Penn State not the first to have an endowed coaching position

When it first came to light that Patrick and Candace Malloy decideded to endow the head coach position for Penn State football (Penn State Live) it was widely reported that this was a new precedent. However, a Yale alumnus already had the idea. That is why Jack Siedleki is the Joel E. Smilow ('54) Head Coach of Football.

I let University Relations know about this a few days ago.

I also think this endowment clinches that Joe Paterno will coach as long as he wants to do so.

Labels: PSU Football 2007, Yale

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posted by WFY @ 12:48 PM | |

Harvard's cheating was much more blatant this year

BLOWOUT AT THE BOWL - Yale Daily News
Not a good day of football.

Labels: Yale

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posted by WFY @ 7:10 PM | |

The Game 2007

VS.

The 124th playing of The Game is tomorrow at the Yale Bowl. Both teams come in undefeated in Ivy League play, but Yale (9-0) has a perfect overall record; Harvard lost two non league games (7-2). It will be noted throughout the HDnet broadcast that the last time this happened was 1968. Every college football historian knows both teams technically came out of that game without a loss. Hearing my father tell the story of that epic game is why I have yet to leave a football game early and probably never will do so. He didn't leave that day.

We saw Yale when they played Georgetown this September. They are a good football team with excellent fundementals. RB Mike McLeod is the biggest offensive threat, breaking all sorts of Yale rushing records. He sees a hole as well as any running back I have ever watched.

This would have been an excellent year (Yale Daily News) for ESPN to take the Gameday crew to the Bowl, but having visited a D-III game last weak, they probably thought they were overdoing it with visiting non BCS schools. Instead Gameday is going to Ohio State vs. Michigan out of habit. It should be noted that Yale has so far beaten all the I-AA teams it has played, while the Wolverines have not.

I plan on watching The Game with the old man ('63) downtown. If it is a good one, I'll watch the whole thing. Given Penn State's recent transgressions, I'm tempted to watch the Yale game all the way through even if I miss some of the Penn State game.

FURTHER READING

Media Related to "Harvard-Yale 2007" - Yale Daily News

Unlike ’68, There Can Be No Tie in the Game - The Times

No-option QB - Boston Globe

Hoping flaw doesn't show - Boston Globe

Winner Take All - The Harvard Crimson

Harvard Sucks - The Harvard Crimson
Duh.

Harvard-Yale has undefeated Ivy League twist - USA Today

PREDICTION

Yale wins in OT

Labels: Yale

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posted by WFY @ 12:43 PM | |

Old Ivy League Stadia

Football's Oldest Stadiums: Witnesses to Game's Evolution - ESPN
With The Game just days away, take a look at this ESPN article about the site of this year's game, the Yale Bowl as well as two other ancient Ivy stadiums: Harvard Stadium and Franklin Field.

I've been to the Bowl several times, seen Franklin Field's exterior in the dark and rain and viewed Harvard Stadium from the top of the Prudential building in Boston. By the way, Harvard doesn't have bleachers -- just concrete. Yale's blue bleachers are made of wood and has backs -- much more comfortable than aluminum without a back.

The accompanying article on The Game is also worth a read. This year's edition, number 124 in the series, is for the undisputed Ivy title. Both teams are undefeated in league play for the first time since 1968 I believe.

Labels: Sports, Yale

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posted by WFY @ 12:02 PM | |

Yale vs. Cornell

Yale has its first game at The Bowl today. The play-by-play guy is excited to be back in a real football stadium after visiting Georgetown last week. Who can blame him?

Football kicks off Ivy season - Yale Daily News
Cornell Football Rundown - The Ithaca Journal

Labels: Yale

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posted by WFY @ 7:09 AM | |

Beano Watch 09.19.2007

Carroll H. Cook ('54 Pitt) addressed the Nittany Lions twice in yesterday's chat.

