Columbia Football

Cypress Bay High School in Broward County, FL

I thought talking about a player from the Miami area might warm us up on this snowy day here in the Northeast.

The Miami Herald's sports blog reports that Cypress Bay linebacker Joe Nathan is coming to Columbia.

The 6'2", 215-pound Nathan was a part of what many pundits considered to be the best linebacking corps in high school football.

Bring us a Rally, Dianne!

Columbia Athletic Director Dr. Dianne Murphy will be in Times Square this afternoon to ring the closing bell at the NASDAQ exchange along with 2008 College Football Hall of Fame inductee Don McPherson.

Dr. Murphy will be there representing the National Football Foundation, as she is the chairperson of the NFF Gridiron Club.

Here's a bit of background on the NFF.

Founded in 1947 with leadership from General Douglas MacArthur, legendary Army coach Earl "Red" Blaik and immortal journalist Grantland Rice, The National Football Foundation & College Hall of Fame, a non-profit educational organization, runs programs designed to use the power of amateur football in developing scholarship, citizenship and athletic achievement in young people. With 121 chapters and 12,000 members nationwide, NFF programs include the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Ind., Play It Smart, the NFF Hampshire Honor Society, the NFF National Scholar-Athlete Alumni Association, the NFF Gridiron Clubs of New York City, Dallas, and Los Angeles, and scholarships of over $1 million for college and high school scholar-athletes. The NFF presents the MacArthur Trophy, the Draddy Trophy, presented by HealthSouth, and releases the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) Standings.




Talk about Good Timing!

The "Buffer" in the News!!

How's this for an eerie coincidence? Just a few days after I posted my brief biography of former Columbia head coach Aldo "Buff" Donelli, the Buffer's name was injected back into sports headlines all over the world because of something that happened on a soccer pitch in Southern California.

Saha Kljestan's debut goals with the U.S. national team were the most since Donelli scored four in a 4-2 win over Mexico on May 24, 1934, in a World Cup qualifying match against Mexico.

A more detailed look at the new connection between Kljestan and Donelli can be read here.

Buckingham Browne & and Nichols: a new Lion pipeline?

As we get closer to "National Signing Day," (Feb. 5), our list of reported incoming freshmen continues to grow.

Remember, Ivy recruits don't actually "sign" anything, but with all the Div. I-A recruits signing the national letter of intent by the fifth, the recruits for other schools often start making their verbal commitments.

The headline name for today (in my opinion) is the very promising offensive guard Xander Frantz from Buckingham Browne & Nichols H.S. That's the same high school that sent us current rising sophomore Nico Papas and another incoming freshman, Steven Grassa. (But we did lose out on getting BB&N QB Mike DiChiara, who has chosen Cornell.)

Frantz is graded highly by scouts who expect him to excel on the offensive line, despite the fact that he played on the defensive line as well in high school.

It would appear that Nico Papas' father John has become a good ally for Columbia recruiters. John Papas is the head coach at Buckingham Browne & Nichols.


Scott Ward

Another offensive lineman bound for Morningside Heights is Newport Harbor High School's Scott Ward. Ward is 6'7" and 241 pounds, so he may need to bulk up, but that's a great frame to work with. Ward's commitment has been reported here OCVarsity.com, a very good web site.



Andrew McHugh

Finally, we have Andrew McHugh, an outside linebacker at Saint John's Prep. School in Massachusetts. McHugh is a native of Swampscott, MA, which was also the hometown of Columbia great Greg Abbruzzese '92.

And Check This Out!

A reader has passed along this link to a video featuring an amazing one-handed grab by incoming freshman wide receiver Price Pinkerton. Pretty amazing.

So now, with Barack Obama as our president, it's time for a completely unscientific, but still fun, look at how Columbia football might do under another Columbian in the White House.

I say "another Columbian" because while Obama is the first Columbia College grad to become president, three other presidents have had very strong ties to the university. Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt both attended Columbia Law School, and Dwight Eisenhower went directly from the presidency at Columbia to the presidency of the entire nation.



T.R. didn't need no stinking law degree

"T.R."

Let's start with Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy attended the law school in 1880 but left in 1881 to run for the New York State Assembly. During that 1880 season, the Lions went 1-2 with losses to Harvard and Yale but a win over Rutgers. The great and unforgettable Fredrick Potts was the team captain. (Like you all didn't know that.)

During TR's presidential years (and Teddy became president just as the 1901 season began), things started off well. In 1901, the Lions went 8-5 with wins over Rutgers, Penn, and Navy to balance out losses to Harvard and Yale.

