Bits and Pieces

Spring football has kicked off at Penn. The Quakers' spring prospectus can be found here and a few of the numbers suggest the Ivy League champions should be a factor in the race again next fall. The prospectus reminds us that Penn will have:

• 11 players returning with All-Ivy of some sort on their resumes (six offense, four defense, one special teams)
• 14 starters back (eight on offense, six on defense and three on special teams)
• 34 seniors next fall (a high during Coach Al Bagnoli's 19 years at the helm)

In anticipation of the start of practice Bagnoli is interviewed on this all-access video and the Quakers are going to have Twitter reports this spring including, they say, some from assistant coaches on the field. The video reports that a couple of tailbacks might be two-way players, at least during the spring, as they get a look at corner (where Penn is graduating two All-Ivy types).

(An aside: You know you are going to have a tough time watching a 15-minute video when a pop-up during a commercial tells you the regular program is going to begin in 20 seconds and five minutes later you are still waiting because of your usual Internet issues. The Penn video took about 30 minutes to load the first 6:18, which I watched. Then it flat-out stopped loading.)

Penn's spring game is slated to be played on April 10, right about the time Dartmouth is taking the field for the start of spring ball.

Columbia receiver Austin Knowlin and quarterback Milli Olawale took part in the Fordham pro day, which drew a decent crowd because of the presence of 6-foot-5 Fordham quarterback John Skelton, considered a potential diamond-in-the-rough. The Spectator has all the numbers posted by the two Lions, including a quick 4.45 in the 40 by Knowlin.

The Brown Daily had a story yesterday about the $46.6 million building project that will see the school's new fitness and aquatics center open in January 2012. From the story: "Originally intended to be two separate buildings, the Katherine Moran Coleman Aquatics Center and the Jonathan Nelson ’77 Fitness Center were combined to cut costs ... " Construction is slated to begin in June.

The story reports that:

"The new strength and conditioning area, which will include mostly free weights and weight-lifting platforms, will be located in the fitness center, east of the pool. With about 12,000 square feet exclusively for varsity athletes, the center will triple the number of teams it can accommodate at once. Team conditioning will now occur mainly between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. ..."

Although Brown has combined the buildings, that's a serious project. To put it in perspective, Dartmouth's Floren Varsity House is listed as having a "10,000 square foot intercollegiate strength training facility."

In a story about Vermont standout Marqus Blakely (the only player in the nation to be leading his team in scoring, rebounding, assists, steals and blocks) a Newark Star-Ledger reporter brings up the name of former Dartmouth football player Mark Akey '81, a mutual friend of the reporter and UVM hoops coach Mike Lonergan. The story notes that Akey, "has owned a bar in downtown Burlington for well over 25 years."

That sent me scrambling to Google where I found a link to Ake's Place. (If you stop by, tell him Big Green Alert sent you ;-) Mark also owns Ake's Den in Waitsfield, reviewed here.

Saw a note about Cornell opening its baseball season in Ithaca and that led me to check the Big Red schedule because it seemed optimistic to be playing at home in the middle of March. Sure enough, the note was correct. What caught my eye on the schedule, beyond the early date, was the April 3 doubleheader against Dartmouth University. I can understand that happening if the Big Green were playing Cornell College out in Iowa, but yikes. ...

The Cornell Sun continues to follow the story of suicides out in Ithaca and writes:

Questioned by national media outlets this week, the University has released more details about the other student deaths this academic year. Besides the two suspected cases of suicide last week, medical examiners have determined that four other enrolled students died by suicide this year, according to Deputy University Spokesperson Simeon Moss ’73.

Also from the story:

There were no suicides recorded between 2006 and 2008, which puts the University under the national rate of 1.5 per 20,000 students per year ...

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A poster on a message board referring to my Big Green Alert blog rant about why I believe the Ivy League should have a postseason basketball tournament suggested Dartmouth's lack of success was behind my feeling. Here's the response I worked up:

Please give me more credit than that. My support of a tournament has absolutely nothing to do with Dartmouth getting "a sniff."

Although I like the Patriot League, I didn't have a rooting interest in whether Lafayette or Lehigh won their game and still I enjoyed the excitement of their tournament final immensely. Over the years I've been glued to the TV watching Monmouth play its heart out in the Northeast Conference final, watching a Niagara or a Rider win the MAAC, and watching other schools in conferences we seldom if ever see, led by players I have never heard of, square off in winner-take-all battles for the right to dance. It is high drama indeed.

If you ask me, league tournament finals in one-bid conferences have all the drama of Elite Eight games, where teams scratch and claw so hard to reach the legendary Final Four. Sure, they want to win the NCAA title, but you can't get there if you don't play in the Final Four.

Likewise, although Lehigh and Robert Morris and the rest who made it through the gauntlet to win their conference automatic bids last week very much want to win an NCAA Tournament game, the thrill, ultimately, is in getting there. And that's why playing that one final game with absolutely everything on the line is so compelling and memorable for players, coaches and fans alike.

Most years Ivy League champions simply don't get that chance. Sometimes they even find out they've earned the bid on the telephone, and while that's certainly exciting, it's nothing like the excitement of doing it on the floor in front of a national TV audience and a packed gym of fans living and dying with every shot.

And in case you are wondering, I've been a Princeton basketball fan for a long time and they haven't needed a tournament to get a *sniff* of the Ivy League bid. In fact, a tournament, if one existed, may have cost them bids. Still I strongly support a tournament.

I just think it would be good for the entire league, emphasis on entire.

Extra Point
• The town of Hanover has done a much better job in recent years of dealing with mudseason. (Longtime readers of this blog may remember hearing about our car being towed home from a mile away after sinking in the mud up to the middle of the hubcaps one year and how we couldn't leave the house for two days after.) Mudseason improvement, however, has come at a cost. To deal with the mud, town trucks rumble up the road, raking, grading and pouring fill into the low mud spots. Whether it is what is in the fill, or the act of raking up what's already in the road that is doing it, old, rusty nails and other sharp objects keep showing up. And you know where I'm going with this.

On her way to work this morning with that certain soph and his best friend in the car, Mrs. BGA heard and felt that sickening buh-lump, buh-lump, buh-lump and pulled over to find a rapidly flattening tire. We made it through last mudseason without a flat, but I wouldn't be surprised if we've averaged at least one per mudseason over the past 10 years or so.