1) Harvard
Well, Tim Murphy proved me wrong and showed that he CAN win back-to-back tough road Ivy games. Harvard is just a much better team with Connor Hempel and that's all there is to it.
2) Dartmouth
The Big Green played well enough, (compare their performance to Princeton's 49-7 loss to Harvard last week), to show they're now an elite Ivy team.
3) Yale
The win over Columbia wasn't all that impressive, and I question the size on the defensive and offensive lines, but the Elis are still a top three team.
4) Princeton
This team's stock is falling fast. Not drubbing lowly Cornell is a bad sign.
5) Brown
Getting better every week. Converted QB-to-RB Seth Rosenbauer may be the savior for the final three weeks of the season.
6) Penn
Let's stop talking about Al Bagnoli and start talking about this terrible offense. Injuries played a role, but with the Quaker hopes riding on the brittle Lyle Marsh, that was to be expected. This is a recruiting fail in a big way.
7) Cornell
Hooolllldddd Everything! The Big Red may have found a really good QB in sophomore Robert Somborn. He almost pulled off a Cornell upset vs. Princeton by throwing for 315 and two TD's without an INT on Saturday. Suddenly, Cornell has a shot at winning two of the last three games.
8) Columbia
A new bragging right for the Lions is the Columbia starters seem to be playing with more urgency against the opposing second teamers and uninterested starters. Yay.
31 comments:
I didn't see the Harvard vs Dartmouth game but it seems Harvard's defense came through, holding Dartmouth to field goals. 23-12 final score.
Cornell does surprise every now and again. Not sure they are good for anything more than a win over Columbia this season.
Penn...well, it is too early to say the sky is falling. It just adds more pressure on Bagnoli's successor to turn it around in 1 season or there will be a lot more questions next year.
Boy, sure looks less and less like we're gonna beat anyone this year.
Whats amazing, as has been stated before, is that Dartmouth and Princeton go through win-less seasons,and promptly rebound to upper tier status ("elite" if you will) whereas we plummet like stones in the Mariana Trench.
Why us...or more correctly why not us!!!
Jake,
The word "disinterested" means
impartial. The word you want is
"uninterested."
Tod Howard Hawks CC 66
This is absolutely the worst Columbia team I have ever seen. If Columbia were a public company it would have faced derivative litigation by now. Allowing this situation to continue after last year's debacle is simply disgraceful. Bollinger owes an apology to the players, their families who entrusted their sons to this trainwreck, the alumni, the Columbia community, and the entire Ivy League for making a mockery of the season. If Murphy had any decency she would offer her resignation right now instead of picking up a fat paycheck while flying around the country at our expense for the next nine months on her farewell tour.
Way to go, Tod, not many know that distinction (but Columbians should).
Allie
Although Princeton has no defense this year and, without good receivers, a hobbled offense, they are not out of this yet. Yale is fully capable of both losing to Princeton and beating Harvard, and Princeton could squeak past Dartmouth at home. You could see Harvard and Princeton sharing the title yet again.
Meanwhile, it all hangs on Cornell for the Lions, though at this point they could play the Cornell Band and still drop passes all over the place.
I'm uninterested.
This is decidedly not "the worst" Columbia team I've ever seen. Several teams during "the streak" were clearly worse. To a poit where I actually worried for their ohysical safety duribg games, so overmatched they seemed to be.
Mangurian probably is, however, the worst Columbia head coach I've seen. Which is saying a lot given the likes of Navarro and Bill Campbell.
As for Murphy, going after her for her lack of football success becomes tiresome. She's hired Kyle Smith; that alone was a wondrous achievement. (Now the next AD "simply" has to retain him.) Ms. Glance, I suspect, will turn out to be an equally good choice. Even crew appears in good hands.
I agree Kyle Smith looks promising, but I need more time to say he was a gem hire.
The reason why Murphy deserves so much scrutiny for the Mangurian hire is not only has he failed, but the hiring process was decidedly not above board. I have called it flat out fraudulent, because we hired a supposed "search team" when the decision was already made based on a phone call from an unemployed, (with good reason), Mangurian to Murphy weeks earlier.
Even if Murphy were a stellar AD in other areas, the unethical hiring process of Mangurian in our biggest sport by expenditure, is clear grounds for dismissal and vilification. I don't need to be mean spirited about it, but I do intend to passionately remind everyone about this serious breach of her responsibilities for as long as others choose to defend her.
Thanks for the correction Tod, I have used the word correctly many times even on this blog. I'm not sure why I got it wrong this time.
I don't care that Diane's search process was a sham and not by the book, I care at what a poor choice it was and that Diane should have known PM well enough to realize how bad of a hire he would be here.