1902 was a 6-4-1 season for Columbia with big wins over Rutgers and Navy again.

But 1903 was the best year for the Lions during the first President Roosevelt's tenure. Columbia went 9-1 with six shutouts—a loss to Yale prevented a perfect season.

The 1904 squad went 7-3 with another six shutouts but also fell to Yale in a rout. The Elis routed the Lions again—reaching a low point with a 4-3-2 1905 season.

Then tragedy struck when Columbia President Nicholas Murray banned football after the 1905 season. The reason for the ban was the violence that was running rampant in the sport at the time. The ban would stay in effect until 1915.

But Murray's ban was not ignored at the White House. Roosevelt became the point man in reforming the game to make it safer. TR's efforts helped bring football back to Columbia—albeit six years after he left office.

So, the total won-lost-tied record for the Columbia Lions, with TR as a student and President, was a very robust 35-18-1.



FDR, another Columbia "dropout"

FDR

Franklin Roosevelt entered Columbia Law School in 1905 but dropped out (never to graduate) in 1907 because he had passed the New York State Bar exam. So, FDR was only on campus for the 4-3-2 1905 season.

But the latter President Roosevelt was in office for 12 seasons of Columbia football—1933 through 1944.

Like TR, things started out with a bang as the Lions went 8-1 in 1933 and won the 1934 Rose Bowl over Stanford, 7-0, on New Year's Day 1934. That 1933 season included a 33-0 win over Penn State and 16-0 shutout of Syracuse.

1934 was another strong season with the Lions going 7-1 with another win over Penn State, 14-7 and a long-awaited 12-6 victory over Yale.

But things started heading a bit south in 1935. Columbia went 4-4-1 but rallied for two season-ending wins against Brown and Dartmouth to avoid a losing record.

There was a brief upswing in 1936 with a 5-3 record—including another 7-0 win over Stanford. But 1937-39 were three weak seasons in a row with no more than three wins in any single season despite the presence of Sid Luckman on the squad in '37 and '38.

1940 was another standout year. The Lions went 5-2-2 with huge wins over Georgia and Wisconsin, but the actual war years of 1941-44 (though technically the war did not start until after the '41 season was over) were generally rough. No year was rougher than 1943 when a very depleted Lion squad (due to the war) went 0-8, lost four games by shutout, and were outscored by 313-33.

The overall Columbia football record with FDR as a student and a president was 48-54-9.



President Eisenhower leads the cheers at Baker Field, 1952

Ike

Dwight David Eisenhower became president of Columbia University in 1948 and served full-time until 1950 when he became the supreme commander of NATO. He really was a campus figure for just the '48 and '49 seasons.

The 1948 team finished 4-5 but did post big wins over Yale, Navy, and Syracuse. The 1949 team was 2-7 but did beat Harvard for an early season highlight.

While Ike was in the White House during the 1953 through 1960 seasons, fortunes were not bright for the Lions. There were no winning seasons, but there were some high points—an 8-0 shutout of Harvard in '53, a 13-0 shutout of Yale in '58, and a 44-6 thrashing of Cornell in '60.

The overall record for the Lions, with Ike as president of the university and then President of the United States, was 22-68.



Barack Obama in his college days

BHO

And now for our current president. Mr. Obama graduated from Columbia College in 1983, and he was a student at CU for the 1981 and 1982 seasons. Both of those seasons were 1-9 years, but they were exciting as the great John Witkowski was at the helm at QB.

Both of the wins during Obama's undergraduate years were memorable—the Lions beat Penn in '81 by a 20-9 score and then crushed Princeton in the last Homecoming game at the old Baker Field—35-14.

So President Obama comes into this season with a 2-18 record to build on.

We believe in change.

The mystery is over and we now know the Lions 2009 schedule.


2009 Columbia Football Schedule


9/19
at Fordham

9/26 CENTRAL CONNECTICUT STATE

10/3 at Princeton

10/10
at Lafayette

10/17
PENN (Homecoming)

10/24
at Dartmouth

10/31
YALE

11/7
HARVARD
11/14
at Cornell

11/21
BROWN

The most-asked question was who Columbia would play in week two at home to replace Iona, which has discontinued football.

The answer is Central Connecticut State University, a much tougher opponent than Iona for sure. CCSU appears to play at a level of a mid-level Ivy team, but not quite as good as last year's co-champs Harvard and Brown.

