Of Polls And Rankings

On the College Sporting News site The Gridiron Power Index is described as, "the hybrid ranking for FCS and top index indicator of at-large playoff selection." Wonder what last week's win did for Dartmouth in the index, which uses 11 different rankings and polls to create one master ranking?

The Big Green went from No. 79 to No. 71.

Rankings of Ivy teams (along with Dartmouth's 2007 opponents):
7-New Hampshire
10-Yale
19-Holy Cross
29-Harvard
47-Cornell
48-Colgate
70-Penn
71-Dartmouth
75-Brown
88-Princeton
110-Columbia
(Note: 122 teams are ranked with Northern Iowa No. 1 and LaSalle No. 122.)

Here's the neighborhood Dartmouth resides in this week:
66T-Northwestern St
66T-SE Louisiana
68-Lafayette
69-Weber St
70-Penn
71-Dartmouth
72-Tennessee St
73T-Idaho St
73T-Sacramento St
75-Brown
76 -Alabama St

Former Dartmouth sports information director Jack DeGange's informative football program story on College Football Hall of Famer Reggie Williams '76 can be found here.

A columnist from The Dartmouth laments the tailgating situation around Memorial Field. He makes some good points. Of course, Penn Stater that I am I got a laugh out of this: "For a 12:30 p.m. football game, you reasonably need to start tailgating around 11 a.m. (or at least the people grilling do) ..." In Happy Valley the only folks who start tailgating around 11 a.m., are the ones who start on Friday. Or Thursday.

The good news for the Dartmouth football team at Harvard Saturday is it won't be facing the quarterback who won the starting job coming out of the Crimson's preseason camp. The bad news is the guy who replaced him when he got hurt is pretty good. As the Crimson wrote about Chris Pizzotti, "The senior threw for 365 yards and two touchdowns in a 27-10 victory, a performance that vaulted him into the Crimson record books."

A Yale Daily writer was intrigued by the estimated 30,000 pieces of toast (and bagels) tossed from the Franklin Field stands during Penn's Homecoming game against the Yalies Saturday.

Speaking of Yale, the Bulldogs beat the Quakers down in Philly, but they got battered and spent in the process according to this story.

The Columbia Spectator has a story about the fund raising push for the school's athletic department. The story says, "Two weeks ago, the department unveiled its groundbreaking initiative toward providing a solution for the University’s storied athletic futility." (You have to know they loved that "storied athletic futility part," in the athletic offices ;-) ... An editorial in the Spectator ruminates about the initiative.

With the Tennessee Titans fullback out for a month or so with a broken forearm, this story suggests Casey Cramer '04 is being considered as one of his fill-ins.

And finally, having a big league team nearby can have nice dividends. The Penn baseball stadium will be the first north of the Mason-Dixon Line to have Patriot Bermudagrass, a variation of bermudagrass that grows only in the south, according to the Daily Pennsylvanian. The Philadelphia Phillies are considering going to the Patriot variety and are helping install it at Penn to see how it works for baseball. The story says northern college and pro football teams (including the Philadelphia Eagles) already play on the stuff.