Sports Network, Globe Expect UNH Offensive Explosion

UPDATE: Missed this the first time around. The Daily Dartmouth writes about the Colgate game.

Matt Dougherty, the I-AA guru for The Sports Network, predicts a 49-10 UNH victory over Dartmouth Saturday on Memorial Field. Scroll almost to the bottom of this story for his take on the game. ... The Boston Globe is no kinder to the Big Green, writing: "UNH has averaged 41.4 points per game in the teams' last five meetings, and that figure could go up. ..."

A Minnesota high school quarterback from the same school that produced Heisman winner Chris Wienke and several other top quarterbacks, tells this web site that Dartmouth is one of the schools that has shown interest in him.

A rambling Princetonian story about Division I-AA includes this nugget about the Ivy playoff ban hidden deep inside. The speaker is Princeton Associate Athletic Director Erin McDermott:

"It's a presidential decision that football can't participate in the postseason playoff, even though all of our other NCAA-sponsored sports are allowed to. There are two main issues — concern over missed class time and tradition. Football has the largest traveling squad, so more players would miss class time. Also, there's the tradition of the Ivy League Champion. The season culminates in an Ivy League Champion, it's a tradition."

McDermott adds:

"The issue has sparked more discussion among athletic directors, the presidents, and so forth. There's a possibility for change, but I don't see it happening."

Green Alert Take: McDermott must not have gotten the memo saying it's best not to try to explain the unexplainable. (There was no memo, at least not one that I've heard of, but you get the idea.) That said, at least she had the courage to address the issue.

Jumping on a train Princeton started, Columbia is replacing loans with grants for students from families making less than $50,000 a year as explained in this New York Times story.

You had to know the FieldTurf pr machine was loving it when Harvard chose to install the stuff. Here's a press release celebrating the marriage of the old and the new at Harvard Stadium.

A subscriber tipped me off to this NYT story about lightweight (oops, I mean Sprint) football for players 172 pounds and less (with at least 5 percent body fat). One of the beauties of the sport is that the linemen and the backs can be the same size and speed. In fact, the linemen might be faster. Here's an outtake from the story:

Army coach (Gene) McIntyre described a game against Navy several years ago in which a safety was disrupting his team’s option attack. Army was struggling to account for the safety until McIntyre came up with a solution that would work only in sprint football: He used his center, who could run the 40-yard dash in 4.6 seconds.

“He was able to catch the free safety coming over the top,” McIntyre said with a laugh. “You couldn’t do something like that in any other scheme.”

For more information, check out the league web site.

Looking ahead a week to the Ivy League opener, did you realize the rookie Penn quarterback hit the first 11 passes of his career? The Daily Pennsylvanian included that tidbit in its notes.