 1948, with six. His teammate Barry Pizor tied Sullivan's career-interception record with 11. The team's leading tacklers were linebackers Joe Fernandes and Dave Neslund.
Without great dazzle or flash, Maher finished the year with 707 yards on 145 carries, just 80 yards shy of Dartmouth's single-season record set by John Short in 1970. Maher ran for 40 yards against Penn before leaving the game with a kidney injury in the second quarter.
Dartmouth has now won seven Ivy titles outright and shared five others. Yale has won six outright and finished as co-champion five times. No other team comes close. The Big Green earned a shot at its first Ivy title since 1978 on the penultimate weekend of the season. Dartmouth easily outclassed Brown, 38-13, at Memorial Field, but the day's big news came out of Palmer Stadium at Princeton, where the Tigers derailed Yale's bid for an unbeaten season. Princeton, which fell to Dartmouth, 32-13, in the season opener back in September, spotted Yale a 21-0 lead with 4:36 left in the first half. But Princeton came rushing back on the wing of quarterback Bob Holly, who threw four touchdown passes and scored on a one-yard run with four seconds left in the game to give the Tigers a 35-31 victory over Yale, the three-time defending Ivy champion. That set the stage for the final weekend of play, with 5-1 Dartmouth against a hapless 1-5 Pennsylvania and 5-1 Yale against 4-11 Harvard.
"Going into the season, Yale had the best team on paper there was no question about it," said Dartmouth head coach Joe Yukica after the Brown game. "But what we all said was that no one had gone unbeaten in this league since 1970, when Dartmouth did it. We have good balance, more balance than we've had in our league in a long time."
Dartmouth appeared to face an uphill fight for the Ivy title when it traveled to Cambridge to take on Harvard on the third Saturday in October. The Green held a 1-0 record in league competition but had lost all three of its games with non-Ivy teams. Dartmouth had dropped a heartbreaking 12-7 game to William and Mary the previous week and, in the process, had also lost its starting quarterback, junior Rick Stafford, who suffered a season-ending knee injury. "We had that two-point loss to Massachusetts and the five-point loss to William and Mary, but I thought we were improving and doing something," Yukica observed. "I didn't think we were out of it, but I knew we faced a lot of hard work. The game we won at Harvard was a very pivotal, very critical game." Frank Polsinello got the starting nod at quarter- back, the first sophomore signal-caller to start a game for the Big Green since Steve Stetson did it back in 1970. Polsinello com- pleted nine of 13 passes for 114 yards while junior tailback Sean Maher lugged the ball 118 yards on 28 carries to give the Big Green a 24-10 victory over the Crimson.
Dartmouth upped its record to 3-0 in the league the next week with a 42-7 thumping of Bob Blackman's Big Red of Cornell. The defense did its share of scoring in the Cornell game by converting two blocked punts into touchdowns, and Maher gained 144 yards on 19 carries including a 44-yard touchdown run. Polsinello completed seven of14 passes for 120 yards and scored a touchdown on a three-yard run. The Green's title bid was dealt a setback the next week at New Haven. "We had a great game against Yale for the first 30 minutes," said Yukica. Dartmouth had the ball three times within Yale's ten-yard line in the first half but came away with only three points. The Bulldogs held a 10-3 lead at the half and added two more touchdowns in the second half to defeat Dartmouth, 24-3. "We have to win our next three and hope that someone beats Yale," Yukica said after the game.
The Green got back on the winning track against Columbia at Baker Field on November 7. Maher rushed for 131 yards and a touchdown in the first half, and Peter Lavery carried the ball for 96 yards after he replaced a dazed Maher at the tailback position late in the second quarter. Lavery scored a touchdown on a three-yard run, and Polsinello, who completed 7 of 13 passes for 79 yards, completed a seven-yard touchdown pass to senior flanker Shaun Teevens, as Dartmouth upended the Lions, 21-7. Polsinello completed 16 of 23 passes against Brown for 199 yards, including touchdown strikes to Jack Daly and Dave Brown. Maher ran the ball for 73 yards and two touchdowns in the 38-13 victory. "I wanted to show Brown what I could do because they tried to recruit me," said Polsinello. "We've been so well prepared for every game that when we go out there, it's just like another practice."
Yukica credited the continued steady play of the team's defensive unit and the improvement of the offensive unit for putting Dartmouth in a position to earij at least a share of the Ivy League title. The coach cited the "fine play" of Polsinello since he inherited the starting quarterback job against Harvard, the continued improvement of the offensive line, the running of Maher and fullbacks Rich Lena and Tom Bruno, and the receiving of Teevens and Daly.
Polsinello's arm led the way to victory at Harvard; Teevens' diving catch raised hopes at Yale but produced no touchdown.
Maher ran for a touchdown and 131 yards overall in 30 minutes at Columbia; Daly did a Teevens against Brown and scored, too.
Taplin soars after the regionals win.
