They had all summer to prepare for the biggest game of the year, but having finally beaten Penn, the Big Green football team must shift its focus away from the celebration of beating an Ivy powerhouse and focus on another team from Pennsylvania, Lehigh.
Dartmouth travels to take on the Engineers today. The Engineers are 1-2 on the season, coming off of a 34-20 loss to Buffalo last weekend.
The biggest worry on the minds of the coaching staff and the players has to be a letdown from last week's last second victory over the Quakers. Even with an eight game unbeaten streak on the line, this contest is out of the Ivy League and is therefore meaningless to the conference record, meaning that a loss wouldn't derail the team's main goal of capturing its first Ivy League championship since 1991.
"I don't think we are worried about a let down, but obviously that is a concern after a game like that," offensive tackle and co-Captain Brian Larsen '97 said. "We have practiced well all week and I know that everyone will come to play on Saturday."
Coach John Lyons said, "We tell our players that they only get to play 10 games each season, so it doesn't matter who we are playing, whether they are a league opponent or not."
"But we know that somewhere in the players' minds they know this isn't a league opponent," Lyons added. "However, even though we won last week and played well in the end, we made a lot of mistakes and so our emphasis has been fixing them all week and ironing out those problems."
Despite the Engineers 1-2 record, they have some talent that the Big Green will have to deal with.
"Lehigh's record is deceiving because they have played some pretty good teams in Delaware and Buffalo, strong scholarship programs," Lyons said. "One thing that really scares me is that this will be their fourth game and only our second, so their players have had more game experience."
The main focus in practice has been improving the kicking game, which was miserable against Penn, where four extra points and two field goals were missed.
"The kicking game had a complete breakdown in every way last week, but we've been working on it during practice and we think we've made the adjustments, and Dave Regala '98 has been kicking well all week," Lyons said.
One clear difference between this week's game and last week's will be the defensive emphasis. While Penn was unable to throw the ball and tried to run against the strong front seven of Dartmouth's defense, Lehigh likes to throw the ball and their two quarterback rotation of Brown and Edwards will test the Dartmouth secondary early.
"This is the fastest and most experienced secondary we've had since I've been here," Lyons said. The Engineers' Brown is averaging over 283 yards passing per game and has thrown for five touchdowns in three games.
Fortunately for the Big Green offense, Lehigh has been unable to keep opponents out of the endzone, giving up 32 points per game. Furthermore, their rushing defense has been porous, allowing Buffalo last week to gain 354 yards on the ground after Delaware and Fordham each gained over 200 yards.
This is good news for the senior backfield of Greg Smith '97, Ambrose Garcia '97 and Pete Oberle '96, who, along with the scrambling abilities of quarterback Jon Aljancic '97 should keep the Engineer defense on its feet all day with the running and option game.
But don't expect Dartmouth to abandon its balance on offense after throwing the ball 34 times against the Quaker defense proved to be very successful in helping them move the ball.
"One of our keys on offense last week was keeping Penn off-balance in terms of our play calling," Lyons said. "Obviously we need to be able to run the football, but Jon [Aljancic] threw the ball well last week and we want to continue to do that."
Larsen said, "We are just going to show up and play our brand of football, which does involve a solid ground attack, and play hard for 60 minutes."
Two weeks ago, Lehigh defeated the Big Green's next opponent, Fordham, 20 14.
Kickoff for the Big Green and the Engineers is 1:00 p.m. at Goodman Stadium.