Coach Wilson's strong ties to the state of Connecticut and the recruiting strides Columbia is making there may have both played a big role in this scheduling decision. But I don't really have the inside story.

I guess I was half-hoping we would see a new opponent in week four other than Lafayette. But I am looking forward to revisiting the Lafayette broadcast booth, complete with the cool replay monitor and pretty decent food!

And for those of you looking for some real changes in the order of our games and in the faces of our opponents, I hear you. But remember that the Ivy League is a league that's all about tradition, and change for the sake of change isn't going to happen.

I am happy that the Lions are once again facing a schedule with no "easy wins" right off the bat. I thought Columbia played right up and right down to the competition every week until the Brown game. Playing better opponents should help the coaches forge a better team.


Harvard and Hatch

Ivy football followers are buzzing about former LSU starting QB Andrew Hatch coming back to Harvard where he began his college career a few years ago.

I openly admit that if Hatch were coming to Columbia, I'd be pretty excited too. But objectively, I'm not sure anyone should be handing the 2009 championship trophy to the Crimson just yet.

This is a MUCH tougher league than most people, even our own people, give it credit for. One talented athlete does not make for a championship, especially on a Harvard squad that needs to be more concerned about its 2009 defense anyway.

There's also no guarantee that Hatch will start, let alone be a real impact player. But whoever does start for the Crimson will have such an embarrassment of riches with wide receivers and big tight ends, that I doubt even Tom Brady would make Harvard's passing attack less formidable.

In other words, Harvard was going to be tough regardless of the QB. I don't have a problem with anyone who wants to complain about the great break the Crimson is getting right now.

But that's realling baying at the moon.

Bill Campbell



With Steve Jobs announcing his decision to step down for at least six months due to medical reasons, speculation is running rampant about who will take over as Apple CEO.

One leading Apple analyst says Columbia Board of Trustees Chairman and former football great Bill Campbell is a good bet.

The fact that one of the world's leading companies would look to Campbell in its desperate hour speaks volumes about the man. He deserves congratulations even if it doesn't happen.

"Women Have to Work Harder"

Columbia athletic director Dianne Murphy is quoted prominently in the latest issue of Diverse: Issues in Higher Education.

Most of the readers here know that I'm not exactly a bleeding heart type, but Dr. Murphy makes an excellent point when she says: "athletics is one of the last bastions of male dominance," and, "Women have to work harder."

No doubt they do. I do have to say that whatever successes or failures Murphy has had in her tenure at Columbia, at least I don't see her gender playing a role in either.

I haven't heard even the harshest critic, (of which there seem to be very few anyway), say gender was a factor. But being a woman AD is just not easy.

Speaking of female AD's, Dartmouth's AD Josie Harper has announced she is stepping down. She oversaw some major improvements to Dartmouth's physical plant, even as the football and basketball teams declined overall.



Gehrig in his Columbia days


Hollander's Story

Now back to history and we look at page 5 of the 1961 Columbia-Penn game program and the historical piece written by legendary sports writer and historian Zander Hollander.

The topic was the 1922 Columbia-NYU game played right on the Columbia campus on South Field. One of the Lions stars in the game was Lou Gehrig, but he was ejected just minutes into the game for slugging the NYU quarterback.

The game was one of the controversial sporting events of the 1920's, and not because of Gehrig's ejection. NYU was awarded an early TD when the Violets blocked a punt and fell on the loose ball...but the ball had already bounced out of the end zone.

It should have been a safety, but at the time the score was 7-0, NYU. Columbia only scored 6 points in the game and the final on the field was 7-6 in favor of the Violets.

A DAY LATER, the ref admitted his mistake and the final score was amended to 6-2 in favor of Columbia. NYU never accepted the revised score.

Hollander's writing is great and fun, even though he's recounting historical events not many fans could have remembered in 1961, (however, I realize that in 1961, 1922 was 39 years in the past while in 2009, 1961 is 48 years ago!).

I hope to find more articles by Hollander in other vintage Columbia programs.

Mike Tree


Columbia is among four Ivy League schools who have reportedly made an offer to Brophy College Prep linebacker Mike Tree. Tree comes from the same high school as rising Lions junior lineman Brandon "Moose" Veldman.

Scout.com is reporting that Tree visited Princeton last weekend and is going to Dartmouth this weekend. There's no information on whether he's headed to visit Columbia or Brown, in the coming weeks.

