What Were The Odds?

What were the odds that Penn State would replace a Brown grad as head football coach with a Brown grad as head coach? Pretty long, I'd say, but that appears to be the case as New England Patriots quarterback coach Bill O'Brien '93 is reported to be the successor to Joe Paterno '50 in Not-So Happy Valley. ESPN broke the story. (Mentioned in the story is O'Brien's agent, also former Dartmouth and NFL tight end Casey Cramer's agent.)

Boston.com also has a byline story on O'Brien while the Boston Herald also has a piece and there's another in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that includes this from Cleveland Browns backup quarterback Thaddeus Lewis, who played for O'Brien when he was OC at Duke:

"He's a guy who went to Brown and later came to Duke, so he understands the academic side of things. He will make sure guys graduate. He will make sure guys excel on and off the field."

O'Brien was the 1992 winner of Brown's Broomhead Memorial Trophy as the "football player whose continuous and generous contributions to Brown athletics and loyal devotion to his university promise to make him an ambassador of Brown in the tradition of Fred Broomhead." He lettered as a defensive end on 1991 and '92 Brown teams that were pummeled by Dartmouth, 45-13, and 51-28.

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As long as the subject of the day is major college football . . . Dartmouth grad and SEC Commissioner Mike Slive talks about the "plus one" possibility for the BCS in a short video and says he expects changes, not "tweaks" to the formula:

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A "prized" linebacker recruit has switched allegiances from Yale to Harvard in the wake of the coaching change in New Haven according to Portal 31, the New Haven Register's Yale football blog.

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Finally got the snow tires on the '93 Expo yesterday and we were warned that it will be the last year for them. That's OK. With rust holes starting to swell and almost 195,000 miles on the old Expo we call Vlad (Guerrero, get it?), the car probably won't last another winter either. But I'll miss it ;-)