The D Chimes In

The Daily Dartmouth writes about Dartmouth football and offensive coordinator Jim Pry going their separate ways. The story includes comments from a very surprised quarterback Conner Kempe and two-time captain Tim McManus.

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A story on NFL hopeful Julius Thomas posted on The Sports Network site caught my eye yesterday. It began this way:

This time last year, he was completing his final season on a basketball scholarship at Portland State and hadn't played football since his freshman year of high school.

The reason it caught my eye is back when 6-foot-9 senior Clive Weeden joined the Dartmouth basketball team I was Googling around for a story I was working on about the hoops recruiting class and discovered he might have been more highly regarded as a football prospect than a basketball prospect even though he only played one year on the gridiro. I wrote about that in a profile of Clive for a recent basketball program. Turns out he loves the game. Too bad he doesn't have one more season like Thomas to give tight end a shot on Memorial Field. ;-)

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Back in Buddy Teevens' first tenure one of his assistant coaches was Brud Bicknell, who lost out to John Lyons as his successor. Bicknell, who was with Teevens at Maine, followed him to Tulane before getting out of the college game after 13 years. He's been a high school coach and teacher for quite a while and now has been appointed head coach of a new Virgina high school as this Washington Post story reports.

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Dartmouth corner Chad Hollis writes about watching the Super Bowl in Spain – in Spanish and without commercials.

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Speaking of football players abroad – and I know some of you are out there reading this – if you or your folks email me a few photos from Spain or New Zealand or wherever you are, I'll be glad to toss a few up here.

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The column from a former Yale football player regarding comments from the Yale president about limiting the number of athletes on a campus has generated an abundance of comments, some pretty heated on both sides of the discussion, er, argument. You may have already read the story but do go back and check out the comments at the end.

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A little after the dinner hour last night I was working on a freelance story (gotta pay the bills ;-) and started hearing boom-boom-boom echoing off the mountain. I thought I knew what it was and headed down the snowy driveway to our (sometimes) dirt road to look down over the valley. Sure enough, I was able to catch about 10 minutes of a pretty good Winter Carnival fireworks show seven miles away. In case you didn't know, this is the 100th anniversary edition of the Carnival, something that surely sets Dartmouth apart from the other Ivy League schools. Check out the Carnival schedule of events.

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BGA will be mobile this weekend as we take That Certain Hanover High Junior on his first official college tours in New England. Unlike a Certain Hanover Grad, his interest is in bigger schools with his most intense focus on one of the biggest, a school located in on particularly happy valley.

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Former linebacker Gordy Quist '02 performs Let Your Heart Not Be Troubled with the Band of Heathens aboard the Music Fog/Celebrity Coaches bus in Nashville in this video. The Band of Heathens, which recently celebrated its fifth anniversary playing together, is on tour and will be playing in West Virginia tonight, at the Club Cafe in Pittsburgh tomorrow and at Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland tomorrow. Catch 'em if you can. The band is based in Austin, Texas. Quist, by the way, played his high school ball at Klein HS in Spring Texas, which is sending offensive lineman Scotty Whitmore to Dartmouth next fall.