Thursday, November 17, 2011

'The Game' And More

The Boston Globe has a lengthy piece about Yale quarterback Patrick Witt choosing to play in The Game over interviewing for a Rhodes Scholarship. That comes on the heels of the New York Times story that broke last night regarding the Rhodes Scholarship candidacy of Yale coach Tom Williams.

Princeton's game notes for Saturday are out and they include this:
In all likelihood, the 2011 Ivy League rushing champion will be determined on Memorial Field, as Dartmouth senior Nick Schweiger and Princeton freshman Chuck Dibilio lead the rest of the Ivy League field by 180 yards. Schweiger, the reigning Ivy League rushing champion and co-winner of the 2010 Bushnell Cup, has rushed for 766 yards in six Ivy League games (the Ivy rushing title is based on league games only).
That should be fun to watch.

Schwieger, meanwhile, has run for 1,153 yards this year and is bidding to become the Ivy League's overall rushing leader for the third consecutive year. (The NCAA ranks rushing leaders by yards per game.) To see a breakdown of overall rushing leaders in the Ivy League, find the 2011 rushing leaders here, the 2010 leaders here, and the 2009 leaders here.

Dibilio has run for 1,002 yards making him the first "true" freshman in Ivy history to reach the 1,000 mark. The Ivy League record for any freshman is 1,187 set by Harvard's Clifton Dawson in 2003. (Dawson had redshirted the previous year at Northwestern.)

The Columbia banned. (That's a play on words and you'll have to click through to see why.)

The Sports Network picks are in and there there's one stunner:
Dartmouth over Princeton
Brown over Columbia
Cornell over Penn
Harvard over Yale

A short video explains how Northern Illinois is using robotic cameras to film football practices from the end zones.

As promised, excerpts from last week's 5 Questions With Dartmouth Coach Buddy Teevens:

Q: What are some of the things you do as a coach with the coaching staff to mitigate the risks of playing away from home?
BT: I actually like playing away from home and we try to preach that with our players. We travel well. We stay in nice places. The guys are fed well. They can leave everything else back on campus in terms of distractions, classes, exams and so forth. They do take their books down and they study, but there is a little bit more sense of an escape. In the morning everything is right together. You see the guys you are going to play with. You can meet with the team easily and with regularity. So it’s actually easier to play on the road than at home.

Q: You have several dozen players out with injury this year including a bunch with concussions. It may be that years like this are cyclical but have you gone back and rethought equipment, practice plans, offseason conditioning and strength training practices?
BT: We have wondered about that. With the number of concussions we have had we look at the helmets. We bought a lot of cutting edge helmets and we have had concussions with those, but we have had them with the others also. We have had a lot of freaky things. Ankles, knees, a broken leg, a broken wrist. It is the highest injury rate that I have ever been involved with. Right now we have 43 people out. The nice thing is there are very few hamstrings, which has been a nemesis of ours for years. We would have 15 or 18 guys with hamstrings in the past and right now we have two. But yeah, we go through it all. The training protocol and everything else. We actually have had fewer shoulder injuries than we have had and I think that is due to the strength training. I think it is just some freak things that have happened that really are not preventable.

Q: Rank your three favorite stadiums to play in when you were at Dartmouth.
BT: Memorial Field was the fave. I liked Princeton’s old Palmer Stadium. It was a nice setup. I liked the older one. The new one is certainly nice, but I just liked the feel of the old one. Harvard Stadium was also a nice place to play.

Q: Your entire senior class has stayed together for four years. Have you ever had that happen before and what does it say about the program when they haven’t won as many games as anyone wants, but nobody has quit?
BT: It is the first time that I have had an entire group stay together. They like each other. They have challenged each other. They have been committed as a group. I think it speaks well of the way we treat our players and the expectations we have. They have to give up an awful lot but we treat them in a special fashion. It is a compliment to see guys come in and stay the duration even though they may not have played a whole lot, or they haven’t had the success that they shot for. That is a good message for the younger classes as well.

Q: How many early decision applicants and how many commitments do you have so far?
BT: We generally try to go 10 to 12, and we are right about at that level. We feel very strongly about where we are with early decision. Rather than go higher than that we will try to flesh out the rest of the class (in the spring). This way you know what you have and you are able to select what you need. The response has been phenomenal. We had a real strong class last year and I expect another good one this year. We’re in the recruiting mix for a lot of other kids at this point.

Tonight on Green Alert Premium: More thoughts from Coach Teevens on each of this year's seniors and coverage of Thursday's practice.

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