Winter Wonderland

Click pic for a better look.

Here is the view his morning from our "sun" room. I'm guessing we are going to have a white Christmas on Moose Mountain ;-)

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Old friend TigerBlog would have have had Dartmouth quarterback Dalyn Williams atop his ballot for the offensive Bushnell Cup, which went to Yale tailback Tyler Varga. TB explains his reasoning in another interesting COLUMN.

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From a New Haven Register STORY about Varga winning the Bushnell:

Varga finished third on the historic program’s career rushing touchdown list with 31. He is also fourth in career rushing yards (2,985), fifth in rushing attempts (529)

Here's the kicker: Varga did all that in just 24 career games after transferring from the University of Western Ontario. For a good story about Varga out of Canada, CLICK HERE.

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Speaking of Canadian-born overachievers, Winnipeg native John Urschel, who posted a 4.0 GPA in math while graduating from Penn State in three years (and beginning work on a second masters before starting on the offensive line for the Baltimore Ravens) has taken on the role of "Advanced Stats Columnist," for Derek Jeter's The Players Tribune.

From his first column (LINK):

It is commonly said that football players at the top universities are not student-athletes, but simply attend university to play football, and little else. While that debate may never be one that is truly settled, I decided to do a little digging in order to perhaps further the conversation. For this piece, I investigated how the distribution of student majors at two big-time college football programs, with two distinct reputations, compares to that of their respective general student populations.

Urschel looked at the Auburn and Stanford programs. At Auburn, 23 of 48 upperclass football players were majoring in public administration while just 88 of 11,402 upperclassmen had that major. From the column:

The odds of something this extreme happening by chance is about one in three undecillion. For those of you not familiar with your large numbers past trillion, that is a digit 3 followed by thirty-six zeros! Yes, 1 in 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That’s roughly equivalent to you flipping a coin and landing on heads 125 times in a row.

He didn't let Stanford off the hook. He found that 17 of 64 football players with a declared major were studying, "science, technology and society" compared to 99 students out of 3,265 in the major in 2009-10. He writes:

The odds of this happening by chance are about 1 in 600,000,000,000 (six-hundred billion), roughly equivalent to flipping heads 40 times in row, and far less likely than winning the California State Lottery jackpot.

Interesting stuff from a professional football player who might have ended up at Stanford or Princeton coming out of high school in Upstate New York, according to THIS STORY. Check out his WIKIPEDIA page.

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Speaking of Princeton, did you see what happened when the Tiger women's basketball team headed to Ann Arbor to take on 6-1 Michigan? Princeton – coached by former Dartmouth women's standout and assistant Courtney Banghart – drilled the Wolverines, 85-55. Surprised? Don't be. The 30-point margin might be surprising but not the win.

Already this year the Tigers have defeated 6-3 Wake Forest (72-55) and 5-3 Pitt (59-43) while getting off to a 9-0 start under Banghart (BIO).

For the record, Princeton is 126-29 since 2009-10, with four Ivy League titles and one second-place finish under Banghart.