But Tree, for his part, is ready to jump into the New York City comedy scene. He's the star of a series of YouTube sketches which he and his friends at Brophy produced called "Campus Linebacker." They're a takeoff on the "Office Linebacker" Reebok commercials from a several years ago.



Rich Skrosky

Coach Skrosky Promoted

Former Lions offensive coordinator Rich Skrosky has been made a top assistant at Elon College in North Carolina. Skrosky was a popular figure in the Columbia football program, and he was the only one of Ray Tellier's assistants to make the transition to Bob Shoop's staff. We wish him well.





Page one of the 1961 Columbia-Penn program

Now back to our page-by-page look at a vintage piece of Columbia football history: the 1961 Columbia-Penn game program.

The first page of text in the program sets the scene for the game and was written by the program's editor, Philip J. Burke. Burke was a prototypical "sports information director" of his time, but I believe he only handled football for Columbia, starting in 1960. I don't know much about how Burke came to Columbia, but I know he left the Lions in 1965 to do public relations for the old Roosevelt Field Raceway on Long Island (now it's just a mall) and then got his call to "the show" as a PR director for the New York Rangers. He died in 2000 at the age of 85.

The top of the page features two small inset pictures. On the left, we have an "in action" shot of running back Tom Haggerty, one of the leading heroes of the '61 squad. Haggerty came into the game with 482 yards rushing and a gaudy 5.3 yards per carry average. He also had nine TDs through seven games and one two-point conversion.

The small picture on the right is of the Lion statue in front of Chrystie Field House.

Also on the top of the page is an interesting note that the game that day would be the 557th intercollegiate football game for the Lions. That brings us back to the question of just how many games Columbia has played since 1870, and when exactly was our 1,000th game?

If the Penn game was game No. 557, then game 1,000 was the 2008 season opener against Fordham. I had mistakenly thought it was the game against Dartmouth in late October.

Having more than 1,000 games in the history of your program is pretty impressive, but the way the BCS loads up the schedules these days most big-time programs will soon be playing 1,000 games every year.

Now I don't like to speak ill of the dead, and I'm sure Mr. Burke was a totally fine man, but I'm not the biggest fan of the copy he wrote to set up the game. It's a kind of a flowery piece hinging on the title of a hit song from the late 1950's called "Now is the Hour." It's a very general look at the successful 1961 team, giving most of the credit to Coach Donelli and his staff.

I guess it's likely the piece is just dated; something that may have been better appreciated by a 1961 audience. Today's fans are stat- and personality-obsessed, and other than a deliberately modest listing of the graduating seniors on the team, there is little a modern fan can sink his teeth into.

But the style reminds me of the little set-up voiceovers Howard Cosell used to do for Monday Night Football. If you take the copy from Burke's piece and put it in Cosell's excited voice, it kind of works.

On the bottom of the page, we have a table of contents on the right and some publication information on the left. We learn that Burke's associate editor was Bill Shannon, who is often referred to as a "Columbia historian," but I don't know what his official titles were. The pictures were taken by an "M. Warman." (A reader tells me he was named Manny Warman and he took the official pictures for Columbia for many years).

The program was peddled for national advertising by Spencer Advertising and published by Robert W. Kelly Publishing. Both companies are now defunct.

1961 Penn-Columbia program cover art


Okay, okay, not quite. But a treasure trove of vintage Columbia material has found its way to me from one Walter Day... the same "angel on my shoulder" who had the program from the 1961 Columbia-Princeton game delivered to me in the radio booth during Homecoming last October.

Walter was never a Columbia student, but his father was class of 1924 and he often took Walter and his twin brother to football games starting in the late 1940s.

I'll tell more of Walter's story as we go along, but just get used to me thanking him for these very generous gifts that I hope my readers will enjoy as much as I am.

The latest mailings from Walter have included more programs, and other publications that I will cherish forever. They are all a unique look inside a very different time for Columbia football, the Ivy League, the NCAA, and America in general.

I thought the best way to share all of this great material and my thoughts on them would be to look at the key parts of each of these items, sometimes page by page.

I thought I'd start with what I consider to be the crown jewel in this collection, and that's the program from the 1961 Penn-Columbia game at Baker Field. This would be the game that would clinch the Ivy title for the Lions, (technically a tie for the title, but we'll get back to that later), for the one and only time since the league was officially formed in 1956.

For those of you dying of suspense about the actual details of the game, you can read a synopsis here.

