Friday, December 15, 2006

Don't Miss This Story

There's a compelling, Sports Illustrated-quality story in the Boston Globe today about UMass coach Don Brown. Don't miss this one. Seriously. It's worth reading just for the hilarious story about the late-night Monopoly game. From the Globe:
(Brown's wife) tells the story, for instance, about his first year coaching at Dartmouth in 1982. He was a poorly paid graduate assistant. She was a full-time nurse and mother of three children under 6 years old. At night, Debe would collapse on the bed, and cover her ears in the pillow, trying to drown out the staccato rhythm from downstairs.
That would be the sound of her husband studying the minutiae of safety blitzes on big reels of film. Debe had put up new wallpaper; Don had nailed a sheet of paper to it for a screen. "I would hear that film, 'click-click-click,' 'til all hours of the night," she remembers with a laugh.
The Globe's Bob Ryan talks with Mark Whipple, the onetime Brown coach who led UMass to the 1998 national championship and is now quarterbacks coach with the Pittsburgh Steelers (and a frontrunner to take over at Boston College). Brown tells Ryan:
"When I was at Brown, I was very upset the Ivies wouldn't allow the league champion to go to the playoffs. That's one reason I went to UMass."
New Hampshire's Ricky Santos has won the Payton Award as the offensive player of the year in what used to be called I-AA. The Manchester Union Leader has a story. There's another one here.

Dartmouth gets a mention for giving recruiting attention to a 6-foot-5, 215-pound quarterback in Florida in this story.

I staffed Dartmouth men's basketball last night for the Associated Press and Basketball-U and came away impressed. After an 0-6 start, the Big Green has won two in a row, this latest a 71-50 win over a Stony Brook team that already has a victory over Penn State of the Big 10 this year. If Dartmouth can get everyone healthy -- two potential starters and a third player who had been a starter are out indefinitely -- this team will definitely surprise some people. By the way, the Big Green has a 7-foot-1 center from Seton Hall Prep coming to Hanover next fall according to Basketball-U.

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