Welcome To The Ivy League

I watched the YouTube videos of Tom Williams' introductory press conference as the new head football coach at Yale and my ears perked up when Bill Wallace, the retired New York Times writer, had the following exchange with Williams in the video above.

Wallace: What about Buddy Teevens? A lot of names were dropped, but I didn't hear his name. You coached with him for three years at Stanford.
Williams: What about Buddy?
Wallace: Yeah.
Williams: He's the coach at Dartmouth. We'll be competing against him this fall."
Wallace: Maybe you can ask him to explain the Academic Index to you.
Williams: "I've already had that explained, so we're in good shape."

Williams, of course, was Buddy Teevens' assistant head coach at Stanford.

Williams' prepared remarks can be found in this second YouTube video while opening remarks from the presser are in another YouTube video.

There are stories galore about Yale's new hire and a sampling would include ...

• A New Haven Register column from Dave Solomon under the headline, "Coach a perfect fit for a school like Yale."

• The Register hiring story that recaps the search.

• An AP story that includes this quote from Calvin Hill, the former Yale and Dallas Cowboys standout:

“Anybody who has ever worn the Yale blue and played in the Bowl ought to be excited, especially if they are black, They picked a guy who can carry on the great tradition that started with Walter Camp, and included Carm Cozza, and they’ve gotten somebody who perhaps can start to beat Harvard, like things should be.”

• A New York Times story that isn't so much about Tom Williams as about black head coaches in the Ivy League. (It includes head and shoulders shots of all the league's black head coaches in football and basketball, including Dartmouth hoops coach Terry Dunn.)

• The Yale press release on Williams becoming the school's 33rd football coach

Williams' former boss at Stanford has been lobbying hard for a dedicated football strength coach at his current posting. Buddy Teevens doesn't disagree with those who say Dartmouth was pushed around physically last fall. Rest assured he'll take great interest in a New York Times story about the importance of strength coaches to the teams that will battle tonight for the national championship. From the story:

...(A)sk Sooners Coach Bob Stoops or Florida’s Urban Meyer to name the most valuable person in his program, and each would immediately point to his head strength and conditioning coach.

The story also includes this note:

N.C.A.A. rules do not allow position coaches to work with players in the off-season, so strength coaches become de facto head coaches.

Speaking of the national championship, writing for ESPN, Rick Reilly says the true champion is ... Utah. In his column, the always entertaining but also enlightening Reilly (he'd love that) says:

By the way, we're calling our title the "national" championship because it actually includes the whole nation­—all 119 Division I schools—unlike the BCS, which includes 66.

Reilly makes a good point. Think about it. Utah opened the season with a win at Michigan and went on to beat four ranked teams, including Alabama in the Sugar Bowl in the Tide's back yard. The Utes finished as the only undefeated team in the nation.

Critics say Utah wouldn't have gone unbeaten in the SEC or the Pac 10 and that may well be true. But the Utes don't belong to the SEC or the PAC 10. They did everything they could as members of their conference. If that's not enough what we are being told is that a team from the Mountain West or Conference USA or the MAC is essentially ineligible for the "national" championship. If that's the case, the mythical national championship really is a myth. What we are crowning tonight is the champion of the BCS.

Football Scoop is reporting a reunion of two former Dartmouth assistant coaches in the south. From the site: "Princeton University assistant Scott Sallach will be quarterbacks coach/passing game coordinator at Elon." Sallach and Elon head coach Pete Lembo were assistants under John Lyons in Hanover.

And finally, I don't watch a lot of basketball on TV, but last night's Davidson (read: Stephen Curry) at Duke game was compelling. Kudos to Davidson for battling back from way down to make it relatively interesting in the final minutes. But that's not why I mention the broadcast.

If you were watching, you saw a red Score Alert scroll across the bottom of the screen. Nothing unusual in that, at least until you saw the one of the teams in the game: Harvard. The Crimson earned the spotlight by knocking off No. 17 Boston College, 82-70. Harvard's first-ever win over a ranked team came just three days after BC knocked off previously undefeated and No. 1 North Carolina. From the Boston Globe:

In the history of the hallowed halls, the Crimson had never beaten a ranked team. Now it was as if they were beating the No. 1 team by proxy.

Dartmouth will try to do the same thing and put a five-game losing streak in the rear view mirror at the same time when it opens the Ivy League season Saturday night at Leede Arena against Harvard.