But let's start with the cover of that program, (see above). It features some cover art of two players vying for a football, one wearing Columbia's colors and the other in Penn's all-red jersey of the time. (Notice how Penn has really de-emphasized the color red in just about all of its team uniforms in the last 30 years or so. Penn used to really favor that color over the blueish hue the Quakers wear now.)

Neither one of the images was meant to portray an actual Lion or Quaker, (we know that since no Penn player actually wore the No. 18 that we see on the player's jersey and helmet), and the Lions No. 88, Marc LaGuardia '62 was not a starter.

The inset picture is of captain Bill Campbell standing tall at the Lion statue just outside the Chrystie Field House. Call me old-fashioned, but I liked the old days when each team had just one captain.

No one in 1961 could have predicted that Campbell would go on to become a Lion head coach, big-time silicon valley entrepreneur, and chairman of the Columbia board of trustees. Or maybe they could have. Campbell's leadership abilities, and his strong identifiable figure on campus, led a lot of people to predict great things for him.

On the bottom left corner there is a picture of the '61 Lions in action against Cornell, not a bad turnaround considering the fact that the Cornell game was just two weeks earlier and the much slower pace of publishing 48 years ago.

Below Campbell's picture is the "In this issue" teaser promising a story called "Okay, Who Won It?" by none other than the great Zander Hollander.

Now if any of you are over the age of 30 and you still have never heard of Zander Hollander, I feel bad for you. That's because in the days before the Internet or ESPN, Hollander's big, fat paperback preview books for the four big pro sports were THE most coveted things for fans to get their hands on.





Above is a picture of his 1986 MLB preview book. Man, these things are so much fun to read even now. Sometime in the late 1990s, they stopped publishing them. I assume because the Internet was making the information they carried a little outdated too quickly.

I never knew that Mr. Hollander had any connection with Columbia until I saw this program, but it appears that he contributed some exclusive content to the football programs for a few years in the 1960's.

As far as I know, he was never a Columbia student but he is still alive, if not exactly working full-time. I'll take a closer look at the article he wrote for this program in the coming weeks.

The final item of interest on the cover is the price of the program: 50 cents! Before you wax poetic about how much less expensive things were in the old days, remember that Columbia football programs have been FREE for the last two years, (I think the top price they ever reached was $3 before they made them free in 2007), and that if you adjust for inflation, 50 cents in 1961 would be about $3.43 today.

So, Columbia actually beat the inflation-adjusted price by 43 cents even before the gracious gesture of slashing the price entirely.



On the inside cover we have an ad for Rheingold Beer. In 1961, the beer industry was still a mostly local business. This was before Miller and Anheuser-Busch pushed everyone else out. Rheingold was very much a New York City beer, and the company learned at a very early point that sponsoring sporting events was an obvious perfect fit for a beer company.

It became the first really- recognizable sponsor for the New York Mets and became the team's "official beer."

What's odd about this ad is that it's set at a very un-New York City square dance. Perhaps the woman in the ad, Janet Mick, who was "Miss Rheingold 1961," was from the West. I do know that Mick was considered a shoo-in for the customer-voted-in title because of her uncanny resemblance to Jackie Kennedy. Mick went on to become a flight attendant for American Airlines.

The whole "Miss Rheingold" contest was ended in 1965 and the company also went out of business in 1976. A new version of Rheingold Beer was introduced in 1999.

Suffice it to say that beer ads no longer appear in Columbia sports programs. I'm not sure, but I think that would be against NCAA or at least Ivy League policy. But if you think beer ads are questionable, wait until we get to the cigarette ads in this program. Let me just say they are VERY questionable and for reasons that go way beyond health hazards!

We'll get to page one and more of the program in the coming days. Anyone with any memories that can fill in any of the blanks so far, please feel free to comment.

Talking about Tom



Not all the talk about race and college coaching is worth listening to, but Ed Daigneault gets it exactly right in this piece about Yale's new coach Tom Williams.

It's nice that he also points out that Columbia Coach Norries Wilson has brought the Lions back to respectability, which we may not be entirely clear in the won-lost record, but is entirely clear on the field of play, where Columbia outplayed at least half of its Ivy opponents in 2008.

Ivy fans know that while Yale may have the richest alumni and most storied football history in the conference, things can still go bad in a hurry in New Haven.

The Elis went from perennial contenders in the '60s, '70s, and '80s to chumps in the 1990s. Columbia beat Yale four years in a row from 1994-97, and not all of those teams were the Lions' best.

While Jack Siedlecki's tenure was not totally fantastic over the years, he seemed to be getting much, much better in his final three years.

