Game Day

The forecast in Providence has improved ... somewhat. While it was raining this morning, it is expected to be cloudy and 48 degrees at gametime with a chance of rain. Interesting how perceptions change depending on whether you have real grass or FieldTurf. In Hanover these days, if it's raining heavily in the morning but is supposed to stop by game time, you don't think twice about it. The field will be perfect. But at Brown, where they still have the real stuff, you are glad the forecast for rain has changed but worry about the sloppiness of the field. Even without a drop of rain during the game it could be a mess. ...

The Providence Journal has a capsule look at Dartmouth-Brown here. ... From Jake Novak's Roar Lions Roar blog:

Brown over Dartmouth
No disrespect here for an improved Big Green, but I think the Brown passing game will have a field day. Dartmouth will keep it close. Brown by 4.

There's an interesting and timely column in the New Haven Register about the Ivy League's ban on postseason play in football and football alone. It's timely because every 3-4 years there's a team that is tremendously worthy of showing just how good it is and this is one of those years. Yale still has to get by Princeton and then Harvard, but if the Bulldogs do that and run the table it will be a crying shame that we never find out quite how good they are. A few thoughts from the column:

From Princeton coach Roger Hughes, the former Dartmouth assistant:

"I know our colleagues at Yale and Harvard would rather have the only game ... only their teams as the final game of the season because for them, that's more of a culminating thing than it is for the rest of us. So I'm not sure they share the rest of the league's (desire) to go to the playoffs."

Hughes has made this next argument to me on several occasions:

"Clearly our league is very conditioned on making sure that football stays within the university mission. But sometimes tradition needs to be looked at. I think all these schools, if we only adhered to tradition, there'd be no women; there would be very few minorities at the schools."

The writer of the column makes the following suggestion, with the idea of perhaps tapping Reggie Williams' connections to see that the game is played at Disney World:

What if the Ivy League and a sister league such as the Patriot League struck up a five-year test balloon in which the league champions met every year in a bowl game. They could whisk up a major corporate sponsor in the time it takes to burn toast.

Two thoughts on that. First, playing such a game in Orlando would be a recipe for disaster. I believe it would be the rare postseason contest that would be much, much better attended in the Northeast than in Florida. And second, just because the Ivy League is unfair to its football teams doesn't mean the Patriot League needs to be. Given that the Patriot League has quietly started to talk about possible scholarship help for football, it would mark a complete about-face for the league to abandon the playoffs.

You can bet that there are people with long memories in the PL whose answer to the Ivy League if the idea were formally presented, would be, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

Finally, the column includes this:

(Yale athletic director Tom) Beckett said he's heard testimony from one school that in fact went to the Division I-AA championship game and said it would rather have played a bowl game than going through the four-week process.

The writer tags on this sentence: "Beckett wouldn't say which school, but all signs point to Colgate in 2003."

They are going to absolutely love that in Hamilton.

All I would ask those who think a four-week run is too much is this: How many times has a Patriot League team gone that deep? Once. How many other teams from the Northeast have made four-week runs to the championship game in the past quarter century? One. UMass, last year. That argument is a red herring at best.