Completed Event: Football at Central Connecticut State on September 27, 2025 , Win , 35, to, 28
Final
Football
at Central Connecticut State
35
28
Nick Howard (17) attempts to elude the Columbia defense
Photo by: Maria Golick
Nick Howard: All About Belief
10/26/2022 7:08:00 PM | Football
Even through the adversity of the first half of the season, the Big Green QB maintains his belief in himself and his teammates
After pulling together stories on Shane Cokes and Quinten Arello, the assignment this time around was to do a feature on the third Dartmouth captain.
Writing about quarterback Nick Howard for the big Homecoming game against Harvard made perfect sense.
Ask anyone and they will tell you Howard is the beating heart of the Big Green. What figured to make his story even more compelling when the idea came up this summer is that after splitting time behind center last year, the senior from Green Bay was going to have a chance to prove this fall he wasn't just a runner. He was going to show he could win games with his arm and succeed as a full-time quarterback while leading the Big Green to a third consecutive Ivy League championship.
Five games into the season, nothing was going as planned. Dartmouth was a disappointing 1-4 and worse yet, 0-2 in the Ivy League. Howard had run the ball 24 times for 186 yards and two touchdowns in an overtime loss at Sacred Heart and 24 times for 108 yards and two more touchdowns the next week in an overtime loss to Penn, and he had paid a price for it.
Howard was so banged up that he had to be held out of a critical week-four game at Yale to recover from the pounding of the previous two weeks.
"No one could last taking that kind of punishment," said Buddy Teevens, the Robert L. Blackman Head Football Coach.
Given the promise Dylan Cadwallader demonstrated throwing the ball at Yale and the toll being the full-time starter was taking on Howard, Teevens was now speaking openly about reinstalling the two-quarterback system. The Big Green did just that the week after Yale against New Hampshire when Cadwallader was called on to throw 20 passes. Howard threw just seven, reverting mostly to his role as the running quarterback. And now even that was a struggle as injuries limited him to nine yards on six carries.
With all that as a backdrop, a decision had to be made. Needing to talk with Howard in the days leading up to the Columbia game in order to meet the deadline for a Homecoming week story, would it make sense to instead call an audible, save the story on the third captain for the final game program and feature someone else this week? Should a good kid having a hard time be given the chance to get things turned around without putting him in the awkward position of having to answer questions about a season that wasn't going as he hoped and dreamed?
Rick Bender, Dartmouth's senior associate athletic director in charge of athletics communications, made the call. He had seen the class Howard showed addressing the media after a game-ending interception at Sacred Heart. He knew how maturely Howard had responded in his junior spring when he lost his mother.
"Nick's a standup guy," Bender said. "Let's go ahead with the story."
And so a few days before the Columbia game, Howard looked his interviewer in the eye and answered every question thrown his way without blinking. That included the hard one: What has this year been like for you?
"I'm not gonna lie," he said. "It's been a tough battle, trying to try to stay confident, trying to keep belief in myself. Some things are just out of our control. If we hit that field goal against Penn, maybe that's a different game. All of the injuries. We've dealt with some adversity as a team, and I have personally.
"I've just had to keep reminding myself to remember why you play. To have fun. I love my teammates. I would rather go 0-10 with this team than go 10-0 with any other team."
All Nick Howard ever wanted was to be a quarterback. But while he threw for more than 2,000 yards, had 15 touchdown passes and ran for 636 yards and 10 more touchdowns as a senior at Green Bay's Southwest High School, most colleges saw the 6-foot-2, 225-pound quarterback who plays like a linebacker as, well, a linebacker.
As tempted as he was by a preferred walk-on offer to suit up as a linebacker for Iowa, he knew the strain out-of-state tuition would put on his family. When South Dakota offered him a scholarship to play quarterback it was too good an opportunity to refuse, but as the son of a former college football coach, Howard knew how the recruiting game was played. When he came to the conclusion the Coyotes would eventually move him to linebacker, he switched his commitment to Cornell, which also wanted him on defense. He decided if he was going to be a linebacker it might as well be at the best school that wanted him to play the position.
