Pointing Toward Colgate

Colgate's game notes for the Dartmouth opener with the Raiders has been posted here. In case you were wondering, injured Colgate tailback Nate Eachus does not appear on the depth chart.

Audio from yesterday's first weekly Ivy League teleconference has been posted on the Ivy website here. The conference runs 56 minutes and here's a tip: Skip ahead to 20:55 to hear Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens. Green Alert Take: Putting the audio on the site is a good idea; breaking it into individual audio from each coach would make it much easier for interested listeners to get the sound bites that interest them.

Although he says Princeton is his top choice at this point, a 6-foot-1, 210-pound high school senior from Tampa named John Marley also has Dartmouth on his mind. Marley, only 16, originally came from Kingston, Jamaica. Tampa Bay Online notes: "(Y)es, he's in the same family tree as legendary reggae musician Bob Marley."

While most of the focus this week is understandably on Colgate, looming in the near future is the Ivy League opener against Penn. The Daily Pennsylvanian has Five Questions about the always stingy Quakers defense. The piece is introduced this way:

Penn's No. 1 Ivy defense from a year ago lost six players with significant starting experience, including three-fourths of its secondary.

But entering the 2009 season, the unit still has loads of talent.

The New Haven Register's Portal 31 blog analyzes the Yale depth chart, pointing out that five players who started game last year are listed as backups for the opener with Georgetown. Green Alert Take: Having been on both sides of the depth chart game as someone who in another life had to drag one out of a coach, and later as a reporter who compared the depth chart to the actual starters, I wouldn't put much stock in what the charts say. While they are usually accurate to a point, there's almost always a little fiction involved as well.

Yale's game notes have been posted and they include this:

HAWAIIAN FRIDAYS Three members of the Yale coaching staff have ties to Hawaii, and Tom Williams has instituted Hawaiin Fridays in the football office. Any staffers caught without a Hawaain style shirt on a Friday on the third floor of Ray Tompkins House is subject to a one dollar fine.

Still on the subject of Yale, the Yale Daily has a story about those early morning practices in New Haven that begin with meetings at 6:30.

Former Harvard standout Matt Birk and ex-Brown receiving great Sean Morey are two of three active NFL players who pledged to donate their brains and spinal cord tissue to Boston University's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, which is involved in a study of brain injuries from sports. The co-director of the center is Chris Nowinski, a former Harvard player who went on to fame in pro wrestling before concussions forced him to retire. Find a story here.

Still on the medical front, I stumbled across an old (summer of 2003) Dartmouth Medicine story yesterday headlined Sports And Medicine. The "pullout" tells the story:

"Does prowess on the rink, the track, or the court have anything to do with proficiency in medicine? Assorted athletes with Dartmouth medical ties think there's more than an incidental connection."

Check out this quote from Dr. Kenneth DeHaven, a 1963 Dartmouth Medical School graduate, former president of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons and the captain of Bob Blackman's 1960 Dartmouth squad, for which he played center and linebacker:

"I've never seen (an applicant) yet who was a good athlete who was not a good surgeon. They've grown up being used to having their body do what their minds want them do to. And they're used to performing under pressure. Both qualities are crucial in medicine. I realized that when the pressure's really on, I can make that all-out effort."

The article ought to be photocopied and posted on a bulletin board in every admissions office in the Ivy League.

Extra Point
The cost for attending a top college these days can easily top $50,000 annually and to read the headlines, the economic climate has made the job market a challenge even for graduates of the nation's finest schools. By way of contrast, we had someone in to fix our refrigerator a couple of weeks ago and while we were talking he told me he's completely overloaded with work and others he knows who can repair appliances are as well. A couple of days ago, we brought a balky vacuum cleaner in for repair and, you guessed it, the fellow who ran the place pointed around his shop and said it would be a month until he could even look at it. So go out and get that degree, but if you want to make sure you always have a job, learn to fix things.