Ivy League Football 2023

Yale's Nolan Grooms leads the favorite Bulldogs

OVERVIEW

Despite worries that canceling the entire 2020 season would leave the Ivy League at a major recruiting disadvantage for years to come, and the easy-to-enter transfer portals wreaking potential havoc, the Ancient Eight has emerged three years later with an unusual amount of returning talent and an undeniably better quality of football overall. 

The proof is on the rosters, where seven of the eight teams return starting QB's with extensive experience, last year's offensive player of the year and co-defensive player of the year are back, and only two teams suffered overall losing records in 2022. 

But there will be a lot of change in the league this year. Legendary head coaches Al Bagnoli and Buddy Teevens will not be on the sidelines, and the transfer portal has had an adverse impact on some teams more than others. There will also be the 1st down clock rule change that will affect not just the Ivy teams, but all of Division I football.

The elephant in the room is that the league has a prohibitive favorite to win it all this year; perhaps the heaviest favorite I've seen in my 36 years of closely following the Ivies. That team is Yale and it's fair to say that anything short of a solo championship will be a disappointment for the already defending solo champion Elis.

The good news for everyone else is that heavy preseason favorites to win this league haven't exactly had the best track record in the past.

Speaking of bad track records, my 2022 predictions were pretty off the mark, (see below), but here goes another stab at it for 2023:

1. Yale

Count me among the believers that Yale will repeat as champions, thanks to an impressive array of returning stars who have already proved their worth in key games.

It would be a lot easier just to name the one or two minor concerns for this team and then move on to the rest of the league but here are the highlights for this impressive program: 

Head Coach Tony Reno has clearly evolved from his early days in New Haven when he craved and often bagged recruits from big-name schools and lured impressive transfers. Those "big gets" didn't always pan out when it came to building a cohesive team. 

Now, Reno is winning the more traditional recruiting battles consistently. Most impressively, Reno has now proven he can recruit and develop top QB's in succession and that's something that's become even more noticeable as arch rival Harvard continues to fail to find a star signal caller for going on a decade now. 

The current Yale star QB is 2022 Offensive Bushnell Cup winner Nolan Grooms, who can pass and run extremely well and seems to thrive in big game pressure. Grooms is blessed with historically strong protection up front as the Elis boast NFL draft prospect LT Kiran Amegadje anchoring an offensive line that also has two other returning starters including one who grabbed All Ivy Honorable Mention honors. 

2022 Ivy League Rookie of the year Joshua Pitsenberger is back at RB, along with star runners Tre Patterson and Spencer Alston. All six, yes six, of Yale's WR's top wide receivers return with Mason Tipton probably the most consistent weapon. 

The Yale defense returns stars on all three lines: DL Clay Patterson, LB Hamilton Moore, and DB Wande Owens.

Overall, the defense is clearly not as stacked as the offense. If you beat Yale in 2023, it will probably be because you exposed the defense... which still won't be easy.

Oh, and Yale also has seven home games this season. Yes, that's seven home games out of 10 total games played. 

It's good to be the king.

Sayin lets one fly

2. Penn

The Quakers were the surprise team of 2022, with only a close loss at Brown, (the Bears played just about everyone really well at home last year), costing Penn a share of the Ivy title. 

Some of the people responsible for that run are back in 2023, and some are not. It makes predicting how they and they will do tougher because no one will be surprised by the Quakers this time around. And Penn is just one of the very good teams not named "Yale" in the Ivies this year that are hard to place as far as predictions go. 

Penn QB Aidan Sayin is back after putting in a very impressive 2022 campaign. He gets Joshua Casilli back at WR, but loses his top WR Rory Starkey from last year. His two top O-linemen are gone to graduation transfers, and the Quakers didn't have a very strong RB last season to bring back anyway. Sayin will have to do more with less and with a bigger target on his back.  

The Penn defense may simply be the best in the league, even though it lost its biggest star in Jake Heimlicher. 