M.A. (Altoona, PA): Ok Beano, is this finally the year that Joe Pa and his Nittany Lions get the monkey off their back with a win at Michigan?

SportsNation Beano Cook: (3:08 PM ET ) If you were to seacrh .com, I said Penn St. would play for the national title, which means they have to go undefeated, especially since the Big Ten is not that strong and the non-conference schedule is a disgrace. With that said, they will win, and meet LSU for the titel. I am surprised they are favored, by three, I thought the game would be a toss up.

As if I wasn't nervous enough about Saturday's game, Beano again reminds us that he is picking Penn State for the BCS Championship Game. He's like a curse!

Jason (WI): How do you see the Wisconsin Badgers finishing the year?

SportsNation Beano Cook: (3:30 PM ET ) They will lose to Penn State. They could win as many as 9-10 games, but they will lose to Penn State. But if they beat Joe Pa's team, I am sure I will hear from you after the game.

The prevailing trends suggest that Beano just ensured a Wisconsin victory by picking Penn State, four weeks ahead of that game. Congrats dl004d and Tortcaesar.

Bonus -- sending love to Yale:

Tony (New Haven, CT): Beano, with Yale and Harvard both picked highly in the Ivy league, can I count on seeing you in New Haven for The Game?

SportsNation Beano Cook: (3:05 PM ET ) I hope before I die, I would like to see one more Harvard-Yale game, but I won't make it this year. If ESPN sent me I would go, but they are not going to send me.

Send him, ESPN!

Labels: Beano Watch, PSU Football 2007, Yale

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posted by WFY @ 5:59 AM | |

YDN on Yale vs. Georgetown

Hoyas first to fall in ’07 attack - Yale Daily News

Labels: Yale

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posted by WFY @ 12:46 PM | |

Yale 28 Georgetown 14

This afternoon, my father Bill treated Erica and me to see his alma mater play in the nation's capital for the first time ever. Yale defeated Georgetown to go 1-0 on the season. The Hoyas fell to 0-3. Recap from yalebulldogs.com | Flickr set

Yale started off well with two touchdown drives in the first quarter with the wind at their back. The offense was led by Mike McLeod, a running back who compensates for a lack of speed with excellent vision. He found holes and made the right cut with incredible accuracy. He would score all four Bulldogs touchdowns and finish with 157 yards.

Georgetown scored in the second quarter with the wind behind them and were driving for a score at the end of the half. Georgetown had the ball inside the five with under ten seconds to go. Offsetting penalties brough the clock down to six. On the next play, Georgetown threw an incompletion and the officials sounded the final gun. The Hoyas head coach was furious that the clock had not stopped sooner and the half was over. Judging by the scoreboard clock, I think the Hoyas had good reason to be upset.

The second half opened with Yale threatening, but not scoring. Georgetown again drove deep into Yale territory, but turned the ball over on downs after being stopped inside the 1 yard line.

Yale went up 21-7 before yielding another Georgetown touchdown. Mcleod would score for the fourth and final time to put Yale up for good at 28-14, but Georgetown stormed back with less than 2 minutes to play. An interception deep into Yale territory put the game away.

We had a good time seeing the Elis play the Hoyas. It was the second time I had been on the campus to see a sporting event; the first being the Lady Lions triumph in December 2006...Multi-Sport Field is a half finished venue with bigger bleachers on the visiting side than the home side...Yale had more fans in to the crowd than Georgetown...We sat near the family of WR Chris Denny-Brian and the Abare twins, Larry and Bobby...Sophomore TE John Sheffield was dominant with 8 catches for 115 yards...Hoya QB Matt Bassuener is probably as blue as his Georgetown jersey after all the hits he took yesterday...yesterday's game occurred exactly six years after a Yale at Towson game we had tickets to was cancelled due to the 9/11 attacks...Yale won for the first time in front of me since 1993. The last time I saw them play, in 2001, they lost The Game...Yale's overall record in games I have been at rises to 2-4. They Elis lost to William & Mary (in Norfolk's Oyster Bowl) in 1983, lost to Navy in Annapolis in the mid 80s, lost to Harvard for the Ivy League title at The Bowl in 1987 (so cold), beat Harvard in 1993 at the Bowl, lost to Harvard 2001 at The Bowl...Yale begins its Ivy League title defense next weekend against Cornell at The Bowl.





