Columbia Previews Start

Dartmouth's official game preview for Columbia is available here. From those notes, a reminder:

The game will be televised nationally by the VERSUS network with Rich Ackerman providing the play-by-play and former Dallas Cowboy Dale Hellestrae giving analysis.

Find a PDF of the Big Green's full game notes here. ... The Ivy League's preview of the week's action can be found here.

Arguably Columbia's best player a year ago was wide receiver Austin Knowlin. The Columbia Spectator writes about the 5-10, 190 junior who had 74 catches for 988 yards and 10 TDs last year but has just 16 catches for 205 yards and two scores at the midway point of this season.

There will be a Toys for Tots collection at Columbia Saturday There's a note here.

It's pretty much unanimous at this point. Those who do the rankings of FCS teams now have Columbia seventh in the Ivy League and Dartmouth eighth. Given relative scores that's understandable. Here's the current GPI (the Gridiron Power Index is a synthesization of the various polls and rankings):

20 (t) Harvard
51 Brown
55 Penn
58 Yale
62 (t) Cornell
79 Princeton
98 Columbia
103 Dartmouth

Dartmouth defensive lineman Max Copello offers a recap of the season (up to the loss to Yale) in his Dartmouth Review column.

There are former Dartmouth assistants all over the place and with Maryland's 26-0 win over Wake Forest I stumbled across another. Kevin Lempa, who was in Hanover from 1991-96 before moving on to the San Diego Chargers, Hawaii and Boston College, now coaches for the Terps. Find his bio here. ...

Speaking of former coaches, John Lyons is having another successful season at nearby Kimball Union Academy. After leading the Wildcats to an undefeated record and the NEPSAC Austin Bowl championship a year ago, the former Dartmouth head man has KUA at 5-0 this fall. The Wildcats now have won 14 consecutive games and are 20-2 over the past three years. To see a video of some of Lyons' international players – he's clearly used his experience in NFL Europe to his advantage – talking about their experience at KUA, click here.

Profiles of players from other Ivy schools show up in school newspapers and other outlets all the time. Some are worth spending a little time with, others ... not so much. The Yale Daily News has a good story about the Abare brothers, Bobby and Larry, who have been wreaking havoc on opposing offenses ever since arriving in New Haven. Linebacker Bobby Abare, you'll remember, stuffed Dartmouth's momentum a couple of weeks ago by making an interception in the end zone to stop the Big Green's opening drive. Last week he scored his second touchdown of the year on an 86-yard fumble return. Yale coach Jack Siedlecki:

“We had high expectations when we recruited them. Their high school (Acton-Boxboro High) team won 50 games in a row, won four Massachusetts Super Bowls, and they both started every game since their freshman year (in high school).”

I don't know about you, but I miss Rick Reilly in the back of Sports Illustrated. He's now writing every other week for ESPN and his columns can be found on espn.com. When I saw he'd written about the DII football player who had his pinkie amputated so he could continue to play, I almost didn't read the story. Gotta admit, I'm about pinkied-out on that one. But it was Reilly and so I read it. Not surprisingly, he tossed out something I hadn't heard before. From the column:

"What's off-the-charts unbelievable is Trevor's head coach, Joe Ramunno, did the same thing. He slashed his left pinkie in a high-school shop class 29 years ago and insisted they cut if off rather than miss his senior season. "It didn't occur to me until afterward," Trevor says. "My coach and I had the same thing happen!"

And finally, we've been having some wet snow up on the mountain this morning. The kids were psyched. Fortunately, the weather is supposed to be better this weekend when that certain Hanover High junior will be bidding for her first-ever state championship as a member of New Hampshire's top-ranked cross country team. Unfortunately, dear old dad will be on the way to Columbia when the four-time defending state champions try to add to that legacy. ...

That certain Hanover freshman, by the way, had one carry from the 4-yard line in the junior varsity's eight-point loss Monday afternoon. He got to the 2 before he was crushed and still had a headache that night. (He was fine the next morning.) It's not easy being a "just-under" 5-foot, 115-pound fullback when the other jayvee team has a 300-pounder in the middle of the line. Yikes!