Passing Fancy

Cornell's game notes for Saturday's game with Dartmouth have been posted here. A couple of nuggets straight from the notes:

• The Big Red has piled up 300 or more yards passing in eight of its last nine games. 

• If junior quarterback Jeff Mathews averages 357 yards per game through the air – as he has the past two seasons – he will graduate with 11,508 yards in his career. The Ivy League career record is 9,294 by Brown's James Perry, meaning he will break the record by more than 2,000 yards. Dartmouth's record is 6,684 by Jay Fiedler (who played before freshman eligibility).

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Click on the SoS column in the Massey Ratings to sort on strength of schedule among 122 FCS teams ranked. Here's what you'll find:

65. Princeton
67. Holy Cross
69. Cornell
73. Sacred Heart
75. Brown
77. Harvard
82. Penn
84. Yale
85. Columbia
90. Dartmouth
118. Butler

For what it's worth, Massey has it Cornell 28, Dartmouth 21 with the Big Red's odds of winning at 72 percent.

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The fellow who writes the Bleacher Report for the Ivy League has Dartmouth ranked sixth, with Cornell fourth. As is always the case with BR, your mileage may vary.

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Bragging rights from the Dartmouth sports information site:

The NCAA has released its annual student-athlete graduation rate survey, and Dartmouth College has been shown to lead the nation in Graduation Success Rate (GSR). With a GSR of 99.7 percent, Dartmouth ranked first among Division I institutions for student-athletes who began college in 2005.

From the same release:

The Ivy League also topped the survey, with the Ancient Eight combining for an average rating of 97.9%. Dartmouth led the way, followed by Brown (99.3), Columbia (98.5), Harvard (98.3), Yale (97.1), Cornell (97.0), Princeton (96.7) and Penn (96.4).

Curious how other schools and other conferences fared? There's a searchable database.

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The Dartmouth page on the Basketball-U message board has a reprint of the thorough Blue Ribbon Magazine preview of the Big Green men's team.

Back when I covered the basketball team I subscribed every year to Blue Ribbon, the bible of the college game. The research isn't quite as detailed as it used to be – when it started the writers would get comments from opposing coaches about the team in question and that team's recruits – but it's still the best there is. It's hardly a secret that Dartmouth has struggled mightily on the hardwood of late, but this is a relatively upbeat opinion of the Big Green's progress rebuilding.