Just days before the deadline for early admission to Cornell, former Big Green assistant Kyle Cavanaugh touched base with Howard about his interest in playing quarterback for the Big Green. When Howard learned that Jared Gerbino '20 — another player Cornell had tried to recruit as a linebacker — had been having success at quarterback at Dartmouth, running for 202 yards in a win over Princeton a year earlier, he was intrigued.
Not ready to give up on his dream of playing quarterback, he took a hurried visit to Dartmouth and the Wisconsin kid who likes to hunt, fish and ski was suddenly leaning heavily toward playing in The Woods. But with opportunities at Iowa, South Dakota, Cornell and even an offer to play linebacker at Harvard all on the table, Howard was dealing with a lot of outside noise.
"It was all part of the journey," he said with a smile. "A lot of people didn't think I was making the right decision. But both my mom and my dad really helped me stand firm. My decision was about doing what was best for me. I wanted to play quarterback and I loved what I saw of Dartmouth."
He arrived on campus in in 2019 and ran for 141 yards and two touchdowns in the Big Green's only junior varsity game. He played in one varsity game, running for 19 yards on four carries while filling in for the injured Gerbino, ironically against Cornell.
After his sophomore season was canceled because of COVID-19, Howard spent the winter term interning in Washington, D.C., where he had to hole up in the Cannon House Office building for 12 hours during the Jan. 6 siege on the Capitol.
He returned to campus for the spring, only to rush back to Green Bay several weeks later to spend time with his mother, Mimi, who was in the late stages of a courageous battle with breast cancer. After celebrating his April 17 birthday with his mother, Howard returned to campus only to be called home within days see his mother for the final time. The support he got in those difficult days reaffirmed in Howard's mind that Dartmouth was the right place for him.
"I don't think I'd still be in college if not for Coach T and the guys here," he said. "Losing my mom, it hurt. It ripped me apart every day for a long time. Having a reason to come out here and having a reason to be around people who I know needed me as much as I needed them really was everything to me.
"Coach T has been more supportive than I could ever imagine. And Mrs. Teevens as well, has stepped right in and been like a mother to me. That's why I decided to come here. My family and I believed, and our belief paid off."
Nick Howard credits former teammates Jared Gerbino and quarterback Derek Kyler for the roles they played in his career. Gerbino showed that Dartmouth could win with a running quarterback and the ever-calm Kyler showed that with the right personalities, the two-QB system could be successful.
Sharing time with Kyler last year, Howard ended up leading Dartmouth with 787 yards and 15 touchdowns rushing, the TD total tying a school record that has stood for more than 90 years. He was chosen to the All-Ivy League First Team after helping lead the Big Green to a 9-1 record and its second Ivy title in a row.
While Howard is quick to thank Gerbino and Kyler for the role they played in his success, he knows he also has former Princeton quarterback John Lovett to thank. Almost identical in size to Howard, and like Howard, once known more for his relentless running style than his arm, Lovett twice won the Bushnell Cup as the Ivy League's top offensive player. It was only after watching Princeton win the 2016 Ivy League title with Lovett sharing time behind center that Dartmouth turned to the two-QB system.
"When he was with the Packers, I reached out to him," said Howard of the former Princeton standout, now on the Miami Dolphins injured reserve as a tight end. "He was very, very receptive. He's an awesome dude, someone I've really looked up to.
"I actually texted him before this season, in August, and he texted back and wished me good luck."
As much as he admires Lovett's bruising style, Howard came into the 2022 season determined to keep his own natural instinct to run over people in check. He joked in August his goal was not to run very defender over, but just half of them.
"Well, I tried," he said with a laugh and a shrug of his shoulders while talking about his season a few days before the Columbia game. "I definitely got beat up a bit. We're working on things to deal with the injuries.
"For me, it's just about belief. I didn't end up playing against Yale, but I was still out here practicing as much as I could. Everybody was giving me a hard time about it, but I woke up and told myself I was going to practice. Every day you've got to find a reason to go on. We're finding a reason not to feel bad about ourselves and let the season get away. We're finding a reason to believe why we're going to be Columbia."
With Columbia lining up for the potential game-winning field goal on a glorious fall afternoon that saw Howard spend most of the second half on the sideline, the decision a week ago to stick with him as the feature story for the Homecoming game looked questionable.
