Faulty Reasoning

OK kids, pay attention. Todays' subjects are math and common sense.

The first Ivy League football game last fall was Sept. 19.
The last Ivy League football game was Nov. 21.
That's a span of 63 days.

The Dartmouth men's ice hockey team played its first game on Oct. 30.
The hockey team saw its season end last night with a 2-1 loss to Quinnipiac in the opening round of the ECAC playoffs.
That's a span of 130 days.

One oft-repeated explanation for why the Ivy League presidents don't allow football to go on to the NCAA playoffs: The season is too long. The same argument is used for prohibiting the Ivy League from joining the rest of the free world and playing an 11th game.

Um, don't you think the presidents could come up with something a little better than that?

Now consider this. If allowed to go to the football playoffs, the Ivy League would have one team go on. Let me repeat that with emphasis added. One team would go on.

In men's ice hockey, all six Ivy League teams made the playoffs. Let me repeat that with emphasis added. All six teams went on.

Oh, and men's ice hockey isn't even close to being finished. In fact, only the Big Green and Princeton (ousted by Harvard) have hung up their skates. That's right, four teams will go on. Let me repeat that with emphasis added. Four Ivy teams will go on.

Next weekend it will be Brown playing a best-of-three at Yale, and Harvard a best-of-three at Cornell. That's March 12-13-14. Two Ivy teams will go on from there.

One week later the survivors will meet in the ECAC semifinals and finals. That's March 19-20.

Next on tap are the NCAA regionals from March 26-28. (Yale, Princeton and Cornell made it this far last year. That's half of the Ivy League's ice hockey teams.)

The NCAA semifinals are April 8.

The NCAA championship is April 10.

Now some more math. Thanks to this handy date calculator and the above dates, we know these things:

63 – Number of days between Dartmouth's first football game and last.
163 – Number of days between first Ivy League men's ice hockey game and NCAA championship game.

Could an Ivy League team make it all the way to the NCAA men's ice hockey championship game? It hasn't happened lately but Harvard won the title as recently as 1989 after appearances in the championship game in 1983 and '86.

To quote the bard, Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. The Ivy presidents need to offer up a better explanation for allowing every Ivy League sport but football to go to the playoffs.

OK, I'll get off my soapbox now. For a few days at least.

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The Dartmouth men's basketball team wrapped up its season at 5-23 (1-13 Ivy) with a pair of losses at Princeton and Penn (link) while the women fell to 11-16 (6-7 Ivy) with a shocking 44-31 loss Saturday night to a Penn team that came into the game 1-25 and 0-12 Ivy (link). The 2008-09 Ivy League champions need a second win this winter over Harvard (19-8, 10-3) tomorrow to avoid a losing Ivy mark.

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The morning paper had an obituary for Joanne Burnham, widow of longtime Dartmouth coach and administrator Whitey Burnham. She was a neat lady and will be missed.

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Lastly, a couple of signs that spring is coming. The sap buckets are up on the trees. No, not ours. We hung buckets for a few years when the kids were smaller as a delicious science project, but the most we ever got was about a cup of syrup and yikes it was a lot of work. I mean, a lot of work.

And if you see me driving around in Vlad you'll have to excuse me if the old boy is filthy. (Vlad, pictured below, was named after Vlad Guerrero. Like this guy, who is a 1993 with 165,000 miles on it, Vlad the Impaler is an old Expo, but I digress.)

It's not quite mud season but there's enough mud on the road that I could go to the car wash every day for the next six weeks or so and you'd never notice it. Never.

Living 1.5 miles up a dirt road I can wash the car and it will be a complete mess by the time I get home no matter how slowly I drive. At the New England high school track championships in Boston Friday night, we were laughing about what people must have thought looking at our other car, which kind of hides the dirt because it is maroon. What are you going to do?