Cornell Paper Lastest to Write About Playoff Ban

The Cornell Sun is the latest Ivy League student newspaper to give coverage to the Ivy Council's push to allow football teams to advance to the NCAA Division I-AA playoffs. If I remember correctly, stories have now appeared in the Penn, Princeton, Harvard and Cornell papers. I could be missing one, although I know it's not the Daily Dartmouth. Not yet, at least.

Here's a quote Cornell head coach Jim Knowles gave the Cornell Sun:

"I know (that with) the Ivy League coaches, when we meet, it's certainly the thing that everybody talks about. We'd love it, but I don't know if I'm overly optimistic."

While it's laudable that the Ivy Council has gotten the word out to the school newspapers, I haven't yet seen anything about the push in the regular media. (I'd have been hopping on the story if I were still at our local paper, but we were always different than the big-city newspapers. ;-)

To get the kind of media splash that will, uh, make a splash, I'd suggest those who believe the playoff ban is unfair should follow the lead set by the Dartmouth swim teams. When the college announced a few years ago that it was going to drop swimming, backers of the program got a lot of publicity out of putting the program up for sale on ebay. While that media coverage wasn't responsible for saving the program, the light it cast on what was happening certainly didn't hurt the cause.

Now, I'm not suggesting the football playoff advocates go down that road. Ebay has already been done. But I believe if those who want the ban overturned put their heads together (and pulled some strings with influential football alumni) they can find their own novel way to make the media and those who matter sit up and take notice of how unfair it is that one sport -- and one sport alone -- is not allowed to go to the postseason. Suggestions anyone?

After winning the NEC championship last fall, Stony Brook University on Long Island has announced it is going independent in Division I-AA football and is adding scholarships. SBU athletic director Jim Fiore is a former member of the Dartmouth athletic department and a good friend of the school. While Georgetown and a California school or two might be the frontrunners to be new opponents when Dartmouth finally frees itself from its scheduling straightjacket, Stony Brook might deserve a look as well. The Seawolves are playing UNH, UMass, Hofstra and Georgetown next year. Check out these pictures of their stadium, by the way.

"West Tennessee's most decorated high school quarterback/pitcher" was involved with both Dartmouth and Harvard but has decided to look elsewhere according to this story.

I've learned that Dartmouth has added one last football recruit, a quick-if-smallish defensive back. I'll see what I can dig up on him in the next several days.