Happy New Year!

You had to know it was coming in someone's "Year End" story. It turned out to be in the Manchester Union Leader, which wrote that, "New Hampshire's 2008 year in sports had no shortage of great athletes, stories and milestones. There also were a few letdowns along the way:

-- PERFECTLY IMPERFECT: The Dartmouth football team went 0-10, suffering its first winless season in 125 years. The Big Green's losing streak extended to 12 games, including a 21-13 loss to Columbia on national TV.

The College Sporting News has named its Fabulous Fifty Division I FCS All-American team and there are several Ivy Leaguers, a few other players Dartmouth competed against and a "one that got away" name on the list.

Chosen to the first team offense were Colgate tackle Nick Hennessey and New Hampshire tight end Scott Sicko.

Named to the first defense was Yale linebacker Bobby Abare.

One of five players listed in the Freshman of the Year category was Colgate tailback Nate Eachus.

Chosen positional honorable mention were Harvard offensive lineman James Williams, Penn defensive back Chris Wynn and the New Hampshire quartet of wide receiver Mike Boyle, linebacker Matt Parent and defensive backs Dino Vasso and John Clements.

Also chosen positional honorable mention was the aforementioned one that got away – Maine fullback Jared Turcotte, the 6-2, 232 redshirt freshman who had made no secret of his hopes to come to Dartmouth before ending up at Maine. All he did in his first year of college football was become one of just two freshmen to make the All-CAA first team.

And finally, a regular reader sent along a link to a thought-provoking story in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that begins this way:

Football and men’s basketball players on the nation’s big-time college teams averaged hundreds of points lower on their SATs than their classmates, and some of the gaps are so large they call into question the lengths to which schools will go to win.

The biggest gap between football players and students as a whole occurred at the University of Florida, where players scored 346 points lower than the school’s overall student body. That’s larger than the difference in scores between typical students at the University of Georgia and Harvard University.

Check out this quote from the story:

“If you’re going to mount a competitive program in Division I-A, and our institution is committed to do that, some flexibility in admissions of athletes is going to take place,” said Tom Lifka, chairman of the committee that handles athlete admissions at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Every institution I know in the country operates in the same way. It may or may not be a good thing, but that’s the way it is.”

Yikes.

And this:

It’s true not just in big-time college sports but even in the Ivy League. Football players in the Ivies’ 1995 freshman class scored 144 points lower on average than other Ivy League men, according to (former Princeton University President Bill) Bowen’s book “Reclaiming the Game.”