Thoughts On A New Dartmouth AD

My old editor at the local daily has a column about Dartmouth today under this headline – Wanted: An AD Who Can Win. A few excerpts from the column:

Excellence should not be reserved for the classroom. The facility expansion is all well and good, but the program is judged on the scoreboards and playing fields around the league. And right now, the Big Green is lagging behind.

And ...

Get it straight: Dartmouth is not a ski school; it is a football school.

The story suggests that, in order to draw the strongest candidates, President Jim Young Kim should make it clear that the new athletic director will be given "more power, more flexibility and more opportunity to rebuild the programs and bring Dartmouth back to Ivy League athletic supremacy."

The column adds that Kim should be "willing to hire the right, independent person. And finally: Get out of the way. Let the new AD do the job he or she was hired to do."

What's your take?

North Carolina's Mount Airy News has a story about a wide-eyed high school junior and his dad making a camp and recruiting trip to get their first look at the Ivy League. They visited Cornell, Harvard and Brown. Said the potential recruit:

“The campuses were a little more ancient-looking, I guess you could say. They kind of have a Harry Potter feel to them.”

(He should have seen Yale and Princeton.) The story ends with this quote from the young man:

“It was definitely an experience that enlightened me. I’ve never been that far up North. Everywhere we went, they asked us where we were from. And they didn’t have sweet tea. All I drank was water and Coke.”

The Yale football website has a story about the two BCS (I-A) transfers joining the Bulldog program, a quarterback from Nebraska and a lineman who walked on a UCLA. The story offers this piece of interesting triva:

Both new Elis have older brothers who played football at Harvard and were teammates for two seasons. Jeff Witt was a QB for the Crimson who graduated in 2009, while Frank Fernandez '07 was Harvard's starter at center for three seasons.

Turning away potential season-ticket holders in the FCS (I-AA)? Before you've ever played a game? That's the story at Old Dominion, which processed orders for 14,377 season tickets but had to turn down orders for 1,065 more. Find a Virginian-Pilot story here.

And finally, former Dartmouth quarterback-turned-wide receiver Matt Brzica '93 was quoted in the ledge of a Washington Post story last month regarding unsolicited genetic testing of newborns. Find the story here.