Monday, August 18, 2014

Another Scheduling View

Here's another take on future Ivy League scheduling from someone whose opinions I respect. A former player who continues to follow Dartmouth and the Ivies closely, he thinks the "problem," is overstated. His lightly edited email:
I totally agree that the financial aid and limited number of Ivy spots post-elimination of freshman football have changed everything. Even with scholarships the Ivy League is recruiting better athletes than the Holy Crosses and Sacred Hearts of the world. This is happening real time. The top 5 Ivy teams are much much more competitive than even 5 years ago. We should still schedule the new scholarship schools and frankly we should put an academy or lower tier D1 (non-FCS team) on there every other year. It would help recruiting, and we can compete at that level."
Dave Rackovan, a key member of the staff that helped Dartmouth to a 10-0 record in 1996, is gearing up for his first year as head coach at The Hill School in Pennsylvania. (LINK) Rack coached in the Ivy League for 23 years. He was at Dartmouth from 1992-99 and then moved on to Princeton when Big Green offensive coordinator Roger Hughes took over the Tiger reins.

The Hill School headmaster is former Dartmouth lineman Zach Lehman '95. (LINK)
Opponent previews began on BGA Premium yesterday with a detailed look at a Brown team that graduated a ton of players but has a surprising amount of talent returning. Tonight BGA Premium will weigh in on Columbia. Previews will run seven days a week until daily coverage begins of the Dartmouth preseason.

If you have renewed your BGA subscription, you are good to go. The email "alert" list is still being compiled and vetted so it will take a few days for that to kick in. If you signed up for the "alert" option and haven't given me the address you want the alerts sent to, now is the time ;-)

Brown preview page

And finally, with football around the corner and a trip to State College to bring That Certain Nittany Lion back to school this weekend, I've been getting done what I can around our 9-Acre Woods here on the shoulder of Moose Mountain. Yesterday included a little weeding that proved to be more adventurous than planned.

The first bee sting on my leg was an unpleasant surprise. After 20 minutes of so of holding ice cubes on what was a surprisingly painful sting, I figured the bee that got me had given his life for the cause and I was good to go. Mistake. Turns out that first bee was part of an underground hive I hadn't noticed that got pretty riled up when I came back the second time. I *think* it was just two stings on the other leg this time, but it might have been more. Both legs are surprisingly sore even this morning. I feel like I got hit on each one with a hammer. I'm not sure what kind of bees they were, but I am sure of one thing. I won't be weeding in their neighborhood anymore.