No Dartmouth game until at least 2025....

Sorry to see this! Dartmouth has always been a good opponent for us! And, yes I will also miss the Hanover trips as well as their coming to Worcester!

Will never forget the Bob Blackburn coached teams that came to Worcester! IIRC it was senior (1966 -1967) year when we beat them in a rain soaked game on a filed goal!  !

What are you talking about 2023?! According to the title of this thread, they don't play Holy Cross until at least 2025, so how could their schedule be "interesting" before then?! 

You made me curious, so I did look it up. Easier to put the years we didn't play them:

2015
1999, 1998 (2 year stretch of no games)
1995, 1994 (another 2 year stretch of no game)
1964
1951
1941,40,39,38,37

We played them very sporadically before WWII

A great rivalry suspended--presumably due to Dartmouth--really disappointing

To anyone who attended the game last year, on a decent day last year with a very good team, was their following a big improvement over past years or just about the same?

Understand the Jax and Valpo games, they wanted to play a game in the south and the midwest....Marist, CC and SH, not so much.

I like any road game vs HYPPD...HC fans seem to like to go to those places and I do too. I'm not particularly enamored with any of them coming to Worcester as they don't seem to bring much of a following with them. Neither does Brown and hope to have nothing to do with Columbia or Cornell evah. Rather play someone who'll come to Fitton, quite frankly.

With so many traditions/rivalries within the Ancient Eight, I don't think their small (3-game) OOC football schedules mean very much to the Ivies in terms of traditions/rivalries . This year's Ivy powerhouse (10-0 Princeton) played Butler, Monmouth, and Lehigh.

If any PL Ivy football matchup is a rivalry/tradition game, I guess Colgate-Cornell (tradition, geography, applicant overlap) would sort of qualify. But even that game means very little to Cornell fans.

You honestly think they care ?

Now would be the time to schedule Villanova as a non-conference game.

I believe Dartmouth is one of the three schools we've played the most (the other two being BC and Colgate).  I ran into a Dartmouth grad on a cruise up the Yangtze River (if you can believe it) way back in 2000.  We talked at length about Dartmouth-HC football out there in the middle of rural China.  I can confirm that he was quite interested in the series and knew more about it than I expected.  That being said, I suspect that the interest level these days is not high in either community.  Given the long series track record, that's a shame.  But so it goes. 

  

I doubt there is much mutual interest. From Villanovas perspective, the CAA is a conference which for them is a lot of travel. All at least 4 hours minus Towson and Delaware. So if they are going to schedule somebody from the PL/IVY group they tend to rotate through local opponents like Lehigh, Lafayette, Bucknell, Penn and Fordham.

From our perspective, we play in a Pennsylvania-centric league. Probably little interest in adding another trip in this driving range unless it's an FBS guarantee game.

And as it was pointed out, we have very little athletic history and tradition with Villanova. The perceived connection seems to lie in the fact that we have tons of overlap in incoming freshmen applications and the fact that we "could a-woulda-shoulda" been in the same basketball conference.

I  don't see us playing Villanova much in football or basketball. I like our CAA game w/UNH and between that game, an Ivy or two, and an FBS we're full. They tend to knock around the PA Patriot League football teams and we don't need (in terms of our W-L  record) to join that hit parade at this point. Ditto for hoops. Can't imagine they'd have much appetite to schedule us either (although Jay Wright might draw a very nice crowd at our arena).

Edit: If we were to add a second CAA game to our football schedule I'd want it to be URI. 2 New England CAAs, 2 Ivies, and 1 FBS plus our 6 PLs would be optimal (IMHO).