Una-Bashed by the Media Poll

I sat and spoke with tailback Jason Bash on campus yesterday for a freelance story I'm writing for one of the football programs this fall. The fifth-year senior truly has a remarkable story, but that's for another day. The first question I asked Dartmouth's leading rusher in 2005 was actually for the Blog. Had he seen the Ivy League preseason poll that projects another seventh-place finish for the Big Green and what did he think?

JBash was anything but upset by how the voting went. Here's what he had to say:

"We don't take much stock in it. Yeah, our coach will put it in front of us for a little motivation. But it's just some media guys and what do they know? I like it like that. I like the idea that it's just the guys on our team and our fans who believe in us. We're a close knit group that knows what we can do. We haven't shown up much in the last couple of years but we are going to change things. That's why all of us '06's decided to come back this year."

Bash, by the way, reports that he's up to 211 pounds with a goal of being at 215 when camp opens. He'd like to play between 205 and 208 pounds.

As for that crack about media guys and, "What do they know," I told him I voted in the poll and he's probably right. I think it was Groucho Marx who once said, "I wouldn't belong to a club that would have me as a member."

Former Brown wide receiver Chas "Goose" Gessner has been getting his share of ink lately. A note in this story mentions that he's one of three Ivy products on the Tampa Bay Bucs roster right now, along with Dartmouth's Jay Fiedler and Columbia's Steve Cargile.

If you follow the happenings at Dartmouth at all, you know Tubestock, the annual, unsanctioned Bacchanalia on the Connecticut River, has been outlawed and replaced by Fieldstock, a college-sanctioned event. One of the centerpieces of the day will be chariot races on the green, resurrecting a "tradition" that itself was outlawed in 1984 for safety concerns. The Daily Dartmouth has a nice history of the chariot races here and a capsule of Fieldstock here. (An aside: The legendary Tubestock was started by my old roommate when we shared a rental house on the river in Norwich. I still remember him asking what I thought of the idea of having a band play on our deck and inviting people over to float on the inlet in front of the house and listen. You might say it grew into something quite a bit bigger ;-)

The Cornell season preview will be posted on the subscription Green Alert site later this morning.