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| T-shirt spotted at Dartmouth football practice sports a message that says it all. |
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The Dartmouth has a story under the headline: Football looks to start season off on a high note against Butler.Not much new there if you've been paying attention.
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The venerable Sagarin Ratings are out and here are how teams of interest stack up:118. Harvard
159. Brown
164. Penn
176. Yale
190. Dartmouth
194. Cornell
217. Columbia
174. Holy Cross
229. Sacred Heart
230. Butler
I was thinking about Sagarin and how silly it is to rank teams before they've played a game. Those rankings haven't a clue who is playing quarterback for Dartmouth, whether Harvard's star running back will be in the lineup, or that Columbia has a new coach.
Sagarin is a little like Bonnie, the teeny little person who apparently lives inside our portable GPS unit. When we are coming home from a trip "Bossy Bonnie" (as we call her) will offer up an estimated time of arrival. When we are about three miles from home she'll still have us a good 15 minutes from arriving, but as we head on down our road a funny thing happens. Bonnie cheats. As if we wouldn't notice, she starts rolling the time of arrival back faster and faster. Wonder of wonders, when we pull into the driveway Bonnie has nailed it. I can almost hear her self-satisfied smile in there.
Likewise, I expect that Sagarin will have the Ivy League race pretty well figured out – right about the time Dartmouth's busses roll into the driveway on Nov. 20.
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Clicked through to catch the Holy Cross coach's show only to discover that they are charging $1.95 to watch it. Sorry folks in Worcester, but that's one fewer viewer the show will have this year. Makes a person wonder whether something like that is about making $1.95 a viewing or about getting the word out about your program. I'd venture to say there are some pretty fair high school players around the country (and their parents) who might like to see what Tom Gilmore looks and sounds like after a game like that who won't be forking over the money to find out.
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As long as I'm going all Andy Rooney on you today, here's a request of people who design web pages for college football teams. Go ahead and have the "lead story" that rotates from one story to the next if you must, but please don't make me play "Whac-a-Mole" to read the story that interests me. Here's my wish: If the website has a "news" tab, I'd like to click there or be able to bookmark that page and skip all the bells and whistles. Unfortunately, on most sites the "news" only makes it to that page after it cycles off the Whac-a-Mole page. (By the way, how great is Wikipedia? It actually has a page on Whac-a-Mole.)Not that there are many people who do what this blog does, but the W-a-M annoyance has gotten to the point where I have pretty much stopped checking the individual school web pages for football stories. Just too annoying.
End rant.
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Check BGA Premium tonight for coverage of today's practice as well as the start of a series looking at how this year's freshmen are doing.
