Before the season even started, the notion of a dominant Dartmouth football powerhouse was dismissed from the minds of the Ivy League contenders. Preseason reports left Dartmouth in the lower tier of the conference, with an offense hailed as lackluster and a defense that was described as far from extraordinary.
Campus sentiments reflected the dismal preseason reports, as the football team enjoyed student support comparable to that of the intramural tennis team.
In their first game, UNH was supposed to crush Dartmouth. They didn't quite succeed. After being down 35-14 at halftime, Dartmouth rallied to take the lead in the final minutes of play 38-35.
On a rare defensive breakdown and a clutch pass from the UNH quarterback, Dartmouth went down 41-38 and eventually lost the game after a valiant hook and ladder attempt on the kickoff failed to produce any points.
The close game was the result of the brilliant play of quarterback Greg Smith '02 and the Dartmouth defense in the second half, coupled with the clutch kick of freshman kicker Tyler Lavin.
The heartbreaking last-second loss was supposedly a fluke, a rare moment of divine inspiration where the Dartmouth players gelled as a team to engineer a comeback that was three points short of being miraculous. This was a game that many thought was a one time performance.
The game against UPenn was not even expected to be a game. In the preseason rankings, UPenn was just out of the Associated Press Top 25 in Division I-AA, and in their opener they crushed Lafayette 37-0.
The events of the previous week were forgotten, and again Dartmouth was deemed an inadequate competitor and an easy opponent for UPenn to defeat. Dartmouth went into the game with fire and scored on the opening drive of the game, and left at halftime down 21-14.
With under two minutes left in the game, Dartmouth scored on a Michael Gratch two-yard touchdown run. All that was left to tie the game was the extra point.
And Dartmouth choked. Again. Despite winning the defensive battle of the second half for the second time in as many weeks, Dartmouth managed to lose their second straight game 21-20 on a blocked extra point in the final minutes of play. Lavin, one of the heroes of the previous week, became one of the scapegoats in the game against UPenn.
The mental cost of each game on the team as a whole is magnified because they could have won; each was not just dismissed as a blowout. The players must put aside the games and look to the next, without lamenting about the 2-0 record they could have had.
Despite the fact that Dartmouth almost upset the two best opponents on their schedule, each was a heartbreaking contest that was torn away in the final seconds of play. Which means that Dartmouth is 0-2, with two straight weeks of heart-wrenching losses weighing on the team's confidence.
As a young team, it seems that the team does not know how to win yet. They blew each game with a couple of minutes left, the result of inexperience causing the team to falter in clutch situations.
Both games were mental blows to the team's confidence. The upcoming game at Princeton will be a test of the teams mental toughness and resilience. The emotional toll that the past two games inflicted on the team will either bring the players closer together through a common desire to improve for the future or tear them apart as they dwell on what could have been.
They have shown that they have the flash of talent to win against the best teams, but they have yet to prove that they are contenders.
