Category: Columbia Lions
WR Stephens shines as White defeats Blue 9-0 in Spring Game
For those in attendance, Friday night’s spring game was the first opportunity to see what lies ahead for Columbia’s football team once the class of 2010 graduates next month.
Blue faced off against White in the evening game, and half of the Lions left the field victorious. The white team—made up of the first team offense and the second team defense—beat the blue team 9-0.
Football to Showcase Talent in Annual spring game
The football team will hit the field for its annual spring game tonight, giving fans a glimpse of what the 2010 squad will look like.
For those of you who have been in serious football withdrawal since the 2009 season ended, today is your lucky day. Tonight your beloved Light Blue will take the field again in its annual spring game.
For those of you who haven’t been eagerly awaiting tonight’s game, the rundown is this: the Lions will scrimmage themselves tomorrow starting 7 p.m. at Robert K. Kraft Field. The first team offense and second team defense will compose one team and the opposing team will be comprised of the second team offense and the first team defense, creating solid matchups all around.
Fans headed up to Baker tomorrow will undoubtedly have many questions concerning the future of coach Wilson’s team—most of which have to do with the replacements for Columbia’s graduating seniors. Who will be filling in for the first and second string positions vacated by our star players?
Ivy League looks to expand TV coverage
Ivy League sporting events may be coming soon to a television set near you.
In an effort to reach out to a wider fan base, Ivy League Executive Director Robin Harris said the league is in talks with multiple national cable and satellite television networks in order to form a comprehensive multi-year agreement with a network to broadcast Ivy League sports nationwide.
Although Harris declined to give any details on which networks the league has been negotiating with, she said the deal would allow viewers across the country to tune into games without having to purchase a package deal ahead of time.
2010 Columbia Schedule Released; Spring Game Set for April 23
Columbia will open the 2010 football campaign with four straight home games on Robert K. Kraft Field, beginning on Saturday, September 18 vs. Fordham in the annual Liberty Cup game.
After a year off, Columbia will renew its series with Towson on Sept. 25, before kicking off the Ivy League season on Saturday, October 2 against Princeton. The four-game homestand will conclude against Lafayette on Oct. 9.
Why Ivy League Should Bring Back All-Star Game
Whether you’ve been watching or not, it’s all-star season in professional sports. All of these recent all-star games gave me an idea for postseason play that is not unheard of in the Ivy League: Let’s have an Ivy League football all-star game.
Patriot Games: Scholarships Pose Threat to the Ivy Way
Imagine, for a second, that instead of traveling to Holy Cross tomorrow to watch Harvard take on the Crusaders, you were one of over 30,000 fans packing into a maximum-capacity Harvard Stadium as the Crimson kicked off its season against a major-conference team, say, Boston College. It’s a pleasant thought, but the reality is far more complex.
Fordham’s decision in June to begin awarding football scholarships starting with this year’s recruiting class piqued the interest of a lot of people in the Ivy League football community. The move shows a changing mentality in the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS, formerly Division 1-AA), which includes the Ancient Eight.
“It’s something we’re definitely keeping an eye on because if they go scholarships—we’re talking about the league now—it will change dramatically,” Harvard coach Tim Murphy says. “The last time any Patriot League school had scholarships in that league was Holy Cross in the ’80s and ’90s. They dominated Eastern football at this level in a way that wasn’t seen before and hasn’t been seen since.”
Harvard Reduces Sports Travel as Ivys Cut Athletics to ‘Core’
Dartmouth College, where former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson was an All Ivy football player in the 1960s, has scrapped a $15 million stadium renovation project as its sports endowment plunged as much as 18 percent.
Harvard University, the wealthiest U.S. school, shuttered its Malkin Athletic Center to save money and cut its sports travel budget. Brown University in Rhode Island is calling on private donors to fund sports projects. Construction and hiring freezes are in place at Cornell University.
The deepest recession in five decades may leave the Ivy League behind on the field. The economy is choking donations, battering endowments and threatening to eliminate some sports programs. The eight schools, which have educated 14 U.S. presidents and half of the 110 justices in Supreme Court history, have estimated endowment losses of as much as 35 percent this year.
New Ivy League Commissioner Not Rushing into Football Playoff Debate
After about the third time I rephrased the same question, Robin Harris couldn’t mistake the direction of the conversation Friday.
Harris, the new executive director/commissioner of the Ivy League, who replaced Jeffrey Orleans on July 1, gently rebuked my attempts to discern whether she arrives with a predilection toward allowing the Ivy League to compete in the postseason in football. It’s one of two hot button league issues, along with a postseason league tournament in men’s and women’s basketball. Or so I thought.
“Actually, that topic (football postseason) never came up in the interview process,” said Harris, a native New Yorker who used to spend summers at Camp Hadar in Clinton and whose parents have lived in Madison for over 20 years.
Can the Ivy League Get Its Game Back?
Lackluster teams prompt calls for change; a new chief’s listening tour.
The schools of the Ivy League are among the nation’s finest and richest, with billions in endowments under their command. From law to business to medicine, they’re No. 1 in practically every department but one: sports.
Why are the Ancient Eight increasingly irrelevant in the most competitive arena of all? The short answer, the long-accepted one, is that they choose to be: that they won’t sacrifice their academic ideals by giving athletic scholarships to athletes. But other factors—like a long-standing ban on postseason football games and the schools’ academic standards for athletes—appear to be dragging the league down.
