Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Cornell Reports, Yale On Tap

Although Dartmouth still has another week of waiting, the Cornell football team opens practice tomorrow. The Big Red players took part in a charity softball game yesterday. Find a mention and pictures on the Cornell football website.

Yale players also will report this week. The New Haven Register has a story written out of the impending start of the Elis' camp and the chance to put last year's season-ending debacle against Harvard behind them.

Dartmouth practice doesn't begin for another nine days, which probably has some of you scratching your head and wondering if the Big Green is at a competitive disadvantage because the other schools have more practices before the Sept. 20 opening of the season. The answer is they don't, because the number of practice sessions each school can have before the opener is the same. They are just distributed differently. Dartmouth actually has a little bit of an advantage because school starts so late that the players are still all-football, all-the-time well after most of the other Ivies have begun classes.

Dartmouth's first practice coincides with the UNH Blue-White scrimmage. The Wildcats open Sept. 6 at Army.

Too bad practice hasn't started because it's football weather right now in Hanover. It's 62 degrees and overcast with the temperature not expected to rise much. Just watch, it will be 85 degrees and humid next week.

You knew it was coming. The Daily Dartmouth has the college's response to being pegged 127th in the Forbes.com college rankings. Here's the lede of the story in The D:
Dartmouth may have been hurt by a “special bias” in the college rankings that Forbes.com released last week, according to Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder, who devised the research methodology. This potential bias stems from the prevalence of internal faculty evaluations and the relatively small number of students at the College who use Ratemyprofessors.com, which is a heavily-weighted factor in the analysis. Dartmouth, the Ivy League institution with the lowest ranking, placed 127th.
The LA Times has a story about the president of Whittier College being ...
"one of 100 college leaders backing the Amethyst Initiative, launched last month to persuade lawmakers to lower the drinking age in the U.S. from 21 to 18.

Not only does the current law fail to protect young people from alcohol abuse, it creates a culture that encourages it, the group's mission statement says. Schools like Tufts, Smith, Dartmouth and Duke are among the high-profile signatories."

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