Last Liberty

This is the final week of freedom for the Columbia football players as they will report to training camp on August 20^th and likely hit the field the next day.

The good news is that the intense heat that grabbed New York for much of July has passed and there shouldn’t be too much of a heat strain on the players.

But the big news is that there is so much mystery surrounding a number of our key positions. While I still strongly believe Brett Nottingham will win the starting QB job, I’m a lot less sure about who will get the starts at the open linebacker positions and in the secondary.

The weird thing is that even though the team will be actually working together again in camp and doing a lot of newsworthy things, we’re likely to go into an intense “dark period” for news in the next 2-3 weeks.

I’m not in the business of tipping off our opponents, but I have been wishing for more depth-chart updates during camp for years. I’m not sure about the best way to do that, but if a player if doing something to lock down an open position in camp it would be great to know about it. NFL teams and their press corps do this every day of the week in training camp, so I’m not 100% sure why we can’t do in the Ivy league.


Picture It

Meanwhile, I continue to find more rare pictures of Baker Field that show what the old structure looked like.

Below is a picture sent to me by a loyal reader depicting an interception in the 1952 game against Penn, (click to enlarge).

In the background you can see the home, (west east), side of the field, the two-tiered press box, the very crowded stands, and the extreme sloping of the stands along the edges.