To start things off, the rest of the very impressive Penn D-line besides Heimlicher is back. That includes big Micah Morris, who blew things up for Columbia in the game at Franklin Field last year. 

The Quaker secondary will be the best or close to the best in the league with all of its returning players. The linebacking crew gets two All Ivy Honorable Mention players back. 

I'm still not sold on Penn without that element of surprise they brought to the table last year and without a running game to keep the pressure off Sayin. But on paper this is a serious contending team. 

Bryson Canty

3. Columbia

My full preview of the Lions will come out later this week... the short version for now is it's hard to pick a team with a very inexperienced O-line to win an Ivy title. But if Columbia is able to get that line working decently, the sky's the limit for this team that returns so many top skill players.

Liam Johnson is a star at LB for the Tigers

4. Princeton

The media poll picked the Tigers to come in 2nd, something more savvy observers of the league are scoffing at because of so many losses to graduation and the transfer portal. I'm tempted to join them in burying Princeton a bit this year, but I'll stop short of that by still sticking them in the top half of the league. 

That's because Princeton has proven to be very close to a "reload" team under Head Coach Bob Surace. That means we should assume the Tigers will fill in most of their personnel gaps very well. By the time their late season matchup vs. Yale at Princeton Stadium rolls around, don't be surprised if Princeton is poised to win that game. 

This is a team that still returns QB Blake Stenstrom, the best pure pocket passer in the league, and the Co-Defensive Player of the Year in Liam Johnson. In most other years, that would be enough to choose the Tigers as favorites.

But graduation and the transfer portal hit Princeton hard. WR Andre Iosivas was one of Princeton's all-time greats and he has easily made the Cincinnati Bengals roster to prove it. Also gone are serious weapons in WR Dylan Classi and TE Carson Bobo. 

RB Ryan Butler was impressive in his freshman season as the team's leading rusher, but now he's transferred to Stanford. The Tigers have won a number of titles recently without a dominant RB, so this isn't necessarily a disaster. What is more concerning is the O-line has less experience than what we're used to seeing at Princeton, and that's a problem for a non-mobile QB like Stenstrom. 

The inexperience on the D-line and the secondary is also troubling. But the linebacking crew, (which is the most important unit in a defense), is not only experienced but stacked with Johnson and 2nd Team All Ivy Ozzie Nicholas returning. 

Trust me, Princeton will bring at least two or three new players on the field who will be big stars like the many players who are gone this year. It's just that it make take another year before they gel together. 

Macklin Ayers

5. Dartmouth

The Big Green will join Columbia as a program unexpectedly without their iconic head coach in 2023. But unlike the Lions, Dartmouth has had several months to adjust to this reality and could make a surprise run in the league. The bad news is that the Big Green will not have Buddy Teevens acting as an informal consultant during the season the way Al Bagnoli is doing for Columbia. 

On the field, I have to believe that hard-running QB Nick Howard will have a better overall year after his passing game failed to improve as much as expected in 2022. That may have been because of an offensive line that was hit by injuries last season but looks a lot better coming into 2023. 

Howard will split time at QB with a more pass-oriented player as he did with Dylan Cadwallader last year. Cadwallader will get some competition for that job this year, but I expect him to be the other main QB and improve in the three TDs he passed for in 2022. 

RB Q Jones returns, and he has "breakout season" written all over him, even though he's not an unknown player at this point anyway. It just seems like he'll be an even bigger part of the offense this year. That would be a switch from a program that's flooded the zone with a lot of talented WR's in recent years. But I still expect Paxton Scott to be a major receiving weapon in 2023.

The defense brings back a lot of solid players that flew a bit under the radar last year. The leaders will still be edge rusher Charles Looes, LB Macklin Ayers, and DB Quinten Arello. Ayers is especially one to watch here. 

But this defense also suffered from transfer portal activity, which is probably why I'm not expecting Dartmouth to make a serious run at the title this year. Ordinarily, they'd be a lock to do that after a rare down year. And that down year included razor-close losses to the top teams in the league. 

