A Nor'easter By Any Other Name

All-Ivy safety Ian Wilson runs with the ball against Harvard in the Ivy League Tournament. Dartmouth lost to the Crimson in overtime in the finals. (Anthony Gargiulo photograph)

Today is slated to be the first day of spring practice and the weather couldn't be much worse. The wind has been absolutely howling since yesterday afternoon, enough so that we have an enormous tree down in our backyard. No traffic has come down our dirt road (not that we get much anyway) but it has me thinking the road might be blocked by blowdowns. If so, we would likely be one of the last places in Hanover that the public works people get to because there just aren't many of us out here on the side of Moose Mountain. We got about eight more inches of snow up here although I suspect they got less down in the valley. It's half rain, half snow right now.

I just talked to the Dartmouth football office and they didn't have any word yet on whether today's first session of spring ball will take place. If it does, and if I can get off the mountain, check back tonight for a story.

Penn had its spring game yesterday, taking the (wet) wraps off its new no-huddle offense. Check out what the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Penn sports information office had to say. Here's what coach Al Bagnoli said: "If we have to play any games in the rain this year we’ll be all set." No kidding.

For a sense of how spring ball is going at Week 2 opponent UNH, check out the Manchester Union Leader story here.

Brown sports information has a brief note about prodigal son James Perry returning as quarterbacks coach while Cornell sports info reports about three new assistants in Ithaca.

Jay Fiedler's name has come up in Cleveland, but not in a good way. Check out this story. Here's an excerpt: "...(H)elp almost has to come from the draft because to sign any of the free agent quarterbacks is to go garbage picking in a heap that includes Aaron Brooks, Jay Fiedler, Tim Rattay, Anthony Wright, Rob Johnson and Rohan Davey." A sentence like that is yet another reminder of why I chose to stay at a small-town paper covering Ivy League football for as long as I did.

In a story about the hiring of Tommy Amaker as Harvard's new basketball coach, the Crimsonquotes Athletic Director Robert Scalise: “One of the people who was mentioned was Tommy Amaker. I told the team, ‘If you would like me to, I would be happy to call Tommy.' " Maybe if the team knew it would be that easy they would have mentioned Coach K's name instead.

(Yikes: As I was typing the wind just now the blew so hard for about 20 seconds that I could feel our entire house shake. Holy #$&@! I saw a handful of shingles fly by. We just had an estimate for replacing the roof and I'm hoping it didn't come in too high :-( Oh man. There's another explosion of wind. I think I'm going to head downstairs in case a tree comes down onto the house. This is a little scary.)

Someone found the blog and Googled it this way. Go ahead. Click that link and check out what comes up. The Internet really is amazing.

Finally, thanks to Anthony Gargiulo for sharing the terrific photo at the top of today's blog. Anthony sent along some others he shot as well and I'll toss one or two more up on the blog in days to come.