If at this current time CU has a handshake deal with the next Jerry Berndt (showing my age there), Murphy, or Bagnoli, and we still had to go through the "search process" to make it look appropriate, so be it. Just get the hire right and also make a true commitment to the program for once and for all.
WOF:
I hear you, but I think if we had a real good candidate or two Dianne never would have done everything so under the table.
My point is that Mangurian was "garbage in, garbage out." Had he been the right guy, Dianne would have had the confidence to put him in the mix with other candidates for the job.
Jerry Berndt was solid at Penn but washed out at Rice and Temple. There was an 0-111 season in there.
Jake, what bothers me is that when Mangurian was hired, and even before when there was talk of him coming aboard, you were all in favor, referring to him if I remember correctly as an "excellent choice." Fair weather friend?
And lest we forget, in addition to her excellent hire of Kyle Smith, Ms. Murphy brought us Brett Boretti, one of the the best baseball coaches in the Ivy League, if not the nation! Plus a number of other teams that are doing quite well. Nobody's been able to solve the football riddle since the hiring of Buff Donelli (who was the AD then?), and his glory days were short-lived.
Allie: check out what I really said about Pete when his name first surfaced. I said I "thought" he was an excellent choice for Cornell.
http://roarlions.blogspot.com/2011/12/breaking-mangurian-in-mix.html?m=1
And the more important point is that when his name first surfaced, my sources correctly told me it was already a fait accomplis. But I was not at liberty to fully report that. And what does that matter anyway? The point is nobody was ever interested in Pete for the job other than Pete until he called Dianne cold. The hire stank from day one and I refuse to continue to be criticized for not bring nasty to him on day one by the same people who attack me for going after him after 0-18. .
Being nasty to him I mean.
Many of the other candidates, upon hearing mangurian was in the mix, knew the whole process was a joke.
all of this is indefensible. Bad AD and a bad coach, match made in heaven for a program that does not know how to get out of its own way.
Jake, any idea why Diane did this, though? I mean, she had to know if she tilted everything in PM's favor it was gling to be a career decision for her, too.
Allie, very few of us were in favor of the hire, most of us wanted TG. However, once he was hired we tried to be like you and take an optimistic perspective. Fiurst year he went 3-7 with the remnants of Norries' kids, even though he tried to root out as many from the prior administration as he could.
He has gone 0-18 ver since.
Good thing he separated himself from us loser former players while he nuilt the program from the ground up ...
Don't quite understand this Tom Gilmore business. I know that Diane tried to hire him before Norris, but why hasn't any other Ivy School offered him a job all these years . Must be something there.
Everyone has their own culture and what they see as a fit. Look what went on with Yale after the Tom Williams scandal. They spun in circles with no clue what to do. Then Yale went to Harvard for a suggestion (!) and got Tony Reno from H's staff.
So things work in their own way within every institution. It's not like Gilmore has lit it up at HC. He's definitely qualified to run an Ivy program but maybe he doesn't have the right mojo an uppity AD is looking for. I see that ALL THE TIME at Google. If you want to see how uppity, snotty young generation people with technical skills base hiring decisions, look no further than Google and Facebook corporate culture as THE case examples.
It's not about qualifications. People look for a fit that represent their own interests.
For 40 years now, Columbia has been looking for the "right
fit". Don't know what it is- does it change over time?
But you can't fit a square peg into Columbia's round hole- there is no right fit at Columbia because the school refuses to allow it.
Yale offered the job to Steve Addazio after Williams was let go, but Addazio turned it down to stay at Florida. Beckett had the right guy- needless to say Addazio wanted the Columbia job years before but the athletics committee turned him down.
Yale then went to Reno who has been on the Yale staff under Sidlecki for years.
We never offered Gilmore, we got cold feet for whatever reason, both times....
Gents
Bottom line is that CU cannot make a smart pick. They are institutionally incapable. We desperately need outside expert counselling, re both AD and coach.
More importantly, we need a public commitment from the Prez office that we will fully back athletics as a key component of our CU ethos.
Period,
WOF- that is incorrect- Murphy tried to get him the first time and Holy Cross would not let him out of the contract -Columbia would not buy him out - I would also say that Gilmore used it to get a better contract with HC
WOF- and Penn's football program was as bad as Columbia, and they finally made the commitment . I will say that they had a big advantage over Columbia by having Franklin Field on the campus.
Agree about Penn, once they made the commitment they never looked back. What Berndt accomplished at Penn was near miraculous but you are right it has to start with the school committing.
chip kelly would struggle here without Bollinger's backing.
WOF: Chip Kelly's fate at Columbia would be exactly similar to every other football coach here, without Bolly support!
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