Columbia Football Ready for Annual Spring Showcase
For the past few weeks, the Columbia football team has been practicing, and its efforts will culminate in the annual Blue and White game that will be held at Robert K. Kraft Field at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday. In this game, fans will be able to see what the core of the team looks like and how players have progressed over the winter as well as to prognosticate as to how the Lions can build on their 2-8 record from the 2008 season.
Former Columbia QB Archie Roberts Still Making Big Plays
It was the Field of Dreams that Eli and Peyton Manning never saw. The “stadium” featured the oldest all-wood grandstand in the country. Each summer, long before the first kickoff, New York City sent its building inspectors through the grandstand to mark the planks that had to be replaced before the law would let the Columbia University Lions roar – or all too often whisper.
You took the Seventh Avenue IRT subway and got off at 215th Street. Columbia students sat on the stands facing west, the one that bore the full brunt of the wind whistling off the Hudson River. Long gone was the glory of the Rose Bowl victory of 1934. Year after year, Ivy League rivals could say with certainty, “Anemia, thy name is Columbia football.”
Bowling Green Finalizes FCS-Heavy Coaching Staff
Bowling Green State University head football coach Dave Clawson (Richmond) has announced the hiring of Mark Carney (Fordham, Richmond), Mike Elko (Hofstra, Richmond, Fordham, Penn, Stony Brook) and Adam Scheier (Lehigh, Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth) to complete his coaching staff for the 2009 season.
- 1234 words - FCS News Articles, Richmond Spiders, Hofstra Pride, Columbia Lions, Penn Quakers, Dartmouth Big Green, Princeton Tigers, Fordham Rams, Lehigh Mountain Hawks, Stony Brook Seawolves At Last, a Big Game to Rile Delaware
Proximity, history could charge UD-DSU meetings.
The University of Delaware and Delaware State University have some catching up to do.
Football rivalries don’t form overnight. But UD and DSU already have many of the ingredients to make this one special.
On Tuesday, the schools announced their first regular-season meeting will take place Sept. 19, followed by three annual games beginning in 2012.
Third-String Rummy
The New Yorker has reservations about the inclusion of a third-string football player - and one season sprint football player - at the Ivy league dinner earlier this month.
By last Thursday night, with the changing of the guard in Washington complete, some star power had returned to New York, and there, in the grand ballroom at the Waldorf-Astoria, sat an assortment of media and political figures in tuxedos, such as might have been found at one of the lesser inaugural balls: Stone Phillips, Iowa governor Chet Culver, “Hill Street Blues” star Ed Marinaro, Donald Rumsfeld. Ambassador Thomas Stephenson had just flown in from Lisbon. Ted Kennedy couldn’t make it, but he sent a letter to be read on his behalf by the TV newsman Jack Ford. Five hundred dollars a plate, recession be damned. The Reverend Jason Pankau, a personal life coach from Stamford, offered an invocation from Proverbs 27:17: “ ‘As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.’ We all share the common bond of having been sharpened . . . on Ivy League football fields.”
Gross Sampling Slice of Big Apple at Columbia
Passed over by the big schools, Alex Gross still had options coming out of Fairmont High School if he wanted to continue playing football.
Ultimately, it came down to a scholarship at Wofford, preferred walk-on status at Northwestern or no financial aid whatsoever at an Ivy League school in New York City.
“Big-city life is definitely different,” Gross, a sophomore linebacker, noted this week while home on break from Columbia University. “Never a dull moment, that’s for sure.”
Columbia Downs Cornell to Capture Second League Win
Head coach Norries Wilson came into the post-game press conference in his socks after his Gatorade bath in Columbia’s (2-7, 2-4 Ivy) 17-7 win over Cornell (4-5, 2-4 Ivy) on Saturday.
“They keep ruining shoes and shirts,” Wilson said. “I’m going to go out there with a poncho.”
Cornell Loses Turnover Battle, Game to Columbia
NEW YORK, N.Y. — On Saturday afternoon at Wien Stadium, the 3,811 people in attendance at the Cornell-Columbia matchup witnessed two things that have never happened before in college football: Cornell senior quarterback Nathan Ford tossing four interceptions and Columbia winning a football game. Perhaps the latter is an exaggeration, but the Lions’ 17-7 victory marks only the fifth time that the program has captured an Ivy League win in the last five years.
Unfortunately, two of those victories have been at the expense of Cornell.
Freeing up Ford Pays Dividends for Cornell
ITHACA — A little freedom has gone a long way for Cornell quarterback Nathan Ford.
The Big Red coaching staff left a lot of responsibility in the hands of its three-year starter during last Saturday’s win against Dartmouth, and Ford responded with a record-setting performance.
Ford connected on 25 of his 30 attempted passes, which was a new school record for passing efficiency in a game (83.3 percent). And a lot of that success can be attributed the implementation of an offensive package that gave Ford more options for where to throw the ball.
Tavani Unhappy with 'Pards' Spotty Offense
Unit is banged up, inconsistent and in need of a jumpstart.
The Lafayette football team is five weeks into the season, and coach Frank Tavani should be pretty satisfied. The Leopards are, after all, 4-1.
But, the admitted perfectionist is far from satisfied – particularly with the offense.
‘’I can’t believe I’m still talking about the same things after all this time,'’ Tavani said Sunday. ‘’We are so much better offensively, but we are not progressing and getting better to my expectations.'’
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