But if Nick Howard has taught us one thing, it's that when he sets his mind to something he's going to do it or go down trying, whether it's playing quarterback in college or, after using his Super Senior COVID year next fall, giving pro football a shot as a quarterback, H-back, fullback or whatever else.
"I mean, I'm never gonna let somebody tell me I can't do something," he said. "If something other than quarterback is my opportunity in the future, then I would most certainly not complain. I would be more than happy to assume John Lovett's kind of role and find a find a way to make it work."
None of that was on his mind in the tense final minute at Columbia after the Lions missed the potential winning field goal, giving Dartmouth a shot at pulling out the win and ending its losing streak.
With Cadwallader dinged up minutes before, the Big Green would turn the final drive over to Howard. Eighty yards from the end zone, with 70 ticks on the clock and no timeouts left, the game now rested not on Howard's legs, but on the arm other schools had questioned.
Although he had his own injury issues that Teevens said later were affecting his ability to put zip on the ball, Howard started the drive to save the Big Green season with a screen to the left that Paxton Scott took 28 yards up the field. Then he hit Q Jones for 20 yards to the right. After a penalty nullified a seven-yard connection to Scott and led to a 10-second runoff, Howard hit Zack Bair for five yards at the right sideline that stopped the clock.
With 18 seconds remaining and the ball on the Columbia 41, Howard gritted his teeth and muscled a 26-yard completion to Scott on a post before rushing down the field to spike the ball at the 15 and set Ryan Bloch up for the decisive field goal.
In just over a minute Howard had gone 5-for-5 passing (counting the completion that was disallowed because of penalty), driving his team for what would be the winning kick.
"We all believed in each other," he said. "It looked pretty grim. We had some adversity at the end of the game and things weren't looking good. But the defense, they just did what they did. They came out and played. And then the guys up front gave me a chance."
Which when you think about it is all he ever asked for.
A chance.
Writing about quarterback Nick Howard for the big Homecoming game against Harvard made perfect sense.
Ask anyone and they will tell you Howard is the beating heart of the Big Green. What figured to make his story even more compelling when the idea came up this summer is that after splitting time behind center last year, the senior from Green Bay was going to have a chance to prove this fall he wasn't just a runner. He was going to show he could win games with his arm and succeed as a full-time quarterback while leading the Big Green to a third consecutive Ivy League championship.
Congraulations to Nick Howard of @DartmouthFTBL for being the only @IvyLeague player to be named to the @FCS_STATS Preseason Watch List for the 2022 Walter Payton Award! #TheWoods #GoBigGreen https://t.co/0NbYmMK1GQ
— Dartmouth Athletics (@dartmouthsports) August 3, 2022
Five games into the season, nothing was going as planned. Dartmouth was a disappointing 1-4 and worse yet, 0-2 in the Ivy League. Howard had run the ball 24 times for 186 yards and two touchdowns in an overtime loss at Sacred Heart and 24 times for 108 yards and two more touchdowns the next week in an overtime loss to Penn, and he had paid a price for it.
Howard was so banged up that he had to be held out of a critical week-four game at Yale to recover from the pounding of the previous two weeks.
"No one could last taking that kind of punishment," said Buddy Teevens, the Robert L. Blackman Head Football Coach.
Given the promise Dylan Cadwallader demonstrated throwing the ball at Yale and the toll being the full-time starter was taking on Howard, Teevens was now speaking openly about reinstalling the two-quarterback system. The Big Green did just that the week after Yale against New Hampshire when Cadwallader was called on to throw 20 passes. Howard threw just seven, reverting mostly to his role as the running quarterback. And now even that was a struggle as injuries limited him to nine yards on six carries.
With all that as a backdrop, a decision had to be made. Needing to talk with Howard in the days leading up to the Columbia game in order to meet the deadline for a Homecoming week story, would it make sense to instead call an audible, save the story on the third captain for the final game program and feature someone else this week? Should a good kid having a hard time be given the chance to get things turned around without putting him in the awkward position of having to answer questions about a season that wasn't going as he hoped and dreamed?