Yale Bulldogs, Georgetown Hoyas, football, Ivy League, dc

Labels: Family and Friends, Photography, Sports, Yale

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posted by WFY @ 5:45 PM | |

7 out of 101 and 2 out of 10

ESPN Page 2 has a list of 101 things all sports fans must experience before they die. I have 94 to go.

20. The Stanley Cup playoffs (late spring, various NHL cities).

Sure it was the first round, but I did this in 2002 twice, both at MCI Center, both Capitals losses to Tampa Bay.

34. MLB Opening Day (April, various cities).

2005: Nats at Phillies*
2006: Nats vs. Mets
2007: Nats vs. Marlins*

*Actual Opening Day

41. An NBA game from courtside (winter-spring, any NBA city). You'll never again say they don't hustle.

1992 - Bullets vs. TrailBlazers - my mom got us company tickets.

61. Midnight Madness (October, all over the country). An annual late-night party at campuses across the country. (Say hi to Larry Eustachy if you see him.)

1999 (maybe 1998 too, I don't remember) at Penn State - It was technically "Late-Night Madness." You can debate whether this really counts though since it was Penn State and that was during the good old days when the were mediocre.

90. Little League game (spring, early summer, everywhere).

I played two years of little league.

96. NCAA women's volleyball championships (December, rotating sites).

Early round -- Penn State vs. UCLA at Rec Hall. Penn State went on to win the championship that year.

99. A Harlem Globetrotters game (many dates, many cities).

13th birthday the Capital Centre. They beat the hometown Washington Generals.

Things to avoid:

2. NFL exhibition games.
Three times, all Redskins

vs. Dolphins
vs. Browns
vs. Steelers

4. Baseball old-timers game.

1988 at Yankee Stadium


Glaring omissions
Army vs. Navy
Yale vs. Harvard (I've been to three)

h/t The Dude Abides

Labels: Capitals/NHL, Nats/MLB 2007, PSU Sports, Redskins/NFL, Sports, Wizards/NBA, Yale

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posted by WFY @ 12:27 PM | |

Hollow tribute

In front of my apartment building is Grace Murray Hopper Park, a pleasant county park that is great for a little recreation and a buffer between the rest of Pentagon City.

Back in late February, after six years of living behind the park, I noticed above rock was not actually a rock. We were building a snowman and threw a snowball at the rock. I was surprised to hear a hollow thud. I investigated and sure enough, the "rock" was actually some sort of composite material designed to look like a rock. It was hollow too.

Hopper, who was an important figure in the development COBOL, the first English programming language, lived in my building for many years. After getting a B.A. at Vassar and M.A. and PhD at Yale, she eventually found her way into the Navy. At the time of her retirement her rank was Rear Admiral. I found this great write-up about her on the yale.edu server.

I think someone as accomplished as Admiral Hopper deserves a real rock.

Grace Murray Hopper, Pentagon City, Arlington, Virginia

Labels: BeltwayLand, Virginia, Yale

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posted by WFY @ 12:04 PM | |

Big Uglies

I had been forgetting to do a post about these two brothers (seen in this 2004 file photo) for several weeks now. Since the 1980s, running around Beaver Stadium in the west and north stands in full uniforms and masks. I had not seen them this season and thought it odd since I think #83 had a streak of attending every Penn State game for about twenty years. Thankfully, they were back for Senior Day. Now if they could do something about those "Yale pants."

