Penn Back Will Be Back

No big surprise this, but standout Penn tailback Joe Sandberg, who sat out the Quakers' loss to Villanova last week to rest a nagging hamstring, will be back and starting against Dartmouth according to the Daily Pennsylvanian. Sandberg ran for 1,042 yards and 13 touchdowns a year ago and was rewarded with a spot on the All-Ivy League first team. The Big Green bottled him up effectively last year, allowing him just 65 yards on 22 carries. Sandberg has 85 yards in 17 carries this fall, all in the first half of an 8-7 loss to Lafayette in the opener.

Penn also will have the services of a starting wide receiver benched last week for disciplinary reasons according to the DP.

The Daily Pennsylvanian Sports Blog The Buzz offers up a few more thoughts about this Penn team and the season to date. ... It also points to the LA Times Bottom Ten, which a subscriber emailed about yesterday. Penn is ranked No. 5 -- in no small part because of its seven-interception disaster against Villanova -- while Dartmouth is No. 19. With the two playing this weekend, writer Steve Harvey quips:

"No. 5 Penn and No. 19 Dartmouth face off in a must-lose game for both." ...

The Daily Dartmouth is up and running and for the first time in a long, long time I saw a Daily D writer at practice yesterday. There's a Dartmouth preview here and a Penn season preview prepared by a Daily Pennsylvanian staffer. The Daily D also has a look back at the UNH game.

A Daily Dartmouth columnist who may have heard about the glory years in Hanover at the dinner table growing up believes things are going in the right direction for the football program. Of the Big Green's recent woes, he writes:

Since I have been at Dartmouth, our football team is 5-27. That’s a .156 winning percentage, or bad enough that if you pooled all of the wins into one season, it still would not be enough to win the Ivy League. In contrast, my father, a member of the Class of 1973, saw the Big Green go 32-3-1.

Dartmouth-bound high school quarterback Connor Kempe of Florida had a trip to Harvard planned before he orally committed to Dartmouth according to this account in the Jupiter Courier.

Time to gripe. Kudos to Harvard corner Steven Williams for being named the national defensive player of the week by the College Sporting News. Williams had a terrific game with two fourth-quarter interceptions, three tackles and two pass breakups to help Harvard hold off underdog Brown. Now consider what Ian Wilson did in Dartmouth's overtime loss to heavy favorite Colgate a week before: Two interceptions, two forced fumbles and 13 tackles. National defensive player of the week? Nope. Ivy League defensive player of the week? Um, no.

A Dartmouth alum on the faculty at Rutgers laments the toll of the school's push for athletic success at a national level in a book entitled, “Confessions of a Spoilsport.” In a New York Times piece about Professor William C. Dowling '66 and the book, the writer (a journalism professor at Columbia) notes:

Dartmouth ... instilled in Dr. Dowling an appreciation for what he calls now “participatory sports” — sports without scholarships, separate dorms, team tutors, product endorsements, television contracts, reduced admissions standards, easy classes and so many other tropes of Division I-A sports.

Ironically, given the tone of the book, it is published by Penn State University Press.

Professor Dowling is none too popular among a certain segment of Rutgers sports "fans," as his website explains.

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If you are curious about the debate at Dartmouth tonight, the college has a web page dedicated to the event. Hanover, by the way, is absolutely buzzing. (Today's local newspaper had a picture of enormous collapsible duct work being installed at the Hopkins Center for auxiliary air conditioning.)

Parking is impossible so I'll be getting into town early today and milling around before practice -- all so I can find somewhere to park my '1983 '93 Expo nicknamed Vlad (in honor of a favorite baseball player who is an "old Expo.")