There are mornings when I walk down the driveway to get the newspaper with Cooper the Wonder Dog and just have to run back inside to get my camera. The view is just that dramatic. This was one of those rare days with two levels of fog/clouds in the valley below. A real photographer would have had a field day with the view. If you click on the picture to enlarge it you'll get an idea why.
A Daily Dartmouth story spun out of the Ivy League media picking the Big Green to finish fifth this fall includes quotes from coach Buddy Teevens, defensive back Shawn Abuhoff and linebacker Garrett Wymore.
A columnist at The D looks forward to a breakout football season.
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Nick Schwieger leads off a notes column in the Sun Chronicle.
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Cornell alum Bryan Walters is featured in a San Diego Chargers story built around his 103-yard kickoff return for a touchdown agains the Seattle Seahawks. Find the video here.
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Hard as it may be to believe of someone who steadfastly refuses to get cell phone, I have a GPS for the car. (It was a Christmas present.) We've found it much more useful than we ever expected. Funny thing about it, though. While the directions it supplies are pretty much dead on, it has a little trouble with projected time of arrival. After a long trip we might be 5 minutes from home and the GPS will tell us we still have 15 minutes to go. (Could it have be aware of my reputation as a slow driver?) Anyway, as we draw closer and closer that sneaky GPS starts winding minutes down when we aren't looking. Wonder of wonders, by the time we pull up to our driveway the GPS has our ETA nailed!
I know it's a stretch but I couldn't help but think about the GPS when I saw the first Sagarin football ratings of the season. Like the GPS, Sagarin makes projections that might seem pretty questionable but like the GPS he computes and recomputes as he goes along. By the end, when you hardly need to be a computer jock to figure it out, he has it nailed. Wonder of wonders.
Now that I've thoroughly confused you, here are the Sagarin ratings heading into the season for the Ivy League and a few notable opponents past, present and future:
Ivy League2011 Non-Conference Opponents
132. Penn
142. Harvard
164. Brown
170. Yale
204. Dartmouth
208. Columbia
220. Princeton
222. Cornell
159. ColgateOthers of Interest
166. Holy Cross
232. Sacred Heart
83. New HampshireOK, what were the chances that after a decade with no schedule changes, Dartmouth would add four new opponents to the schedule and they would come in at Nos. 232, 233, 234 and 235?
233. Bucknell
234. Georgetown
235. Butler
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The well-produced but occasionally flakey Football Gameplan video picks Colgate third in the Patriot League and Holy Cross fourth.
In case you are wondering, Football Gameplan is a one-man operation produced by University of Louisiana Lafayette grad Emory Henry, who bills himself as "The Czar of the Playbook." (Czar of the Telestrator was already taken.) I was curious enough about who he is and how he does what he does that I listened to this interview with him. For what it's worth, he points out he played high school and college football (although he did not letter at ULL).
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A regular reader sent along a well-written Oklahoman story about the passing of Jimmy Harris, a legendary player at Oklahoma years ago. The lede of the story will get you thinking:
Jimmy Harris finally lost one.
The quarterback who never lost a game, the oil man who rarely lost a deal, the charming Texan who seldom lost a conversation, lost the one we all will lose.
Lung cancer got him, Monday night, at the age of 76, a number that will startle those who knew him unless they saw him in his final days.
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And finally, the first Dartmouth opponent preview will be posted on Green Alert premium by 10 a.m. today. It's an in-depth look at a Brown team that is poised to surprise a lot of people this fall. Check out BGA to find out why the Bears might deserve to be more than a darkhorse pick to win it all.
Next on tap: the Columbia preview on Monday.
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