Still, if there's any advantage a team can get from wanting to fight to help raise the spirits of its severely injured coach Teevens, then interim Head Coach Sammy McCorkle's guys will have it. 

Thor Griffith

6. Harvard

It feels insane to pick the Crimson 6th, especially when it seems like this program is due for a run to the top after so many years out of the championship mix. I picked Harvard to win the title last year. 

But where else can you place Harvard when it's forced to start a completely inexperienced QB this season and the program has shown no great ability to develop QB talent for several years running? 

The RB room is also pretty much devoid of experienced talent as star Aidan Borquet has graduated (along with his signature bowing after scoring TDs).  

Only minor players at WR return as well. So if this Crimson offense is more than just passable this season, longtime Head Coach Tim Murphy would deserve coach of the year consideration for that alone.

The defensive picture is better in Cambridge, thanks to the D-line led by All-World DT Thor Griffith and the not-to-be-overlooked Nate Leskovec. You still can't really run against Harvard, and that will keep them in a lot of games this fall. 

But graduation really hit the LB and DB units on this team too, and it may take time to get Harvard's usually very talented haul of younger players acclimated in those roles. 

I'm certainly not a total outlier by picking Harvard this far down the standings this year. But I may be the only one who can't help but think Murphy has lost a bit after 29 years in this job in a way similar to Carm Cozza's last few years at Yale. This was a concern I had about this program last year, and I even posted about it on this blog, but I chose to ignore it overall. Not this time.  

And yet no one, including me, would be shocked if Harvard somehow makes a decent run for the top this year. But that seems harder to fathom this year than any time over the last few decades. 

 

Jake Wilcox in the pocket

7. Brown

Brown's 2022 may have seemed very disappointing to others, but if you look closer you see a team that played everyone very tough at home and clearly proved that Head Coach James Perry's offense could work even without QB E.J. Perry at the helm.

QB Jake Wilcox is very good and he'll be backed up by an experienced Aidan Gillman who filled in pretty well for Wilcox after he was injured later in the season. Wilcox gets super WR Wes Rockett back after Rockett entered the transfer portal but then decided to stay in Providence.

The O-line will need to do much better to help Wilcox and establish some kind of running game for the Bears. If there were more talented experience up front, I'd be picking Brown a bit higher. 

Brown's defense was porous last year, but it did include stars like DB Isaiah Reed DB Cooper DeVeau who both return this year.

Kicker Christopher Maron may be the best in the league this year. 

I'm higher on the Bears than just about any other objective observer in this league. But look, Brown isn't going to overpower anybody on both sides of the ball. I do think the Bears will light it up through the air and could have a shot at a winning season if Wilcox stays healthy. Perry is just too good a coach to underestimate Brown for too long. Look for next year, when Perry has a full compliment of his own recruits post-E.J. Perry, for the Bears to make a real move. 

Jake Stebbins

8. Cornell

The Big Red put together a 5-5 season in 2022 as QB Jameson Wang improved his passing skills to go along with his elusive running. But it feels like teams will be much more prepared for Wang this time around and the Cornell defense shows no real signs of taking a major step forward.

The offense has Wang returning, along with most of its starting O-line from last year. Wang's best target coming back is a good one in TE Matt Robbert, but the Big Red needs to find more options in the receiving corps. 

On that challenged defense, Cornell still gets LB Jake Stebbins back for what seems like his 7th or 8th year, (but he's just a 5th year senior). The secondary is very experienced, but the D-line returns no really proven pass rushers. 

A lot of people still think the Big Red are in a good place to get a winning record this season, but I'm not one of them.  

My Predicted order of finish last year:

1. Harvard

2. Columbia

3. Yale

4. Princeton

5. Dartmouth

6. Penn

7. Cornell 

8. Brown

Actual 2022 Final Standings

1. Yale 

2t. Penn

2t. Princeton

4. Harvard

5. Columbia

6t. Cornell

6t. Dartmouth

8. Brown