Accountants and Lawyers?

8:15 a.m. Columbia graduate Marcellus Wiley, who went on to make the Pro Bowl with the San Diego Chargers as a defensive end and is now with the Jacksonville Jaguars spoke with the Columbia Spectator during a recent visit to campus. I vividly remember watching Wiley in the final year of freshman football and thinking the Lions had themselves a talented, if skinny, young tailback. By his senior season, with one year off back home in Los Angeles where he hit the weights and the fridge equally hard, he had swelled to 6-foot-5 and 270 pounds. He helped the 1996 Columbia team win its first six games and go 8-2 overall. The only losses: a 14-11 nailbiter against Princeton and a 40-0 thrashing at Dartmouth, which would finish the season undefeated. Wiley was a second-round NFL draft pick. Here's what Wiley told the Spectator about the reaction of his NFL teammates to his Ivy League background:

We get ragged on a lot of times. They say that we play against accountants and lawyers, and we didn’t play against anybody of size. They just have this image that I was just running around like this giant squashing everybody on the field. But, I just try to tell them that there’s talent here.

I've never been a huge fan of Terry Bowden, but he makes some good points about offseason conditioning and spring drills in this column. It's worth thinking about as Dartmouth's winter sessions wind down. ... I'm headed into town this morning and I'm going to take a peek around Memorial Field. The original word was that deconstruction of the visiting stands was going to start in February. Well, that doesn't leave much time. ;-)