With 7 days to go until the Ivy League Football Coaches Media
Day, I like to help out the folks who tend to ask the questions.
90% of them have little to no knowledge of the individual
teams and their players, and just a cursory knowledge about the Ivy League.
That usually ends up being very good news for the coaches
who don’t want to answer the tough questions and bad news for the League’s
efforts to make the event in general somewhat interesting and informative.
So for the next 7 days, I’ll be putting together a very
brief overview of each Ivy team other than CU and I hope the truly lost media people
who need a refresher will find what they
need to know.
Let’s start with Brown:
2012 Record: 7-3
(4-3 Ivy, tied for 3rd)
Coach: Phil Estes
Last Season in One Sentence:
Brown remained a title contender and an excellent overall team, showing
improvement on defense but falling off a bit on offense.
Four Returning Brown
Players You Need to Know: QB Patrick Donnelly, WR Tellef Lundevall, DE
Michael Yules, RB John Spooney
Big Losses: DB AJ
Cruz, LB Stephen Zambetti, WR Jonah Fay
Big Questions:
Will we see more of an effective running attack this season? Is the returning,
(from a year running track), speedster John Spooney the #1 tailback on the
depth chart? What will it take to beat Harvard at Harvard in week two?
Jake’s Overall Take: Brown
is always dangerous, and Donnelly is the most underrated QB in the league with
his two top 2012 receivers, (Lundevall and Jordan Evans), coming back. But the
team does seem to be on a slight downward track since the final weeks of 2011. Not
beating Harvard at home in week two last year put their title hopes into a
death spiral and the 19-0 shutout loss to Princeton is still a head-scratcher. Now Brown has to take on the Crimson at Harvard and they haven't won there in a very long time. Losing
a defensive leader like Cruz will be a blow, but in general this is still a
very strong team. A game changer could be Spooney at RB, but I’m not convinced
he’s really the answer… otherwise he would have had more carries in his
sophomore season before he left for track in 2012.
5 comments:
Sounds like another 4-3 finish for Brown (at best). But I guess they like that in Providence.
What happened between our coaches and the Brown coaches after the game last year? There was some sort of dust-up.
It had something to do with equipment sharing. I'm still not 100% sure, but Mangurian and co. thought they weren't treated like visiting teams usually are by opposing crews.
I remember now: Mangurian wanted to film the game from the sideline but was denied outlet access by Estes on the basis that he said there is a rule against it.
Guess he should have paid for a one day subscription to Brown's live TV feed of the game, which featured the most "homeric" (no, not pertaining to the Greek historian) color man I have ever seen.
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