Thursday, October 22, 2009

Ask the AD

Almost hidden – unintentionally – on the extremely busy Dartmouth home page, a new and welcomed featured of the Dartmouth web site has debuted: Ask the AD. The feature is described this way:
If you have a question for Acting Athletics Director Bob Ceplikas concerning any of the 34 varsity teams or the athletics department in general, please click on the link below and submit your question. Once a week, Ceplikas will select a question and respond right here on DartmouthSports.com. Check back every week to see if your question is selected!
Find a link to Ask the AD here. To skip directly to the form for asking a question, click here.

The feature is patterned after one at Colgate that last year included this question of Raider AD Dave Roach about the future of the football series with Dartmouth.

The official Dartmouth release for the Columbia game has been posted and it includes this nugget:
Dartmouth has yet to hold an opponent to less than 30 points this year, and Columbia averages 25.
Dartmouth's game notes can be found here.

Jake Novak's Roar Lions Roar blog suggests our local daily has provided Columbia with some good bulletin board material here.

In an earlier post in anticipation of Columbia's longest bus ride of the fall, Jake lists the distance each school has to travel for conference road games. The average distance for Dartmouth is 249 miles, second-longest among Ivy teams behind only Cornell. Yale, not surprisingly, has the shortest average trip of 152 miles.

What is interesting about the numbers, and it's something that has been noted here many times before, Dartmouth's longest road trips (Ivy and non-conference) are all bundled in even-numbered years. Here are the Ivy numbers shamelessly pilfered from the Columbia blog (with the non-league games drawn from Yahoo Directions in italics):

THIS YEAR'S DARTMOUTH ROAD TRIPS
at Harvard 126 miles
at Brown 186 miles
at Yale 189 miles
at UNH 99 miles
at Holy Cross 148 miles
_________________
Ivy League Total (round trip): 1,002 miles
Season Total (round trip): 1,496

NEXT YEAR'S DARTMOUTH ROAD TRIPS
at Columbia 262 miles
at Princeton 318 miles
at Cornell 326 miles
at Penn 364 miles
at Colgate 245 miles
____________________
Ivy League Total (round trip): 2,540 miles
Season Total (round trip: 3,030 miles

In other words, not only does Dartmouth have to play four road Ivy games next year (as opposed to three this year), but they are also the four longest road Ivy games the Big Green could play.

Green Alert Take: I've written this before, but someone from Dartmouth at one point in the past either didn't think the schedule through or didn't fight hard enough to make the schedule make sense.

A regular reader passed along a Dartmouth promotional piece about financial aid that features a few thoughts from Big Green junior co-captain Timmy McManus. Find it here.

Yale has lost receiver Gio Christodoulou and leading tackler Larry Abare for the year due to injuries. The New Haven Register has a story. ... Speaking of Yale, new Bulldogs coach Tom Williams is playing his "ones" versus his "ones" in practice a good percentage of the time. The Register's Portal 31 blog has a note about the practice that Dartmouth's Buddy Teevens has picked up on this week.

The New York Times has yet another scary story about brain damage in football players. The lede of the Times story:
Brain damage commonly associated with boxers and recently found in deceased N.F.L. players has been identified in a former college athlete who never played professionally, representing new evidence about the possible safety risks of college and perhaps high school football.
Extra Point
In Maine last week we stopped by the incredible LL Bean complex (if you are ever up there, be sure to check it out) and I found myself amazed at the selection of retro bicycles that have become so popular in the last few years. I spotted one of those balloon-tired monsters yesterday locked up next to Dartmouth's Berry Center and it looked like nothing so much as one of those much-maligned Schwinn tanks from when I was a kid. Now, I lifted one of the bikes when I was a LL Bean and it's clear they don't weigh nearly as much as they used to. But as someone who bicycled across the country two times and who actually brought a spoon instead of a spoon and fork on those trips as part of the effort to save weight, I can't imagine what it would be like trying to ride up the mountains around here on one of those retro beasts. Downhill might be fun, though!

No comments: