BGA Jeopardy

The answer: 50 Days
The question: How long is it until the first Dartmouth football practice?

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Long a fixture of early August, the Ivy League preseason football media day is now a thing of the past. At least for this year.

Instead of the annual lunch-and-golf gathering at Yale Golf Club, the Ivy League will conduct a teleconference early next month.

Green Alert Take: Not many people I ever spoke to actually enjoyed the media day. For the coaches, it was an interruption to their routine just as preparations were ramping up for the preseason. For the sports information contacts, it was a nailbiting deadline for getting media guides done and enough of them printed to lug to the event. And for the media it was a day that had become increasingly easy to ignore. Fewer and fewer working media representatives seemed to show up each year.

As for me, the recent format of parading from one coach to another trying to avoid asking a question that had already been asked – and would be asked again by the next questioner – was irritating. Then again, I probably had no one to blame but myself. After a few years of boring answers to boilerplate questions in a group Q&A format, I tossed a couple of hot ones out in consecutive years, including one about the ban on postseason play. I asked for each coach's opinion on the ban and whether they thought it was fair.

The silence that political football was met with was deafening. At last the coaches nominated then-Princeton coach Steve Tosches, who I believe headed up the Ivy coaches group at the time, to answer the question for the group. As I recall he did a pretty good job of trying to get his point across without offending the Ivy presidents, who ultimately are responsible for enforcing or overturning the ban. But it was awkward enough that when I ran into Tosches in the men's room after the session was over, I apologized for putting him on the spot. A good and decent man, he shrugged his shoulders and said it was OK. A year later he was gone and so was the group Q&A format.

The Consensus Draft Services lists 20 Ivy Leaguers in its 2010 NFL Draft Prospect Database. Here's the number from each school:

• Brown 6
• Penn 4
• Columbia 3
• Harvard 3
• Cornell 2
• Yale 2
• Princeton 0
• Dartmouth 0

These things are always pretty sketchy (to use a term that certain Hanover High soph loves) but how Princeton running back Jordan Culbreath could be missing from a list that long is unfathomable. That's not to say he's going to be drafted; Ivy League running backs seldom are and there's a good chance none of the players on the list will be picked. But if Culbreath isn't in the top 20 players in the Ivy League there's something wrong.

For that matter, you can also make a case that with his size and speed Dartmouth safety Peter Pidermann at least deserves consideration for the list.

Today's Daily Dartmouth has a story largely about a cutback in hours at the Alumni Gym fitness center, a result of budget constraints on the athletic department and in the college as a whole. The story also mentions work on football's Memorial Field, which would have debuted a whole new home grandstand and press box this fall if not for the economic downturn that sabotaged that project:

Maintenance work on the stands remains on its original schedule and should be completed by early September, before the start of football season, according to Matt Purcell, associate director for construction at the College Office of Planning, Design and Construction.

The project involves sealing the concrete components of the stands, as well as repairing and repainting the steel supports beneath the structure’s seating, Purcell said.

Most of the work is routine maintenance that should prolong the life of the facility for another five to seven years, he said, rather than a complete renovation.