Looking Ahead to Cornell

Dartmouth's game notes for Cornell have been posted. From those notes:

Since 1975, Dartmouth has attempted at least 47 rushes in a game a total of 122 times, most recently against Holy Cross with exactly 47. Of those 122 games, the Big Green have won 103 of them against just 16 losses and three ties for a winning percentage of .857.

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For those of you with iPhones and the like, Dartmouth has kicked off a new mobile site that bypasses the need to access the full website. Find a brief story about it here.

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Corner Kevin De Regt's weekly posting in The Deregtory blog has a pretty hilarious anecdote about his locker room, um, interaction with kicker Foley Schmidt, and the realization that came afterward.

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Should Princeton receiver Trey Peacock deserve consideration for the Bushnell Cup as the Ivy League football player of the year? TigerBlog makes a good case.

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I missed this earlier in the week but the Daily Pennsylvanian has a pretty good roundup of last weekend's games.

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The "BCS of the FCS" has been updated. Check out the Gridiron Power Index

33. Penn
58. Harvard
65. Yale
68. Brown
76. Dartmouth
91. Columbia
112. Cornell
114. Princeton
124. (and last) Valparaiso

82. Holy Cross
98. Sacred Heart
118. Bucknell

7. New Hampshire
69. Colgate

Conference Rating
1. Colonial Athletic Association (22.100)
2. Missouri Valley Football Conference (28.078)
3. Big Sky Conference (28.391)
4. Southern Conference (30.028)
5. Great West Conference (36.375)
6. Southland Conference (41.028)
7. Ohio Valley Conference (44.264)
8. Northeast Conference (52.117)
9. Ivy League (57.406)
10. Southwestern Athletic Conference (61.050)
11. Big South Conference (61.857)
12. Patriot League (64.161)
13. Independents (65.3125)
14. Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (67.292)
15. Pioneer Football League (68.738)

Now that you've had a chance to study those conference rankings, check out a Fanhouse story that includes this:

Imagine for a moment a college football conference with four national titles won by four different teams since 2003. This same conference produced the runner-up two other times in that span.

(Thanks for the link.)

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On the other end of the spectrum, the New York Times had a story in late October about the emergence of club football at colleges including the University of Vermont, which played the Dartmouth jayvees the past couple of years. From the story:

“I’ve been coaching football at various levels for 40 years, and this is the most fun I’ve ever had,” Clarkson Coach Mike Britton said. “These kids have no grandiose expectations. It’s a pure college football. They just want to play.”

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Celebrating the winning of the World Series is Bill Neukom '64, the managing general partner of the San Francisco Giants and sartorial role model for pitcher Tim Lincecum. (link) For a story and video interview with Neukom, click here.

Neukom, of course, is the "founding donor" of Dartmouth's Neukom Institute for Computational Science. Find his Wikipedia entry here (and thanks to a regular reader for the reminder about Neukom).

For an interesting article on Neukom written in the spring of 2009, click here. From the story:

He went to Dartmouth and majored in philosophy. “I love the old guys,” he said. “I love Plato and I love Socrates and I love Descartes.” This is a man who, in the same sentence, can discuss Plato’s ideals and the infield fly rule.

In a 2009 Q&A by the same writer Neukom explains how he ended up at Dartmouth:

When it was my turn to apply to college – what do you know when you’re barely 17? I picked Dartmouth because I liked its colors. Green and a white band. They had a terrific basketball player named Rudy LaRusso. He played with the Lakers opposite Elgin Baylor for years. I thought that’s my school.

(As an aside, the Giants-New Hampshire connection runs a little deeper. Brian Sabean, the Giants' GM, graduated from Concord High School in the state capital.)

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While we are on the subject of baseball, check out this New York Times story on Sandy Alderson '69, the new general manager of the New York Mets. Alderson's Wikipedia entry is here.

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And finally, free nights are precious few and far between from the start of August until the end of November, but Monday was one of them so Mrs. BGA and I took in the movie Secretariat. It plays a little loose with a few facts, but it's really a terrific film – and you don't have to be a horseracing fan to enjoy it.