Williams will be taking over a team that will be losing just about all its best players to graduation. That should actually help in his first two years, as knowledgeable fans will realize this and not set the bar too high.

From a Columbia standpoint, I would look at recruiting in the state of Connecticut as a possible measuring stick. With Coach Wilson's strong CT ties, the Lions have been grabbing more and more strong recruits from right under Yale's shadow. If that keeps happening, it may mean the Eli program is really in decline everywhere else as well.

George Seitz, RIP

I have recently been informed that three-year letter winner George Seitz '56 died last week. Sadly, I do not know much about his playing career, except to say he played on Lions teams that twice beat Harvard and took on Army at Yankee Stadium in 1953.

Anyone who has more personal or gridiron info on Mr. Seitz kindly comment below or email me.

Austin Knowlin has been named an honorable mention team member for The Sports Network's All-America team. He was specifically recognized as a punt returner.

The announcement reminds me that when I first saw Knowlin play, he most reminded me of Towson grad Dave Meggett, who was a classically undersized "scatback" for the NY Giants and a dangerous punt returner as a pro. I get the feeling that Knowlin could make for a decent NFL prospect in that same type of role.

Searching for Bud Corn

For 25 years, Belmont "Bud" Corn '34 was the P.A. announcer for football at Baker Field. He was a total professional, but also displayed a sense of humor from time to time, and that made him a beloved figure from 1936 until 1961. His final game at the mic was the contest against Penn that ended with a huge Columbia win that clinched the Ivy title.

Bud had to quit because his business was starting to demand too much time and travel. You see, Bud was the leading commercial display artist in the world, and with the 1964 World's Fair set for New York, he needed to get started on the many requests for his design services.

It's a great story, but I have one problem. I don't know what happened to Mr. Corn next. Well, I know he continued to be a success at his business and that he had at least one daughter who was married in the late 1960s...but that's it.

Could Bud Corn, who has to be at least 90 years old today, still be alive?

I have tried to track down nonagenarian Columbians before. Last summer I found Sid Luckman's favorite receiving target, John Siegal '39. (He was also a teammate of Sid's with the Bears).

Mr. Siegal was nice enough to take my call, but sadly he was too hard of hearing to be a part of any kind of interview. That was a real loss for Columbia fans old and young. I certainly wish him the best.

But if any fans reading this know anything about Bud, I'd appreciate hearing about it...even if it's just a memory you might have about his voice over old Baker Field P.A.

You can't let history get away from you.

Is this your college loan officer?

The deepening economic crisis and the effect it's having on university budgets is becoming more troubling every day.

Throw in the Bernie Madoff scandal, and you have actual panic in some circles here in New York.

It does not appear that the Madoff scam has touched Columbia in any direct way, but a member of the Columbia College Board of Visitors, J. Ezra Merkin, has been accused of actively funneling money to Madoff from the OTHER BOARDS he served on, including New York School, which sued Merkin on Friday over this. Merkin's lawyer says he'll fight the suit vigorously.

The question for us here is whether this economic downturn will hurt Ivy football and/or Columbia in particular. Could it actually help?

The obvious argument for those who say it will hurt us is that a financial squeeze on more Americans will dissuade kids from taking offers at non-scholarship schools like the Ivies. No one wants to take on more debt right now.

But it could go the other way as well. The scholarship schools will also get hit hard, especially the state schools. So there may be fewer scholarships to go around and some of the better prospects may not get free rides at non-Ivy schools anyway. If that's the case, a lot of players would presumably choose to come to an Ivy because they aren't getting a scholarship elsewhere anyway.

Also, many FCS/D-IAA schools may discontinue football, expanding the field of potential recruits for everyone else.

Obviously there are some good arguments to be made either way. But history is really of no help here. The last deep recession in this country was 1982-83, and the nature of the Ivies is just too different to use those times as a meaningful comparison.

In the short run, we all may suffer when it comes to facilities. Dartmouth's West Stands improvement project at Memorial Field has been put on hold, and I doubt we'll see any of the very, very, very needed improvements at Brown Stadium anytime soon.

I'd love to hear any informed opinions about all of this.

Lineman on the Hook?

Quality defensive linemen are becoming quite a rarity in the Ivies, and that's what made Owen Fraser's addition to the team and Lou Miller's emergence on the D-line so valuable in 2008.

A strong-looking Houston area high school star on the defensive line is Anthony Villamagna, and he has Columbia on his list of possible schools.