Another Award for Tanner Scott

At Dartmouth's Celebration of Athletic Excellence wide receiver Tanner Scott was awarded The Class of 1948 Award as the male athlete in the junior class who has combined, "outstanding performance in athletics and significant achievement in academics." An economics major, Scott began his football career as a walk-on before leading the Big Green last fall with 45 catches for 510 yards and earning a spot on the All-Ivy honorable mention team. Find a story about the year-end awards here.

Monday's BGA blog noted that Penn has been tapped 13th in Athlon magazine's preseason poll. A release about the Quaker recruiting class gives an indication why Penn will be a popular choice to defend its championship this fall:

Penn returns 42 letterwinners for 2010, including 15 starters and 11 All-Ivy honorees. Eight starters will return on offense, five starters are back from the nation's top-ranked defense, and both specialists will return.

The release points out that the Penn Class of 2014 stands a very good chance of leaving West Philly with a championship ring if history holds:

In 15 of the previous 17 recruiting classes under Bagnoli – the winningest Ivy League coach of all-time (71.4%) – the unit has left with a minimum of one Ivy League championship ring. The Class of 2013 didn't have to wait long for theirs as they won the Ivy title just four months after stepping on campus.

Former Dartmouth wide receiver David Shula gets a humorous mention in an update on Jim "Crash" Jensen, who spent 12 years with the Miami Dolphins. From a story in the Sun-Sentinel. The story says that Jensen survived ...

... "what he thought was a critical mistake during the Senior Bowl, a postseason college all-star game. Jensen threw a short pass to David Shula, who played receiver at Dartmouth College and is the son of former Dolphins coach Don Shula. The pass was a little high and the sure-handed Shula went up to make the catch, then got 'slammed' by the defense.

"I saw Coach Shula behind his son on the sidelines and I said, 'That's one team that's not going to draft me,' " Jensen said.

Earning an athletic scholarship may not be all it is cracked up to be. A disturbing Associated Press story reports about, "unkept promises and bottom-line decisions at odds with the definition of student-athlete." From the AP piece that details scholarships being revoked:

The NCAA says its rules are clear. Athletic scholarships are one-year, "merit-based" awards that require both demonstrated academic performance as well as "participation expectations" on the playing field.

Speaking of the big business of college sports, former Dartmouth football standout and head coach Jake Crouthamel is quoted in a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story spun out of Big Ten expansion talks. From the story:

Jake Crouthamel, athletic director at Syracuse from 1978 to 2005, said he fully expects Pitt to join the Big Ten if it is invited.

"They're going to jump," he said. "It's about money. The whole thing's about money."

This one isn't about money. The University of New Hampshire is leaving a check on the table by walking away from a scheduled football game at Boston College. From an Allen Lessels column in the Manchester Union Leader:

On Friday, director of athletics Marty Scarano, while talking about the series at Gillette (Stadium) and football schedules, noted that UNH has opted out of a football game at Boston College that had been scheduled for the 2014 season.

"It was an uncomfortable situation for (head coach Sean McDonnell) to begin with," Scarano said. "He and his staff have close ties to BC. They go to the BC camp. We revisited it and decided not to enter into competition with them and they were good enough to let us out of it."

The Portsmouth Herald has a story about former UNH running back Chad Kackert's bid to make the Carolina Panthers. It seemed the 5-foot-8 speedster who the story says consistently clocks 4.31 in the 40 was always banged up when the Wildcats were playing Dartmouth, and that was probably not such a bad thing. For Dartmouth, at least.

And finally, in her last week of high school softball That Certain Hanover High Senior made a good run at hitting for the cycle for the first time yesterday. She got the hard part done, slamming a two-run homer and a triple (which would have been a second homer if she'd been given the green light at third base). She also reached on a hard-hit ground ball that was ruled an error. That might just have been reversed to a single (at least on this blog ;-) if the hard line drive she hit to left had been a little one way or the other and she had been able to leg it into a double. Unfortunately it wasn't enough to prevent a 7-2 loss for the still winless team.