Tigers, Elis Winners in Ivy Openers

The Ivy League resumed business as usual Saturday: the chaos and unpredictability that characterizes academic football began its annual descent into a prognosticator-confounding morass with a handful of upsets and unexpected thrashings.

Take Dartmouth, for example, the supreme Big Green who, with the aid of running backs Jeff Dufresne and Greg Henry and split end Dave Shula, were supposed to breeze through the early part of the season in defending the Ivy title.

Enter Princeton, the football objective correlative of New Jersey and 1978 Ivy doormat. The Tigers travel to Hanover, N.H., and shut out Dartmouth, 16-0 before an eager-to-leave crowd of 14,500.

Some Luck

Princeton humiliated the Big Green; the game's statistics show that Dartmouth was lucky to lose by only 16. Tiger Cris Crissy ran for 106 yards--29 more than the whole Dartmouth team--caught two passes for 47 yards, and highlighted an impressive Princeton attack that accumulated 360 total yards to the home team's 176.

Without a qualified replacement for graduated quarterback Buddy Teevens, the Big Green never mustered a drive and suffered its first shut-out loss at home since 1947.

In New Haven, Conn., Brown and Yale, the teams that tied for second last year, played a typically close game that ended with the Elis grabbing a 13-12 victory.

Yale's Kevin Czinger blocked a punt deep in Brown territory late in the fourth quarter, but the beefy Bruin defense soon stiffened. Mike Sullivan finally pushed over the winning tally with 2:45 left, the Elis' fourth try from the one yardline.

The fatal miscue for Brown came late in the second quarter, when the visitores picked up a Yale fumble, drove 37 yards for a score, then missed the extra point.

The Elis had little offense throughout the day, and two first-half fumbles set up Bruin scores. It was the Blue defense that picked up the slack--middle guard Czinger's first of two blocked punts set up a touchdown.

Cornell opened with a pleasing visit to Philadelphia, where it embarrassed Penn, 52-13, in the most one-sided defeat of the Quakers in a long series between the two teams.

Things started off poorly for Penn and they just got worse. Quarterback Gib Carter fumbled on the team's fist offensive play, an error that led to a Cornell field goal and the beginning of the Big Red's 31-7 halftime lead. Dick Clasby, the Cornell fullback and son, the great Harvard running back of the '50s, collected the touchdown that put Cornell ahead, 31-0.

In the second half, the Big Red torrent subsided somewhat, with Cornell outscoring the visitors just 21-6. The rout presented the Quakers with an unpleasant debut and probably an indicator of a very long season ahead.