Friday, September 22, 2006

Ball Taking Aim At Rice's Record

University of New Hampshire receiver David Ball said he almost gave up football after playing the self-proclaimed worst game of his gridiron career for the Vermont team in the Shrine Maple Sugar Bowl against New Hampshire at Dartmouth College. In a Burlington Free Press story, he says: ""It would be nice to go back to that venue where I almost stopped playing football and break one of the biggest records in the game." That record would be the 50 career touchdown passes caught by Jerry Rice. Ball needs four more to break the mark. Uh oh.

Is the UNH-Dartmouth series headed for the scrap heap or will it continue after the current contract expires? As New Hampshire's Seacoast Online says, it depends on who you ask.

Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens:
"I would love to branch out, to be honest with you, and I assume UNH would as well. I'd guess their experience at Northwestern was good for the players, the coaches and financially."
UNH coach Sean McDonnell:
"I think it's a rivalry that's got to be played. n the tradition of Villanova playing Penn, Rhode Island playing Brown, New Hampshire playing Dartmouth, Harvard playing Northeastern the past couple years "¦ I think these are games that the Ivy League and the Atlantic 10 should play."
Cornell grad Kevin Booth could be in the starting lineup for the Oakland Raiders this weekend as a rookie offensive lineman according to this story.

The famed Fifth-Down Game between Cornell and Dartmouth has been mentioned in quite a few stories since the Oklahoma fiasco last week. A writer for the Lawrence Journal-World in Kansas thinks Oregon should offer to forfeit the game but, does he think it will happen? He writes: "Get real, but don’t laugh. Such gallantry has occurred in college football at least once." Then he goes on to tell the oft-repeated story of top-ranked Cornell forfeiting a win over Dartmouth when it was discovered the Big Red scored the winning points on a fifth down in the 1940 game.

The citizenship ceremony in Concord this morning was tremendously moving. There were 98 people from 39 countries (but just one from Denmark ;-) sworn in as citizens. More than a few eyes teared up during the playing of a video presentation of Lee Greenwood's, I'm Proud to be an American.

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