A Four-Touchdown Favorite

When last year's football team finished the season with a perfect 10-0 record, people around campus wondered how it would have fared against the last Dartmouth team to go undefeated, the great Lambert Trophy team of 1970. Granted, the game has changed in the past 26 years. Dartmouth, for instance, dropped from Division I to Division I-A during that time. We ran the question past Jeff Sagarin, the computer guru who prepares the exhaustive college football "Power Rankings" for USA Today. Sagarin's rankings are based on a complex computer formula that factors in final scores and the relative strength of every team's opponents. Using his formula, Sagarin rated the 1996 Dartmouth team at 47.61, good for a national ranking of 132. (The low ranking reflected generally close games against a relatively weak schedule.) By contrast, his formula

ranked the 1970 team at 80.59, 33rd best in the country. "Theoretically," he said, "that 1970 team could play some real teams."

Sagarin added, "Logically, there's no way to compare the two teams. The formula takes into account only the universe of college teams within a given year, not the fact that last year's Dartmouth team was probably faster than the earlier one and averaged 20 pounds more at every position." Then he paused. "That said, I'd take the '70 team by between four and five touchdowns."

Ethics bowlers Kate Botham '99, David Rosman '98, John Honovich '97, and Kevin Walsh '98 have arguments to spare.