Forget the records. Forget the Ivy League Championship. Forget about Penn.
Saturday's game at Memorial Field against Princeton will be about one thing -- Jay Fiedler '94 versus Keith Elias, the Gunner meets the Runner.
Everything else will be window dressing for the real show.
Fiedler has turned Dartmouth's record book into his personal scrap book. Elias has done a similar re-printing job on Princeton's. Together they've won just about every award an Ivy League football player could ever hope to win.
And both will play the final game of their illustrious college careers on Saturday.
"They're two of the best players at their positions in the history of this league," Dartmouth coach John Lyons said. "We may not see the likes of them again for a long time."
It may be a cliche, but it really will be a game for the ages -- two of the league's all-time marquis players doing battle one more time.
It's just too bad that round three of Fielder versus Elias will most probably not be for the Ivy League title as the first two were.
The only thing that stands in the way of Penn (9-0 overall, 6-0 Ivy League) and its first outright league title since 1986 is Cornell (4-5 overall, 3-3 Ivy League), a team that rebounded from a tough loss against Dartmouth by allowing Brown and Yale three and zero points, respectively only to lose to Columbia, 29-24, last weekend.
Cornell is a decent team but, realistically, they probably have very little chance of beating a Penn squad that will be playing on its home turf in front of 35,000 title-hungry fans.
Still, if by some chance Bushnell Cup front-runner Jim McGeehan can't find his helmet, if someone ties Terrence Stokes' shoe strings together and the Quaker's defense turn into consciencious objectors, then the winner of the Dartmouth-Princeton clash would become co-champs with Penn.
Both Princeton (8-1 overall) and Dartmouth (6-3 overall) are 5-1 in the league with one loss to Penn, and therefore need the Quakers to lose.
While a battle for second place doesn't have quite the appeal as a tussle for the title, there is still a lot at stake for both teams. A 6-1 mark has been good enough to win at least a piece of the championship five of the last six seasons and, regardless of what happens with Penn, it is still a very respectable record.
The key for Dartmouth is obviously stopping Elias. The 5-foot-11, 195-pound back averages 171 yards and just under two touchdowns a game. Over his career, Princeton is 19-1 when he rushes for more than 100 yards, and 5-4 in games when he doesn't.
And even though that lone time came last year when Dartmouth beat Princeton, 34-20, on the final game of the season, the Big Green aren't counting on lightening striking twice.
"The thing about Elias is that teams have bottled him up for three or three and a half quarters, and then he's broken games wide open," Lyons said. "He just seems to get stronger as the game goes on."
The only team that did contain Elias through 60 minutes was Penn, which put as many as seven men on the line and went after Elias with a vengeance.
"They were playing on that funny turf down at Penn," Matt Feeley '94 said. "It's tough to get your footing on it. Penn is used to it because they play on it all the time. A back like Keith Elias can't reach his full potential on it because it's just so hard to get up to full speed."
Short of covering Memorial Field with carpet, Dartmouth can only throw six and seven up on the line itself and hope the secondary can play to the form it has shown in the past two weeks -- the Big Green picked a total of eight passes against Columbia and Brown -- in case the Tigers decide to let quarterback Joel Foote and his 60 percent completion rating go to work.
"We want to let Joel Foote and the rest of the offense beat us, not Keith Elias," lineman Ed Coker '94 said.
But don't count on seeing that. Princeton has faced teams that have keyed on Elias all year long. The back still averages six yards a carry and is first in Division I-AA in all-purpose yards per game and scoring.
Elias runs behind an offensive line that tips the scales at an average of 280 pounds-per-human Hyundai and will get to push around a Dartmouth front four that leads the league in pounds of used medical tape.
For a group of gimps, though, the Big Green still did the job against Brown, holding Brown's freshman running back Marquis Jessie to just 50 yards on 20 carries. The prevailing strategy against Jessie was basic, hard-hitting intimidation so fierce that Brown's coach said, "If you didn't see the game, you could have heard it."
Mr. Elias is not the type to be intimidated.
Indeed, the only intimidated element for either team is likely to be Princeton's secondary, which has been by far the softer half of the Tiger's iron-tough defense.
Lyons has said he will try to get the run established early -- the Big Green have been most successful this year when Pete Oberle '96 had big first halves as he did against Yale and Brown -- but the focal point of Dartmouth's attack will obviously be Fiedler and his band of merry wideouts.
John Hyland '94, who set the school reception mark for a season against Brown last weekend, needs just 79 yards to set the single season mark for reception yardage, and it wouldn't be surprising if he's got that by the end of the first half. David Shearer '94 and Andre Grant '95 have been Fiedler's other two favorite targets, and Fiedler goes to them with enough frequency to keep any wise free safety off-balance.
Of course, Princeton won't be trying to stop Fiedler in the secondary, at least not if it know what's good for it. When Fiedler has had time to throw the ball this year, the most suffocating of backfields have been entirely insufficient. The only way for a defense to beat Fiedler is to wedge themselves in Fiedler's face mask and hang off his waist like a cheap skirt.
The Tigers have that kind of defense. They lead the Ivy League in sacks with 38, which puts a certain amount of stress on Dartmouth's offensive line.
But, really, it comes down to who is hotter -- Fiedler or Elias.
As if there were anything else.