Rick Bender, Dartmouth's senior associate athletic director in charge of athletics communications, made the call. He had seen the class Howard showed addressing the media after a game-ending interception at Sacred Heart. He knew how maturely Howard had responded in his junior spring when he lost his mother.
"Nick's a standup guy," Bender said. "Let's go ahead with the story."
And so a few days before the Columbia game, Howard looked his interviewer in the eye and answered every question thrown his way without blinking. That included the hard one: What has this year been like for you?
"I'm not gonna lie," he said. "It's been a tough battle, trying to try to stay confident, trying to keep belief in myself. Some things are just out of our control. If we hit that field goal against Penn, maybe that's a different game. All of the injuries. We've dealt with some adversity as a team, and I have personally.
"I've just had to keep reminding myself to remember why you play. To have fun. I love my teammates. I would rather go 0-10 with this team than go 10-0 with any other team."
* * *
All Nick Howard ever wanted was to be a quarterback. But while he threw for more than 2,000 yards, had 15 touchdown passes and ran for 636 yards and 10 more touchdowns as a senior at Green Bay's Southwest High School, most colleges saw the 6-foot-2, 225-pound quarterback who plays like a linebacker as, well, a linebacker.
As tempted as he was by a preferred walk-on offer to suit up as a linebacker for Iowa, he knew the strain out-of-state tuition would put on his family. When South Dakota offered him a scholarship to play quarterback it was too good an opportunity to refuse, but as the son of a former college football coach, Howard knew how the recruiting game was played. When he came to the conclusion the Coyotes would eventually move him to linebacker, he switched his commitment to Cornell, which also wanted him on defense. He decided if he was going to be a linebacker it might as well be at the best school that wanted him to play the position.
Just days before the deadline for early admission to Cornell, former Big Green assistant Kyle Cavanaugh touched base with Howard about his interest in playing quarterback for the Big Green. When Howard learned that Jared Gerbino '20 — another player Cornell had tried to recruit as a linebacker — had been having success at quarterback at Dartmouth, running for 202 yards in a win over Princeton a year earlier, he was intrigued.
Not ready to give up on his dream of playing quarterback, he took a hurried visit to Dartmouth and the Wisconsin kid who likes to hunt, fish and ski was suddenly leaning heavily toward playing in The Woods. But with opportunities at Iowa, South Dakota, Cornell and even an offer to play linebacker at Harvard all on the table, Howard was dealing with a lot of outside noise.
"It was all part of the journey," he said with a smile. "A lot of people didn't think I was making the right decision. But both my mom and my dad really helped me stand firm. My decision was about doing what was best for me. I wanted to play quarterback and I loved what I saw of Dartmouth."
He arrived on campus in in 2019 and ran for 141 yards and two touchdowns in the Big Green's only junior varsity game. He played in one varsity game, running for 19 yards on four carries while filling in for the injured Gerbino, ironically against Cornell.
After his sophomore season was canceled because of COVID-19, Howard spent the winter term interning in Washington, D.C., where he had to hole up in the Cannon House Office building for 12 hours during the Jan. 6 siege on the Capitol.
He returned to campus for the spring, only to rush back to Green Bay several weeks later to spend time with his mother, Mimi, who was in the late stages of a courageous battle with breast cancer. After celebrating his April 17 birthday with his mother, Howard returned to campus only to be called home within days see his mother for the final time. The support he got in those difficult days reaffirmed in Howard's mind that Dartmouth was the right place for him.
"I don't think I'd still be in college if not for Coach T and the guys here," he said. "Losing my mom, it hurt. It ripped me apart every day for a long time. Having a reason to come out here and having a reason to be around people who I know needed me as much as I needed them really was everything to me.
"Coach T has been more supportive than I could ever imagine. And Mrs. Teevens as well, has stepped right in and been like a mother to me. That's why I decided to come here. My family and I believed, and our belief paid off."
* * *
Nick Howard credits former teammates Jared Gerbino and quarterback Derek Kyler for the roles they played in his career. Gerbino showed that Dartmouth could win with a running quarterback and the ever-calm Kyler showed that with the right personalities, the two-QB system could be successful.
