Friday, October 12, 2018

Friday Feed


California's Tracy Press has a story about family and friends of Dartmouth running back Rashaad Cooper and tight end JJ Jones – who played at different high schools in the city of 83,000 about 20 miles south of Stockton – gathering to watch the Big Green take on Yale last Friday night. From the story:
“If we can all get together and cheer together, it’s like we’re part of the team even though we’re not there at the game,” said Tiah Fehling, Jones’ mother. She arranged to have Buffalo Wild Wings set aside a room for about 100 people — family and friends of the two local players.
“Everybody here is super excited because these are boys from a small hometown and they’re far away and they get to cheer them on,” she said.

Find the Dartmouth game notes HERE
Find the Sacred Heart game notes HERE.

I've never been quite sure what to make of Hero Sports, whose stated intention of publicizing smaller-school sports is commendable. There has been just enough curious material on Hero in the past that I've found myself wondering if its reach may have exceeded its grasp. This from a story last month on GeekWire explains a lot (italics are mine):
Founded in 2014, Hero Sports spent the past several years growing a college sports news content production engine — but it was coming at a cost. The company was paying writers on a per-article basis and future profitability wasn’t looking good. 
That’s when Hero Sports brought in Brad Weitz, a veteran startup advisor with marketing technology expertise who took over as CEO and helped build software that automatically created sports news content using machine learning technology.
The original plan was to use the new system for stories on the Hero Sports website.
All of which brings me to the Hero Dartmouth-Sacred Heart preview.

It finishes with this way:
BennettRank predicts Sacred Heart to defeat Dartmouth by 21 points. BennettRank's record this season is 2-0-0.
Here's the explanation for how BennettRank works (LINK).

Green Alert Take: Think they might want to tweak that algorithm?
ESPN The Magazine, NPR and Vermont's Seven Days alternative newspaper were all in town this week preparing stories on Dartmouth quality control assistant Callie Brownson. A TV station in Burlington filed this report last week: