More On the Value of Sports

The NCAA has made it official. The FCS championship game will be leaving Chattanooga, its home for the last 13 years. Instead the contest will be staged in Frisco, Texas for the next three years. The announcement was made by former Princeton football standout Damani Leech, NCAA director of baseball and football.

The change of venue means absolutely nothing to the Ivy League of course.

As has been repeated here many times, while the Ivy League football champion would be a longshot to make it to the championship game, the Ivy presidents have told the student-athletes playing the sport not to even dream of going to Chattanooga or Frisco. (Football is the only Ivy sport not allowed to go to the postseason.)

Perhaps the Ivy presidents would do well to read the comments of former Dartmouth basketball standout Gail Koziara Boudreau as quoted in yesterday's blog.

Or maybe they should read the comments of former Dartmouth government professor Alan Stam that are posted today on Dartblog. A few excerpts from Stam's column:

To accomplish extraordinary things in life, very often one must work harder than one could ever imagine, and do so in cooperation and absolute trust with other like-minded people. That sense of shared mission, sacrifice and achievement simply cannot be gained from reading about it in a book or talking about it in some all-night bull session.

And ...

I honestly do not see any difference in the relative value of a discussion dissecting the views of Hegel or Foucault versus a conversation analyzing the most efficient rowing stroke, although the results of the latter will be subject to an empirical test on Saturday morning while the former will simply vanish into the ether at dawn’s first light.

And ...

The undergraduate poet, as well as the athlete, will wake up one day and realize he or she must go to work in the real world. Only a minuscule proportion go on to actually make their living writing poetry or philosophizing. The question is which way of spending time in college better prepares our students for their future roles in our community? Through the shared sacrifice and exultation found in organized sports and competition, or in the pedantic and nitpicking conversations of collegiate sophists?

Maybe, just maybe, the Ivy presidents will some day realize that the challenge of going to the postseason would actually be good for the student-athletes who play football.

Professor Stam, by the way, left Dartmouth for the University of Michigan. Find more information about him here.

From FootballScoop regarding one of the two Dartmouth coaches let go this winter:

FIU: We hear Cedric Calhoun is a strong candidate to accept the defensive line job at FIU.

ESPN.com has a story about the proposed red turf that is expected to be installed at Eastern Washington University. The story begins this way:

The nicknames are already flying and Eastern Washington University hasn't even begun installing its new artificial turf.

The Slaughterhouse. The Blood Rug. The Bordello Bowl.

If you were among the hearty 343 souls who sat through last night's 55-45 loss to Yale in men's basketball, I feel your pain. I mean that. I was there as well, watching Dartmouth score 16 first-half points. Last Friday night Dartmouth scored 17 points in the first half against Columbia, although at least in that game it was able to pull out a 48-44 win.

The basketball-u.com folks, who I do some work for, wrote about Dartmouth before yesterday's game:

The more dubious distinction that seems all but a foregone conclusion is that Dartmouth will likely finish the season as the worst Ivy offensive team in Pomeroy’s seven-year history, eclipsing the 2004 edition of the Big Green by nearly four points per 100 possessions.

Dartmouth shot 25 percent from the field against Yale in a sloppy game that saw the teams combine for 40 turnovers and 16 assists. The final home game is tonight against Brown.