Image courtesy of @TheGregHillShow

 

The Greg Hill Show made Lebanon, New Hampshire its latest destination for their Road Show on Friday and Dartmouth head coach Sammy McCorkle was a guest with Greg Hill, Jermaine Wiggins, Courtney Cox and Chris Curtis.

McCorkle is entering Year 2 at Dartmouth after the remarkable job he did last season in a brutal spot following the passing of Buddy Teevens. How did he handle it, just by leading the Big Green to a share of the Ivy League title.

No longer the interim head coach, it’s fully McCorkle’s show now and Dartmouth should be right back in contention again this season. Here’s everything he had to say on WEEI Friday morning:

On winning Ivy League Coach of the Year in 2023:

“It took a village. It really did. It took a whole team, program to help us do that.”

His thoughts on the Patriots selecting Drake Maye:

“That’s why they have a front office, right? That’s why they get paid the big bucks. I think obviously they know what they need to do and hopefully he can come in there and perform the way they expect him to do that. So, I don’t have a problem with that pick at all.”

On Dartmouth’s biggest rival:

I’d say probably hard, the location. I think if you ask Harvard if we’re the big rival they’re probably going to say Yale, but I think every game in the Ivy League…there’s so much history with each game, you can find some type of rivalry there. I would say for us it’s going to be Harvard. Yale’s become a big rivalry for us because usually – especially in the last 10 years – it’s us playing for a championship. It’s usually Yale, Harvard or Princeton, HYP. So, we’re going to treat all of those games as a big game because it is a big game. That’s the thing in the Ivy League, you lose a game and you’re behind the eight ball pretty early.”

On managing Ivy League academic expectations and athletics

“It’s not easy, but we have a support system at the school that helps with that. But, our guys…obviously, we’re finding that small percentage of individuals out there in the country that not only are very good football players, we’re competing against the academies. We’re recruiting against Northwestern, Stanford, Georgia Tech’s. But, trying to find that combination, those types of student athletes, it’s not easy. But. when they get there, we obviously have the support system to help them through it and they figure it out. They’re smart, they can do it. We had the highest graduation rate in the country. We’re at 98%. So, that’s pretty impressive.”

On the Ivy scholarship rule:

“That’s the private institutions, right? I think the big thing is, even though we don’t give out athletic scholarships, it’s all need-based. Our school has done a phenomenal job. There was a huge donation from a family, about $150 million dollars to our financial aid office that we can utilize. So, I think the thing is, we’re able to have packages for certain situations where you’re essentially going to go for free. Some of our student athletes, they’re going to get paid. But, obviously, it depends on their family situation. That (lack of scholarships) does become an issue at times where we are competing against a full scholarship school and you have that upper middle-class family. That’s the tough one, because it’s ‘hey are we going to pay $40,000 a year when I can send my kid here to go for free?’ Those are the tough ones we face usually.”

On the portal being a good or bad thing:

“For us, it really does not affect us. It really doesn’t. It helps our players because we use it in recruiting. We tell a guy ‘hey, come play here at Dartmouth, we’ll develop ya. Get a Dartmouth degree and then if you have that fifth year, that opportunity, you can go play at a Power 5 place.’ We’ll help you get there and a lot of our guys are doing that now. But with transfers…at Dartmouth, if we get a transfer, they’ve got to be a freshman somewhere else or a sophomore. If they’re a junior they’re not going to accept them. So, it really hasn’t affected us too much. Once they come to Dartmouth, it’s hard to leave. It’s hard to leave that degree.”

On if the movie Animal House is based on Dartmouth:

“The guy who wrote the script went to Dartmouth. There are parts of it…if you drive around campus. We don’t tell parents that when they bring kids on visits because they do remember Animal House, but…yeah.”

On NIL changing the landscape of CFB:

“No doubt. It’s a different beast now and I think…it’s just gotten to a point where they’re trying…colleges now and the NCAA now is trying to control it a little bit because they’re going to try to have to. It really hasn’t seeped into the Ivy League, but it’s right there. We tell guys ‘your NIL is you get that Ivy League degree.’ You can come out of Dartmouth and get that six-figure job. That’s our NIL right now, but we do…there are individuals who have their own little marketplace stuff going on. I think that’s the benefit of being in the Ivy League, is we’re not dealing with that stuff right now, Transfer portal and NIL, it’s pure still and hopefully, it’ll stay that way.”

On the difference in recruiting between Ivy League schools and FCS schools like UNH:

“Obviously, the first thing is the academic part of it. We’ve got to get approval from our admissions office. That’s all Ivy schools. So, you could have a blue chip, you can have a five-star, you could love him, he could be the dude, but all of a sudden now you’ve got to wait for the admissions office to approve it. Then, it’s the financial aid part of it as well. Those are two big hurdles we have to face. We start with a list of 22,000 kids to start a class. We’ve got to narrow that down to 25-30. So, trying to narrow that list down…and recruiting’s getting so much faster now. It used to be you could narrow that down in nine months. Now, you’ve got to do that in four months. So, that whole process, you put a lot of time and effort into somebody and all of a sudden you get to the end and the family says ‘hey we can’t write that check,’ or ‘hey academically he’s not acceptable.’ That’s a lot of time and effort you put into it and it’s a strike. So you’ve just got go move on and keep those lists going pretty much the entire time.”

On any Dartmouth guys getting a shot in the NFL

“Yeah. Quinten Arello who was a safety for us last year, he got an opportunity. He got a tryout, he’s in a camp (Tennessee). Isaiah Johnson who played at Syracuse the last two years, he was a starting corner for us, he got picked up as well (Miami). So, yeah, we’ve got…every year, we’re going to have two or three guys that are going to have an opportunity, have a shot. The good thing about it is we have a lot of Dartmouth alums from the front office. We were just talking about The Rooney’s, so that helps too. They know who we are and we know what we’ve got. We’re super excited about it.”