Movie Magic

From the NFL Network listings for tonight:

6 p.m. -- NFL Films Presents
Explore the depth of the NFL Films archive with unique perspectives on football's greatest heroes and personalities as well as its history, humanity and humor. Tonight's episode: Movie Magic; stories include: Reel Sports, Brian Mann, Vince Tringali.

That would be former Dartmouth quarterback Brian Mann '02, who parlayed his career with the Los Angeles Avengers of the Arena League into appearances in a number of football movies (and commercials) including the remake of The Longest Yard and Invinceable. Largely responsible for bringing Mann's story to NFL films is Greg Smith '02, who competed with Mann for the Dartmouth quarterback slot and now works for NFL Films in his hometown. (We don't get NFL Network so if you happen to see the show and want to send along a thought or two about it, feel free.) ...

The Columbia Spectator has an opinion piece spun out of last week's magazine story about the role of athletics at schools such as Columbia. This latest piece includes this:

The recruitment practiced by Columbia and other American universities leads to a great disparity in the quality of students. In 2000, the director of admissions at Dartmouth College wrote, in a letter to the President of Swarthmore College, "sadly football, and the culture that surrounds it, is antithetical to the academic mission of colleges such as ours." His opinion is unfortunate and true.

And it includes this:

Athletic recruitment has no place at a school which claims to put academic achievement first.

A subscriber who reads the Boston Globe a lot more carefully than I do found this in yesterday's edition:

NFL teams are allowed to host up to 30 out-of-town prospects at their facility leading up to the draft, and the Bears think highly enough of Harvard running back Clifton Dawson that they've allotted one of their visits for him, according to his agent, Kristen Kuliga.

The mention goes on to note of Dawson: "The Scarborough, Ontario, native, who attended Northwestern before transferring to Harvard, is the Ivy League record-holder for career rushing yards (4,841) and rushing touchdowns (60)."

How's your bracket? I mentioned some time back an NCAA Tournament pool I entered where the idea is to pick five teams you think might have a chance to make the Final Four and you earn their seed points if they make it. Most points wins. Trying a different approach this year, I took a number of longer seeds, figuring that one George Mason-type in the Final Four would have been enough. The bad news is none of my "longshots" made it to the Final Four. The worse news: In our regular family pool I nailed the Final Four perfectly and I wasn't smart enough to carry those teams over to the other pool.

And finally this: Those of you who have followed the blog since last year know that I helped coach a certain now-7th-grade catcher's Little League team to the Connecticut Valley Little League championship last spring. He's moved up to 90-foot bases this year (good luck making that throw to second) but I'm staying around to coach Little League again. Well, last Friday night we had tryouts for the minors and yours truly threw every single pitch during the tryouts. I've been throwing some with the kids for a few weeks so it wasn't my arm that took a beating. It was my back. I'd guess I threw 250 pitches, and that was no problem. Bending over time and again to pick up the balls rolled back to me was. Only this morning is my back feeling better. Ouch.