This and That

Lots to think about in the local daily's lengthy story about the departure of Dartmouth offensive coordinator Jim Pry. Discuss among yourselves.

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Big Green football recruits Jordan Are' and Scotty Whitmore have both been named Texas Sports Writers Association 5A All-State honorable mention. Are' is a 6-foot-2, 190 quarterback while Whitmore is a 6-5 offensive guard listed in this piece as 320 pounds.

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Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had a headline that might stick in the craw of Ivy League football players and alums:

Stanford Corners the 'Smart' Market

After Its Best Football Season in Years, School Chases Top Recruits With Elite Grades

It probably only adds fuel to the fire burning in Yale Daily News guest columnist Charlie Zupsic, a 1976 Yale grad who responded to a remark, "attributed to President Levin not wanting 'quite so many athletes,' as though student-athletes were some lower class of undergrads."

Zupsic writes ...

"Just from my football teammates alone, I count judges, doctors and corporate executives. And expanding my vista to the other teams (wrestling, soccer, crew, etc.) you can find many more leaders in public and private organizations. And why do we athletes go on to become leaders? Because we learn the value of teamwork firsthand through sports. Not to mention we’re usually the ones on the front lines dispelling prejudice, because we understand you cannot measure people by their sex, color, religion, or even college affiliation in lieu of their actions."

There were a lot of former football players and athletes from other sports saying the same kind of things around these parts late in 2004 and into 2005.

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Ivy League football players and other athletes not well-enough rounded? At Brown the football and track athletes have former Jockapella, an acapella group that the Daily Herald writes, "aims to allow athletes to further explore their interests in singing."

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Clearly there are problems in college sports, but for the most part they are at the big-time level. Inside Higher Ed reports that ...

"The National Collegiate Athletic Association punished nearly half of all big-time college sports programs for major violations of its rules in the last decade, an Inside Higher Ed analysis shows.

The review finds that 53 of the 120 universities in the NCAA’s top competitive level, the Football Bowl Subdivision, were found by the NCAA's Division I Committee on Infractions to have committed major rules violations from 2001 to 2010."

(Go to the bottom of the article and click on the "view full table" link to scroll through the list of schools and what rules they broke. Interesting stuff.)

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Jeff Hawkins, a boyhood chum of Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens who worked with Teevens during his first tenure in Hanover, is now the director of football operations at the University of Oregon. As this AP story notes, he is part of an NCAA panel that would like to expand the definition of an "agent." From the story:

Hawkins, who has also coached at Dartmouth and Tulane and worked in the New England Patriots' front office, said that tougher rules are needed to keep unscrupulous agents from persuading marginal pro prospects that they should leave school before graduation in search of fame and riches.

"It's not the 30 or 40 kids (who declare early for the NFL draft)," he said. "It's the thousands of them who think they should come out early."

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From the Daily Dartmouth:

Although still in its early stages, an initiative launched this month — led by College President Jim Yong Kim and Cornell University President David Skorton — will set an example for athlete safety in college athletics by developing recommendations and policies for safe play at practices and games, according to (Director of Health Services Jack) Turco.

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Penn has officially "announced" its 2011 football schedule on the school website.

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Harvard is expected to rule soon on whether it will revert to offering early admissions, which it eliminated in 2006. Story in the Harvard Crimson.

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As of 8:45 this morning, this UConn quarterback trick shot video posted two days ago had registered 1,345,971 hits. Easy to see why. There's a little more info about the video here.

(And if you liked that one, check out this one by younger kids messing around in another sport.)

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Finally, I just stumbled across how to do a Google search this way and think it's pretty cool. (It's a backhanded way of telling someone to do their own work ;-)

Go ahead, give it a try!