Are Scholarships A Response To Ivies?

Dave Coulson over at The Sports Network traces part of the push for scholarships at Fordham – and perhaps elsewhere in the Patriot League before long – to the Ivy League. From the column:

With the Ivy League able to offer full aid to most of its prospective student- athletes, it makes its more difficult for the Patriot League to recruit the cream of the academic-athletic crop, and it has made the scholarship issue even more acute.

I haven't seen this anywhere else, yet, but FootballScoop is reporting that Brown coach Paul (sic) Estes has received a multi-year extension. Smart move on the university's part because Phil Estes has done marvels in Providence.

A handful of readers sent along a link to a New York Times story that I never got to yesterday before zipping off to Boston. The story is about betting on Ivy League men's basketball. From the story:

(Lem) Banker and (Alan) Boston are among a small cadre of savvy gamblers who, because of a quirk in college basketball scheduling, become Ivy League scholars each Friday. As nearly every other Division I conference takes the night off, the Ivy League offers the gamblers an opportunity to capitalize on the dearth of information available on teams that represent institutions better known for patents and professors than for athletic prowess.

I've written about this before but I'll toss it out there again in case you are new. Back when I actually worked for the college, the local writer covering a Dartmouth-Cornell football game for the Associated Press got the score wrong. If I recall correctly, he missed by only one point, but that point made the difference between winning and losing for the bettors.

This was before the Internet had really gotten a foothold so the phones in the sports information office at both schools were ringing off the hook with callers asking for the correct score. I still remember an almost cartoonish voice saying something along the lines of, "Um, I'm a graduate of Dartmouth University. Can you tell me the score last the game against Cornell?" That went on for a full week. Or more.

The Dartmouth men's basketball team fell at Yale last night but even if the Big Green had won, Cornell's victory over Penn eliminated Dartmouth from the Ivy League reace.

And finally, that certain Hanover High School junior had a solid run in the 1,000 meters at the New England Indoor track championships in Boston yesterday. Fractions of a second apart, she matched her PR. Hard to believe that it can work out this way, but the last three times she's run 1,000 meters her time has been identical (apart from the fraction).

This one was fun. After a Dartmouth-bound runner took off and left the rest of the heat behind, you know who ran a very strategic race against the rest of the field, hovering in third or fourth until the next-to-last lap. She passed the last runner in front of her (except the leader) on the final curve and went on to finish second in the heat and 13th overall in New England.