Labels: Yale

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posted by WFY @ 12:42 PM | |

Harvard will fight until the end, but Yale will win

Yale crushes Harvard to win share of Ivy football title - Yale Daily News
After an uncharacteristic drought, Yale won The Game, 34-13 over the Crimson at Harvard Stadium. Congratulations go to Dad ('63 Silliman) who enjoyed watching the Bulldogs reclaim not only their proper place as Harvard's superior, but also a share of the Ivy League crown. Hopefully, he was waving a white hankerchef at the TV.

Almost as good as the victory was the paranoia in Cambridge leading up to the game. The Cantabs were quite supspicious after some clever Blues duped a section in the stadium to hold up a card block that said "WE SUCK" in 2004.

You may have noticed I held off on posting about Yale this year. Being a supersticious sports fan, I couldn't help but notice Yale kept losing The Game when I talked about it.

Labels: Yale

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posted by WFY @ 5:30 AM | |

THE GAME VOL. 122

Yale (4-5, 4-2) vs. Harvard (6-3, 4-2)

There is a serious dearth of coverage for this year's edition of The Game (aka Yale vs. Harvard). The normally reliable Times does not have any mention of it in today's sports section and not even Beano Cook mentioned it this week. About the only thing that has gotten any attention about the contest is the new tailgating policy at the Yale Bowl (The Times). This is a shame.

While Yale-Harvard is not what it used to be, due to the move to I-AA and changing demographic trends that started in the post-WWII era, it is still an incredible rivalry without peer, save for Army-Navy. Beano wrote a great ESPN Insider article weeks ago that summed it up very well.

We're feeling a little academic this week, so what better place to shift the focus than to the Ivy League?

If you'll pass the pointer, we'll provide a little history -- important but little-known history in today's grand picture of college football.

In the first Associated Press poll, the writers voted three Ivy League teams in the Top 20: Penn (No. 10), Yale (No. 12) and Dartmouth (No. 13). In fact, in the first three polls, Dartmouth also finished No. 7 in 1937 and No. 20 in 1938.

Yale, to this day, is the NCAA's all-time leader in consensus All-America selections with 100. Harvard and Princeton remain in the top five, along with Notre Dame and Michigan. Bet you can stump a lot of people with that trivia question.

In a story just published by Street & Smith's, four Ivy League teams -- Yale, Princeton, Harvard and Penn -- were recognized among the 50 greatest college football programs of all time. Yale topped the Ivies at No. 7.

The Ivy League has had more than 250 NFL players (including 14 on active rosters) and more than 350 first-team All-Americans. The league also has had 58 NCAA Postgraduate Scholars and an impressive 37 Rhodes Scholars...

Ivy League teams remained an integral part of the national scene in college football for decades. This began to change in the 1950s when the Ivy League first eliminated spring practice and decided to get out of big-time football. Except for an occasional mention, the Ivy League slowly disappeared from the national scene...

The growth of state universities, because of the GI bill, started to create a large fan base for some schools. Each year, the graduates remain fans, and now some state universities -- such as Penn State and Michigan -- have more alumni than a small country in Europe has citizens.

Once the big universities became committed to football, the Ivy League teams and the small Catholic institutions were doomed to an uphill climb.

But even after the Ivy League de-emphasized football, attendance at its games remained solid and still brought frequent sellouts. However, in recent years, it seems the alumni continue to lose interest and even the students fail to attend on a regular basis, except for something special like Harvard-Yale.

Attendance at Ivy League games this year hovers around an average of 10,000, down 500 from last year.

Nonetheless, in hopes of attracting more fans, Yale -- which leads the league in attendance at an average of 11,134 -- is planning to spend money to improve the 64,000-seat Yale Bowl, which was built in 1914.

So much history has transpired between these two ancient programs. The 1968 game gave the world the brilliant Harvard Crimson headline, "Harvard beats Yale 29-29." At the same time, a young Yale cartoonist named Gary Trudeau had turned Bulldog QB Brian Dowling into "B.D.," a character that lives on to this day in Doonesbury. Last year, some Yale undergrads infiltrated stands in Cambridge and got Cantabs to hold a cardblock that said, "WE SUCK."

