Here We Go Again

Dartmouth's Nick Schwieger has rushed for 288 yards this fall.

Yale's Alex Thomas has rushed for 244 yards this fall.

The Yale player is the leading rusher in the Ivy League– if you buy the official Ivy League statistics.

How can that be, you ask. Good question.

The Ivy League uses the NCAA model for its statistics, and that requires a player to appear in 75 percent of his team's games to be ranked. Because he did not play against Sacred Heart, Schwieger has appeared in just two of the three Dartmouth contests, or 66.7 percent.

So even though Schwieger has run for more yards than Thomas, and even though his actual 144.0 yards per game dwarfs Thomas's 81.3, the Yale back is currently recognized as the Ivy League's leading rusher.

Even if you give Schwieger no yards for the Sacred Heart game he'd still be averaging a league-leading 96.0 yards per game, but as we learned when Schwieger was hurt last year, you can't factor in a zero game because the understanding is there is always the chance that he would have lost yardage if he had played.

For the uninitiated, Schwieger won the Ivy League rushing title last year with a 78.2-yard average. He had run for 626 yards in seven games, an average of 89.4 yards per game, when he was hurt early in the Harvard game. Given the 75 percent rule, he would not have been ranked in the Ivy stats at the end of the season if he hadn't been put in for one play at wide, wide, wide receiver to get over the 75 percent threshold.

For what it is worth, Schwieger returned to action last week at Penn and will magically reappear in the stats after the Yale game.