Say It Isn't So, Joe

This is a blog largely about Dartmouth (and Ivy League) football, so that's what usually comes at the top each day. Being Penn State proud, I'll sometimes sneak in a pertinent Nittany Lion note (like the fact that Erica Walsh, the PSU women's soccer coach and former head coach at Dartmouth is an assistant coach with the U.S. women's soccer team in Beijing) but that usually gets tagged on at the bottom, right before the, "And finally ..."

It's hard, however, not to jump right into this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story because it's illustrative of what can happen to even the best of programs - and for a long time Penn State football was just that: one of the best. The Pittsburgh paper writes in a story spawned by an ESPN show Sunday:

Penn State football received the "Outside The Lines" treatment Sunday, and it made the once-admired program looked like a renegade outfit with its revered coach seemingly out of touch with his team and its players.

That comes on the heels of a story in an April New York Times commenting on the increasingly hollow sound of "The Grand Experiment ... Paterno’s longstanding plan for success on the field without academic or disciplinary compromise."

As a Penn Stater it's hard to see, and hear, and read stories like this. Losing football games is one thing. But I can live with that. This is something much, much worse.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming ...

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The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story and chart accompanying a story headlined:

Have Money, Will Travel: the Quest for Top Athletes
Budgets soar, and so do coaches, as colleges beef up recruiting efforts

Among other things, the chart lists the top 10 spenders in what it calls Division I-AA. The top eight in spending are the eight Ivies, followed by UMass and Colgate. Here's the spending list on recruiting as compiled by the Chronicle:

1. Princeton
2. Harvard
3. Columbia
4. Dartmouth
5. Brown
6. Cornell
7. Yale
8. Penn
9. UMass
10. Colgate

A word of warning: Take the numbers not with a grain of salt but with a truckload of the stuff. Having worked similar stories when I was at the paper I found that how and what the schools report on surveys like this varies dramatically from school to school and even from year-to-year by the individual schools. When Princeton's recruiting expense are reported as having increased by 234 percent between 1997 and 2007 and Yale's by 47 percent in the same time period, it should have you scratching your head. Princeton's increase between 2002 and 2007 is reported at 51 percent while Dartmouth's is listed at 9 percent and that doesn't ring right either.

Quoting myself seems a little strange, but here you go from a Dec. 12, 2006 Green Alert blog note about costs in I-AA football:

"...(I)t's clear valid comparisons between the programs are almost impossible because of different accounting procedures. I remember trying to compare Dartmouth's available athletic budget numbers to those of other Ivy League schools when I was at the newspaper and the figures made absolutely no sense. It turned out one school would include certain figures and another school would not. When I asked Dean of the College Jim Larimore about the discrepancy, he said it wasn't comparing apples and oranges. It was, he offered in a memorable quote, like "comparing apples and hubcaps."

One thing you can take away from the Chronicles piece is that the Ivies do spend a ton of money on recruiting, that's not at all surprising given the number of sports they support, the particular niche they recruit from, and the fact that they recruit 50 states and Canada while most schools in what are referred to as I-AA recruit regionally.

The Patriot League preseason football coaches poll is out and it looks like this (first place votes in parentheses followed by total votes):
1. Fordham (9) 68
2. Holy Cross (4) 56
3. Colgate (1) 53
4. Lafayette 48
5. Lehigh 35
6. Bucknell 18
7. Georgetown 16

Holy Cross quarterback Dominic Randolph is the preseason offensive player of the league.

Holy Cross has a note about being picked second while Colgate has a note about being picked third.

By the way, there will be live football on Memorial Field tomorrow when the top graduated high school players from Vermont and New Hampshire clash in the Shrine Maple Sugar Bowl. The Dartmouth has a story.

To be accurate, that sentence should have said most of the top graduated high school players will be in the game. Local favorite Carl Cutler, a tight end from Hanover High who earned a scholarship to Syracuse, will not risk injury as he continues to prepare for the start of his college career. Cutler, incidentally, was identified on several recruiting services lists as a Dartmouth target (I can't vouch for that) before accepting an offer from the Orange.

It will be interesting to see if the crowd tomorrow is the largest of the year on Memorial Field. The Shrine game used to draw 10,000-12,000 people but it's fallen off in recent years, at least in part because Vermont isn't usually competitive. The parade down Main Street in Hanover on Saturday morning is still wildly popular.

And finally ... those two certain Hanover High School kids return home tomorrow! The junior-to-be has been away for four weeks including a hike to the bottom of Grand Canyon earlier this week. The frosh-to-be has been gone for two weeks. Look for them on the golf course by 2 ;-)