Sharing time with Kyler last year, Howard ended up leading Dartmouth with 787 yards and 15 touchdowns rushing, the TD total tying a school record that has stood for more than 90 years. He was chosen to the All-Ivy League First Team after helping lead the Big Green to a 9-1 record and its second Ivy title in a row.
Congratulations to Nick Howard for passing 1,000 career rushing yards on Saturday‼️#TheWoods pic.twitter.com/jc4qPguvGG
— Dartmouth Football (@DartmouthFTBL) September 25, 2022
While Howard is quick to thank Gerbino and Kyler for the role they played in his success, he knows he also has former Princeton quarterback John Lovett to thank. Almost identical in size to Howard, and like Howard, once known more for his relentless running style than his arm, Lovett twice won the Bushnell Cup as the Ivy League's top offensive player. It was only after watching Princeton win the 2016 Ivy League title with Lovett sharing time behind center that Dartmouth turned to the two-QB system.
"When he was with the Packers, I reached out to him," said Howard of the former Princeton standout, now on the Miami Dolphins injured reserve as a tight end. "He was very, very receptive. He's an awesome dude, someone I've really looked up to.
"I actually texted him before this season, in August, and he texted back and wished me good luck."
As much as he admires Lovett's bruising style, Howard came into the 2022 season determined to keep his own natural instinct to run over people in check. He joked in August his goal was not to run very defender over, but just half of them.
"Well, I tried," he said with a laugh and a shrug of his shoulders while talking about his season a few days before the Columbia game. "I definitely got beat up a bit. We're working on things to deal with the injuries.
"For me, it's just about belief. I didn't end up playing against Yale, but I was still out here practicing as much as I could. Everybody was giving me a hard time about it, but I woke up and told myself I was going to practice. Every day you've got to find a reason to go on. We're finding a reason not to feel bad about ourselves and let the season get away. We're finding a reason to believe why we're going to be Columbia."
* * *
With Columbia lining up for the potential game-winning field goal on a glorious fall afternoon that saw Howard spend most of the second half on the sideline, the decision a week ago to stick with him as the feature story for the Homecoming game looked questionable.
But if Nick Howard has taught us one thing, it's that when he sets his mind to something he's going to do it or go down trying, whether it's playing quarterback in college or, after using his Super Senior COVID year next fall, giving pro football a shot as a quarterback, H-back, fullback or whatever else.
"I mean, I'm never gonna let somebody tell me I can't do something," he said. "If something other than quarterback is my opportunity in the future, then I would most certainly not complain. I would be more than happy to assume John Lovett's kind of role and find a find a way to make it work."
None of that was on his mind in the tense final minute at Columbia after the Lions missed the potential winning field goal, giving Dartmouth a shot at pulling out the win and ending its losing streak.
With Cadwallader dinged up minutes before, the Big Green would turn the final drive over to Howard. Eighty yards from the end zone, with 70 ticks on the clock and no timeouts left, the game now rested not on Howard's legs, but on the arm other schools had questioned.
Although he had his own injury issues that Teevens said later were affecting his ability to put zip on the ball, Howard started the drive to save the Big Green season with a screen to the left that Paxton Scott took 28 yards up the field. Then he hit Q Jones for 20 yards to the right. After a penalty nullified a seven-yard connection to Scott and led to a 10-second runoff, Howard hit Zack Bair for five yards at the right sideline that stopped the clock.
With 18 seconds remaining and the ball on the Columbia 41, Howard gritted his teeth and muscled a 26-yard completion to Scott on a post before rushing down the field to spike the ball at the 15 and set Ryan Bloch up for the decisive field goal.
In just over a minute Howard had gone 5-for-5 passing (counting the completion that was disallowed because of penalty), driving his team for what would be the winning kick.
Nick Howard Postgame Reaction (Part 1) pic.twitter.com/02Dk5KJ8en
— Dartmouth Football (@DartmouthFTBL) October 23, 2022
"We all believed in each other," he said. "It looked pretty grim. We had some adversity at the end of the game and things weren't looking good. But the defense, they just did what they did. They came out and played. And then the guys up front gave me a chance."
Which when you think about it is all he ever asked for.
A chance.
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