December 1, 2006

Problems Even a Mascot Couldn't Fix

83-32--Dartmouth men's basketball gets historically wallopped.
"They missed shots and we're a lot bigger than they are," said Kansas coach Bill Self. "So we should have had a huge advantage from a rebounding standpoint, because they weren't very big."
Dartmouth's 32 points was the lowest tally for any team in the history of Kansas's fieldhouse.

Maybe that school pride issue isn't about mascots at all. Maybe it's about the fact that Ivy League sports are seriously as much fun to watch as high school sports, sometimes not even that. And if you came to the Ivy League expecting anything else, you're an idiot.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous11:21 AM

    You paint with a broad brush, sir.

    For one thing, women's sports at Dartmouth are consistently competitive with the top teams in the nation. The women's hockey team is full of olympians and is consistently in the top 3 in the country, the soccer team finished with a no. 18 ranking, the lacrosse team has been to the final 4, the basketball team is sometimes competitive nationally, etc.

    On the men's side, the Ivy League's (as well as Dartmouth's, though not always) soccer, hockey, and lacrosse teams are consistently competitive on the national stage as well.

    The joke aspect of Ivy League sports is in the realm of the two big-money college sports: mens basketball and football. In those sports, other Division I schools have taken it upon themselves to become the farm teams of the NBA and NFL (major league baseball has actual farm teams, and the NHL has both farm teams and Canadian and European junior leagues as its primary talent pools).

    As such, when an Ivy basketball or football team plays against a professional league's farm team, the result is predictable, as it was here.

    What makes me sad is that many of the old alums see results like this and think that Dartmouth needs to put more resources into athletics and compromise its academics more.

    I know you hate tradition, but Ivy league sports used to stand for something decent, along the lines of the "renaissance man" ideal and the benefits of supplementing academics with athletics. Nowadays, any claim to that ideal is either naive or dishonest.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You're right. But as you sort ofpoint out, mens basketball and football (and to a much lesser extent hockey) dominate in terms of importance. They are all that really matter when it comes to comparing your school to others. I've never heard of someone making fun of another school for having a crappy men's soccer team.

    ReplyDelete