---

Modern football was invented at Yale by Walter Camp. The Yale Bowl was the first grand football stadium, and the model for the Rose Bowl. There is no experience comparable to attending The Game at the Bowl in person; it is something every football fan should do at least once. On three occasions I have had the pleasure and honor of being there; 1987 (-30 F windchill), 1993, and 2001. Yale has only won one of those contests ('93) but they all were exciting.

This year, both teams have a slight chance to tie for the Ivy title (if woeful Columbia can beat Brown) and Yale can win the H-Y-P Championship (which should really be Y-H-P) for the first time since '99. I am betting they will, they are due in The Game. I predict Yale wins, 24 - 19. You can watch The Game on WGN (or other Tribune Co. stations) at noon today. That is what I will be doing, rather than watching what a bunch of Midwesterners with a bad case of myopia and little understanding of history call "the game." And if you need to know who to root for, just remember that JFK said, "Harvard is the Michigan of the East!"

---

Okay, I have rambled on enough. I was going to say that my rambling is proof of why I was not Ivy material, but I read some of the coverage in the Yale Daily News and Harvard Crimson of the game and maybe I was wrong. Don't get me wrong, I love Penn State and would not trade it for anything, but I would love to have a rivalry this good, but then again, who wouldn't?

HARVARD WILL FIGHT TIL THE END, BUT YALE WILL WIN!

Labels: Beano Watch, History, Yale

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posted by WFY @ 7:31 AM | |

BULLDOG, BULLDOG, BOW WOW WOW, ELI YALE!

Mugsy is now Yalie - New Haven Register
The interregnum is over! A new Handsome Dan, the XVI, has been anointed. I did not even get a chance to post the USA Today article about the search.

Labels: Yale

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posted by WFY @ 5:56 AM | |

IT IS OFFICIAL: WASHINGTON NATIONALS

D.C.'s Team Officially Renamed the Nationals - The Post
It is official, they are the Nationals (new and improved Web site) and have a logo and the two hat designs I posted earlier today. Everyone was wearing the red cap (see video from The Post) on the stage, so I have to wonder if the MLB Shop is incorrect in calling the blue model (I like it!) the home cap. Now, the internal debate, do I go and buy a cap with the deal not sealed? Also, there was a knucklehead from the D.C. Statehood Green Party who went up on stage uninvited and began speaking in opposition to baseball. Charlie Brotman and Harold Brazil (D, At-large) grabbed him and whisked him off stage.

---

Phil Rogers - These Nats should fly - ESPN.com
A Chicago sportswriter thinks that we could see success sooner than later. We shall see.

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PENN STATE WRAP-UP

PSU REPORT CARD - Patriot-News
They got an "A" this week -- 'bout time.

---

David Jones - Paterno kept everyone guessing - Patriot-News
I did not think Joe was going to hang it up this week, despite the media speculation. His post-game comments (goPSUsports.com) were a bit odd too.

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FIELD GOAL CHAMPIONSHIP

Congratulations to Sam Basile, who in addition to being the WWN Maryland Bureau Chief is the champion field goal kicker. Sam iced the title, overcoming the terrible conditions (mud, wet grass, and um, victory celebration) that we all faced.

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SIR, HARVARD'S CHEATING WAS MUCH MORE BLATANT THIS YEAR

Harvard trounces Yale in The Game, 35-3 - Yale Daily News
Sounds like things got ugly.

---

CLY IN USAT

My brother Christopher had an item published last Wednesday on USAToday.com. Pop Candy columnist Whitney Matheson asked, "what is your guilty pleasure?" Go here and see what he had to say. Also, his questions page is now in blog form, be sure to check it out and ask him a question.

Labels: Yale

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