Pro Prospects?

Six players Dartmouth faced last fall – including three Ivy Leaguers – are among one commentator's Top 100 FCS draft prospects. While none are projected as draft picks, the first three fall into the priority free agent category. From the Top 100 list:

30. Pat Simonds, Colgate WR
39. Scott Sicko, UNH TE
41. James Williams, Harvard OG
43. David Howard, Brown DT
61. Dominic Randolph, Holy Cross QB
70. Jake Lewko, Penn LB

Following up on Saturday's post about UNH athletic funding, Dartmouth's once-and-future (?) in-state opponent needs to replace a 1930's era football "stadium" built with money from the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal according to this Concord Monitor story. UNH Athletic Director Marty Scarano is quoted as saying ...

... his priority among facilities projects is building a 12,000-seat football stadium, where the university could host night games and high school state championships. He said UNH has the fan base to justify the enlargement: More than 14,850 people attended the 2009 homecoming football game, according to the report.

Money is always tight at UNH, but these days it is tight everywhere, even at The Ohio State University. TOSU, which – brace yourselves Ivy League supporters – has greatest number of varsity teams of any school in the land, isn't about to drop any of them. But the solution to budget problems in Buckeyeville probably wouldn't play in the Ivies ;-) A few excerpts from a story in the Columbus Dispatch:

Ohio State offers 36 varsity sports, the most in the nation. All except football and men's basketball lose money.

But athletics director Gene Smith said getting rid of any sports program was unpalatable.

The board of trustees will vote today on a proposal to increase the cost of football tickets by $7 and basketball tickets by $1 to make up for a shortfall in revenue.

Smith said the price increase would generate about $8 million, which would put finances on solid footing in the short term.

The always interesting TigerBlog out of Princeton discusses balancing enthusiasm with propriety in cheering at athletic events. The piece begins this way:

A few years back, Dartmouth had a track star named Mustafa Abdur-Rahim, who was an All-America decathlete. TigerBlog is pretty sure he had a twin brother who was on the track team as well.

Anyway, these two guys were at every Princeton-at-Dartmouth men's basketball game during their four years, and, TB assumes, pretty much every Dartmouth game they could get to.

The student section at Dartmouth was (is?) right behind where TB would set up for radio, and these two were relentless in how they were on the Princeton guys during the game. They were also at a distance of about two feet from TB, and almost everything they would yell would get picked up by the radio.

At the end of the fourth year of this, TB turned around as the final buzzer sounded and told Abdur-Rahim that he admired what a great fan he was and how no matter what he yelled, he never crossed the line into anything inappropriate. Abdur-Rahim gave TigerBlog a big hug and said "it's all good."

TigerBlog is right. Mustafa Abdur-Rahim and twin brother Ahmad were about as loud and entertaining a tandem as you could find at Dartmouth basketball games and they never went over the line. They toed it, for sure, but never crossed it.

(I remember one win against Army when they started chanting "Start up the bus," and I turned to Moose and whispered, "Start up the tanks." He broke into a huge grin and went with it.)

Moose, by the way, competed in the Olympic Trials in the summer of 2008 and was the subject of this Boston Globe story. I used to daydream about what a matched set of cornerbacks the blazing fast and athletic twins would have made.