Taken By Surprise

This one really surprised me, enough so that I extended the deadline to give a few more people time to chime in.

I figured Harvard would run way with it and that Yale would finish second, but clearly Cornell, Columbia, Brown and Penn don't get the blood flowing. The Penn game used to be huge, but Dartmouth's difficulties over the past decade and the Quakers' recent slide has taken some of the spark out of the rivalry.

Old-timers talk about how special the Holy Cross series is, but that isn't reflected here. It might be because the old-timers aren't on the Internet, but I suspect it's more than that. The Colgate game doesn't appear to have any juice either, but then I'm not sure it ever did.

I wouldn't have believed it if you told me that a win over UNH would be right up there with beating Yale, but thinking about it, a win over what has become a perennial Top-10/20 team would indeed be sweet.

Very interesting stuff. Enough so that I might re-work the poll to allow voters to pick several teams.

The Columbia website has Countdown to Kickoff, ticker that is kind of fun. As I write this it's at 35 days, 4 hours, 10 minutes and 17 seconds. Well, not anymore. Now it's 9 minutes, 47 seconds. (OK, I gotta stop that.)

I actually went to the Columbia field hockey home page to see if they had a Countdown to Faceoff ticker. Nope, the football ticker carries over.

NFLdraftblitz.com has an interview with Colgate tailback Jordan Scott. He's asked about the legal difficulties that resulted in a 21-day jail term this summer and he calls it a "big mistake."

Following a legend at quarterback? Aaron Rogers, meet RJ Toman. Um, RJ who? RJ Reynolds? No, RJ Toman, the new QB at New Hampshire. There's a media day story on Dartmouth's game two opponent here that focuses on the task ahead for the new quarterback in Wildcat Country. Find another story about UNH here.

NPR has been following former defensive lineman Adam Nelson's quest for Olympic gold in the shot put. There was a story yesterday after he failed to get off a clean throw. There are links to earlier pieces about Nelson at the end of the story.

Have you seen the stories about the Little League baseball team touring Cuba? The Twin State Peregrines team is made up of kids from the Connecticut Valley South Little League I've coached in the past few years. Our team, the Green Machine, was tremendously young this year so we had only one player picked for the all-star team that made the trip, but what an experience!