Closing In On Spring

A little under three weeks until spring football kicks off in Hanover. Coach Buddy Teevens had originally thought about starting up the week of April 5 but has pushed practice back one more week. No official word yet but practice will likely start April 12 or 14. The Spring Game is still slated to be played Saturday, May 1.

A Portal 31 Yale football blog report on the pro day in New Haven includes this nugget: "two transfers from BCS teams have been accepted at Yale." Also, it reiterates that quarterback Brook Hart is pitching for the Yale baseball team this spring, which should give Nebraska transfer Patrick Witt the inside track on establishing himself as the Bulldogs' starting quarterback for next fall. Witt completed 57.3 percent of his passes with eight touchdowns and 11 interceptions last year. Hart hit on 60.2 percent of his attempts with four touchdowns and five interceptions. Dartmouth plays host to Yale on Oct. 9.

The Worcester Telegram reports that Holy Cross quarterback Dominic Randolph worked out in front of about 20 NFL scouts yesterday at UMass. Randolph was one of about two-dozen players at the invitation-only event according to the Boston Globe. Randolph was the only QB at the workout but the star attraction was 6-foot-5, 332-pound Vladimir Ducasse, an offensive tackle for UMass.

Randolph has an April 13 workout for the Bengals in Cincinnati.

Perhaps the longest of the longshots at UMass as reported in the Globe story: 5-6 running back DeRon Brown of MIT.

The Cornell run in the NCAA Tournament ended last night with a 62-45 loss to Kentucky. Although the Big Red struggled mightily after a quick start, the final score is misleading. From an Ithaca Journal story:

Cornell was held to a season-low 33.3 percent shooting, and was off the mark on 16 of 21 shots from its favorite area -- the 3-point line. Still, it trailed by only six with under 6 minutes remaining before a slew of missed shots sealed its fate.

A couple of other Cornell stories of interest. The New York Times has an interesting (and funny) story spun out of a visit to the Dog Pound, the dilapidated house where most of the basketball team lives.

And Cornell's success hasn't hurt the athletic department coffers. The Cornell Daily Sun has a story written before last week's two wins lifted the Big Red into the Sweet 16 and put the school name on the lips of sports fans from coast to coast. From the story:

According to John Webster, director of Athletic Alumni Affairs and Development, the Department of Athletics set a record last year in gift funds in support of operations: $3.5 million dollars. Although he does not yet know this year’s alumni gift total for athletics, Webster said, “we are on pace to beat last year’s record for current-use gifts.”

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had a Q&A with Dartmouth President Jim Yong Kim under the headline, "Dartmouth's Chief Tackles Endowment Hit With Tough Cuts." How hard has Dartmouth been looking at ways to cut costs with a minimum of job cuts? Consider this Kim quote from the story:

We re-examined our procurement strategies for things like trash bags, paper towels, toilet paper and hand soap.

By consolidating the number of different products we were using across departments, decreasing the size of the trash bags to minimize waste, and bidding with new suppliers, we will see a savings of over $294,000 per year.

(Thanks for the link.)