Who Knew?

Sometimes the morning email brings a prize and so it was today. A regular reader and valued subscriber has shared a PDF with several pages from the book Courage Beyond the Game: The Freddie Steinmetz Story by Jim Dent, also the author of The Junction Boys.

I started to rewrite what the reader sent along before realizing I couldn't do a better job than he did. Believing sometimes it's better to ask forgiveness than permission, I've decided to share what he wrote:

"In brief, Freddie Steinmetz, Texas ’71, was the collegiate version of Brian Piccolo, the Chicago Bears running back of Brian’s Song fame. Steinmetz, an undersized and under-recruited running back from the Denver suburbs who became an All-Southwest Conference safety on the Longhorns’ 1969 National Championship team, was diagnosed with bone cancer toward the end of the 1969 season, had the cancerous leg amputated, and died in 1971."

And this . . .

"Apart from author Jim Dent’s less-than-gracious (and less-than-credible, given the Dartmouth football team’s 1965 Lambert Trophy performance) assessment of Dartmouth football and Dartmouth athletics in general, it’s interesting to note that had Steinmetz enrolled at Dartmouth in the fall of 1967, he would have been competing for playing time with a guy from Snyder, Texas named Murry Bowden. Small world."

Here's the excerpt that will rankle more than a few alums from that time:

"Steinmetz' best offer to date was from Dartmouth College, an Ivy League school in New Hampshire that certainly fit his academic profile. But how was Freddie going to pursue a career in pro sports with the promise of buying his mother a new Cadillac after spending four years at a small-time, second-rate athletic institution like Dartmouth?"

That's followed by a mention of Jake Crouthamel's short-lived NFL career, the thought that Dartmouth's heyday was in the '20s and a few more sentences about Dartmouth. Find a PDF of this part of the book here.

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The 2012 schedule Penn "announced" yesterday notes the Quakers will be traveling to Dartmouth for a second time in a row for the first time in 36 years. The headline on a blurb posted on The Sports Network site was telling:

Ivy power Penn to play two CAA teams

Those two CAA teams are Villanova and William & Mary.

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From the University of New Hampshire football site:

Football Places League-Leading 20 Players on CAA Academic All-Conference Team

If/when the scholarship-bound Patriot League decides to expand it could do worse than add UNH. Yes, it's a state school, but Sean McDonnell's program does things the right way, bringing in solid student-athletes (without taking the transfer route) who graduate and for the most part stay out of trouble. Adding UNH and Maine – the only CAA teams remaining north of Philadelphia – would dramatically raise the football profile of the Patriot League.

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Saw a note this morning from Forbes that, "Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper publisher, is planning to switch over all of its 80 community newspapers to a paid model by the end of the year."

Green Alert Take: Over the life of this blog more and more publications have been going to paid content and frankly, I'm wondering what took the dummies so long. Giving content away for free just doesn't seem to make much sense. Hey, wait a minute ;-)

As the trend toward a pay-content model picks up speed it will make finding links for you more difficult. Don't worry, I'm not going to start charging for this blog. But it's been pretty much seven days a week, 365 days a year for seven years and I've starting to think maybe the time has come to cut back a bit. I'll let you know.