Ivy Football Celebration

NOON UPDATE
Check out the Boston Globe for a look at Harvard applications for the class of 2013.

Former Dartmouth rushing leader and football coach Jake Crouthamel will be honored tonight at the fifth annual Ivy Football Association dinner at the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. Read about the dinner here. ...

Recruiting tidbits keep floating over the transom. The latest from scout.com is that Denver's Mario Conte, a defensive back at Mullen High School is getting the most "interest" from Dartmouth, Lehigh and the University of North Dakota. Conte is listed at 5-11, 190 with a 4.55 time in the 40.

The FCS title game for the 2010 season is being moved from its traditional December date to the night before the BCS national championship game. The date of the game, played in Chattanooga for the past 11 years, is being changed to allow for the expansion of the field from 16 to 20 teams in 2010 according to the Chattanoogan. And no, the Ivy League champion will not be one of the 20.

Want to improve your chances of making it into the field of 20 in a hurry? Rhode Island coach Darren Rizzi has taken a step in that direction by tapping Rutgers, where he previously served as associate head coach, for not one, but four transfers. (link) It will be interesting to see how that works out.

Speaking of recruiting, a regular reader sent along this link to a Sports Illustrated article purporting to show that BCS schools that "draw at least 50 percent of their players from within 200 miles or from within their home state stand a far better chance of winning consistently than those that did not." From the article:

The model found that a school's academic standing -- whether it's in the top 50 of the US News and World Report rankings -- provides a miniscule bump. So does the final poll ranking of the school the previous season. What didn't matter to players shocked the economists more. According to the data, the players weren't, on the whole, worried about the depth chart, how many national titles schools had won or how many players the school put in the NFL.

"Recruits tend to have short memories," said DuMond, who works for a private economics firm in Tallahassee, Fla. In general, DuMond says, the top recruits are looking for "a place that is in a BCS conference with a big stadium that is close enough that they can be seen by family and friends."

It would be interesting to see if the same holds true in the FCS.

There's a neat interactive map on the site that allows visitors to click on a state and see where BCS players come from, and go to school.

With the Dartmouth men's basketball team headed to Harvard Saturday, today's Daily Dartmouth has a column about the Ivy League race. It begins this way:

It’s a testament to the sad state of Dartmouth’s major sports teams when the most exciting news in the sports world comes from Cambridge.

Ouch.

The Daily Pennsylvanian has a story about the early decision acceptance at the school rising from an all-time low of 28 percent to 32 percent this year. A decline in applications is the cause, according to the dean of admissions. Interestingly, while the acceptance rate has gone up, it has been joined by a rise in the SAT and GPA of the students admitted.

If you check out the story there's an interactive chart that, by rolling your cursor over the names of the different Ivy schools, brings up a chart tracking the acceptance rate at the various schools over a seven-year period. Dartmouth's rate has been gradually declining for the past five years. Princeton and Harvard, of course, have ended early decision.