More On Rob Talley

The Boston Globe has a piece this morning about former Dartmouth assistant Rob Talley being hired as head football coach at Stonehill. ... Former Columbia head coach Bob Shoop, meanwhile, has landed at William & Mary as the defensive coordinator. ...

Today's Daily Dartmouth has the first of a three-part series that "examines what it takes to become an athlete in the Ivy League." Part one offers a few thoughts on the Academic Index. ... For a more exhaustive look at the AI -- although one that I must admit lost me at times -- check out The New Realities: Part II on the Lehigh Football Nation blog. The Ivy League and Dartmouth get a little play in the column. ...

The Cornell Daily Sun has an article about the possibility of an Ivy League basketball tournament and our local daily has a column today saying a tournament is the wrong way to go. Those who have read my stuff in that same paper over the years or have been regular visitors to this blog know I feel strongly the other way. I won't belabor the point here, but Ivy League men's basketball has fallen and it can't get back up. The numbers don't lie:

Ivy League Championships (Alone or Tied) Last 44 Years:
Penn 25
Princeton 21
Yale 1
Columbia 1
Brown 1
Cornell 1
Dartmouth 0
Harvard 0

Sorry, but those numbers do not reflect a healthy league. It's broken, folks, and it needs to be fixed.

Still on the subject of the Ivy League's postseason philosophy -- in this instance football -- a subscriber sent along some numbers that are revealing. Anyone who thinks sending one football team to the NCAA postseason for one game or two would extend the season too much, might want to consider this:

The first NCAA regular season men's ice hockey game:
October 6th
NCAA Finals:
April 7th
Elapsed Time:
183 days -- or exactly one day more than half a year!

Granted, Ivy League teams open three weeks later than the early birds, but that would still be 162 days if Dartmouth went the distance. From the opener at Colgate to the finale at Princeton, the Dartmouth football season this year lasted 64 days.

And finally this ... That certain Hanover High School freshman distance runner got her first recruiting letter from a college track coach earlier this week. It came from a well-known school on the West Coast that I've had the pleasure to visit in the past. Nice place.

Now we all know, or should know, a letter like that doesn't mean very much because some college coaches absolutely rifle those things out. I mean, there are 5-foot-7, 135-pound running backs who get letters from big-time programs after putting up eyepopping numbers in high school only to end up sitting the bench at a weak D-III school. Still, it was cute to see the look on her face when she showed it to me.