On the Field

Full team exercises pic from the @gocolumbialions Twitter account

Today marks the second day of on the field work for the Columbia Lions 2015 football training camp.

The athletic department provided some good color from day one with a brief video with Head Coach Al Bagnoli and several Tweets and Instagram pictures and videos throughout the day. 

I like having some guessing game fun with the pictures, and sometimes they really do solve minor mysteries. 

For example, there's a player with a #17 red jersey on the CU Football Twitter feed that must be freshman QB Kyle Castner based on process of elimination... unless I'm wrong. 

Uniforms

Obviously, the hope that we'd see the new uniforms on or about August 10th has faded but there's nothing like building up anticipation. 

Weather

For those of you wondering about the weather, it's been pretty good for August in New York City so far and the rest of the week is shaping up to be a bit cooler and a lot less humid... which is excellent news.

Scrimmage

I don't have all the details, but Columbia will scrimmage Kean College on September 3rd in the late afternoon. I believe the game will be at Wien Stadium but I am not sure about that. I'm just happy that the Lions are scrimmaging somebody after about five years of not scheduling any work with other teams in preseason. Most of us took the decision to nix scrimmages as a very bad sign.

Practice Times

Also for those wondering, the Bagnoli team has told the players that the early AM practices the endured for the last three years during the season will be no more. 

The one thing I liked about the early morning sessions was that they helped avoid class conflicts that in the Ivy League, are actually important issues for the real student athletes to tackle. But I was wondering how Columbia was going to make the pre-dawn practices work when they had been so unpopular and unproductive at Yale under Tom Williams. Sometimes you have to let the other guys fail so you don't have to.