It’s week 2 of the IvySports Roundup, and what a week it was. The IOC’s choice for host of the 2016 Olympics made Brazil’s president cry and real Americans happy. TV ratings for certain shows skyrocketed due to imagined nudity and sex with employees. And Ithaca was invaded by yet another rapidly-spreading infection, although this one was much more delicious.

Of course none of that has to do with Ivy League sports, so let’s hurry up and get to the countdown. Here’s the previous roundup if you want to know where the schools ranked last week. But if you read that, you’re living in the past. Things are different now man, so get with the program. Start living in the now. After all, tomorrow is just your future yesterday.

1. Columbia

Holds (insanely huge) bragging rights (for decades to come) over: Princeton

Columbia football hasn’t had a winning record in the Ivy League since Rocko’s Modern Life was on TV. Princeton is only 3 years removed from winning the league title. And even though the two schools were picked to finish 5th and 6th in the Ancient Eight this year, not even the Mayans could have predicted the 38-0 scoreline the Lions laid on the Tigers–a level of destruction not seen outside of Roland Emmerich movies. (Coincidently 38-0 is the range your IQ needs to be in for you to enjoy a Roland Emmerich movie.) In the league opener for both schools, Columbia left New Jersey with their largest margin of victory since 1972 and their first in-league road shutout since 1961. Lions quarterback Millicent “The Magnificent” Olawale ran for a touchdown and threw for two more, while cornerback Jared Morine had a 51-yard pick six.

One might say that calling this game utter destruction is an exaggeration since the stats are actually very close and the game only got out of hand in the fourth quarter where the Lions scored three of their five touchdowns. And to that we say shut up Princeton Athletic Department’s writeup of the game, because none of that matters. What’s important is that Princeton, traditionally near the top of the Ivy League in almost all sports, was completely blown out by the “perennial pushover” Columbia Lions. It was a such a humiliating loss that in order for the Daily Princetonian to find a silver lining, they had to reach back to 1890–you know, before the forward pass was legal. This is the event that will bring Princeton and its fans down a peg for years to come. So remember fellow Ivy Leaguers, the next time the Princeton band shows up at your school for a game and starts acting like the dickweeds they are, just walk up and politely remind them about the day their beloved Tigers lost 38-0 to Columbia at home. There is no comeback.

The rest of the schools follow the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

• Brown: Recent alums make millions playing poker, prove that college is pointless
• Columbia: People bring their pets to church Sunday, fail to realize that all animals are deeply into Wicca
• Cornell: Yep, you’re way too boring for us, especially your name, Block. How more boring could you be with a name like Block?
• Harvard: Business School recognizes that the economic meltdown was entirely their fault
• Penn: The Daily Pennsylvanian masturbates
• Princeton: Princeton is out Dartmouth-ing Harvard and Yale
• Yale: Infamous Danish cartoonist visits New Haven because he doesn’t feel like his life is in danger enough
• Yale: It’s an Ivy League school, but it doesn’t have any ivy. What’s up with that? And what’s the deal with the Swiss army? Do they have to fight off invaders with corkscrews and toe clippers?

Ivy League sports may have been taking place for a month now, but the season doesn’t really count unless the IvySports Roundup is there to sort it all out. That is why all Ivy League games before February 2009 never really happened. We decided to wait until this week to commence with the Roundup because we wanted some head-to-head Ancient Eight contests to help make our intricate rankings system more robust. Also, TV Land had a M*A*S*H marathon and we have priorities.

For those new to the IvySports Roundup, here’s how it works: Each week we rank the eight Ivy League schools based on the performance of their athletics teams over the prior weekend, thereby making it just as legitimate as any other college ranking. In addition, we list which colleges have bragging rights over their Ivy rivals. This is a helpful guide for students who want to know where to direct their taunting Facebook messages. Please note that even schools towards the bottom of the rankings may still have bragging rights over colleges above them. That’s because there are many Ivy sporting results to boast about, although some are more legitimate than others. And since we’re in the fall sports season, no sport is more important to the rankings than Ivy League football–even though all the schools have been eliminated from the playoffs since 1978. Sorry college soccer, but having your game clock count down instead of up puts you behind field hockey in terms of importance.

And with that, onto the rankings, starting with the school that had the most painful end to the 2008-09 season.

1. Cornell

Holds bragging rights over: Yale

Over the past decade, the quality of Big Red football has run the gamut from “meh” to “bluh”, and this season was expected to fall somewhere in that range. We have no idea why they’ve been so consistently mediocre. Landing top recruits should be easy when you’re located in the best college town in America*. But while Cornell may still find themselves in the bottom half of the standings in November, for now they sit alone at the top. Two weeks in and the Big Red are the only team out of the eight to have a perfect 2-0 record. Cornell followed up an opening game win over Bucknell with a 14-12 victory at Yale. The Red were close to losing their lead late in the annual Hogwarts Bowl after the Bulldogs scored a touchdown with no time remaining. But the two-point conversion failed and Cornell survived for the road win. (Oddly, the Yale Athletics’ video highlights of the game omits this key final play. Hey don’t be bitter, hockey season’s just around the corner.) Both these successes have earned the Big Red 14 points in the latest FCS poll, which Cornell Athletics considers big news for some reason. “Yay! People think we’re slightly better than Alabama A&M!”

Also this game was broadcast live on Versus, so an audience of 10 people got to see Cornell’s win. We are joking of course. With the dispute with DirecTV, it’s closer to 6 people.

The rest of the schools follow the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

• Columbia: Nepal’s prime minister delivers address, attendees distracted by his funny hat
• Cornell: Collegetown traffic light to be replaced, students to petition against the invasion of evil traffic signal corporations
• Dartmouth: Green buildings actually closer to chartreuse
• Harvard: Hillel students filmed for South Korean TV, attempt to explain why dog isn’t kosher
• Penn: University to be visited by the worst ice cream truck ever
• Princeton: Student arrested for throwing beer at Cottage Club security guard, club suing for damages caused by low-quality beer on lawn
• Princeton: Butler dorm to be named for John Bogle ’51 after turning down offer from Mr. and Mrs. Katzenjammer W. Rectum, Esq.
• Yale: Cornell-Yale football game to be televised on Versus, ensuring that all sports fans will only be watching ESPN on Saturday
• Yale: Groups protest alteration of cemetery walls, claim proposed changes will allow Link to easily break in, defeat the ReDeads, and dig up the Hylian shield

• Brown: Class of ’08 alum to orchestrate numerous crushing election losses in the coming years
• Columbia: Finnish Presidents speaks at Columbia, students disappointed to learn it’s not the one that looks like Conan O’Brien
• Cornell: CIT to add Microsoft e-mail option for those who think Google isn’t evil enough
• Cornell: Daily Sun says, “Don’t listen to us. Ever.”
• Dartmouth: School seeks national media coverage for inauguration, plans for a drunk Larry Summers to interrupt Jim Yong Kim’s speech and declare Beyoncé to be awesome at math
• Harvard: Film archive receives 800,000-piece gift from German collectors, is disappointed to discover that it consists of 800,000 “Triumph of the Will” stills
• Penn: Admissions office to alter “Why Penn?” essay question after years of applicants answering “Why not?”
• Princeton: Renovated Butler dorms remained unnamed after the university was forced to turn down a large donation from prominent alum Anthrax Q. Vagina ’47
• Yale: School of Engineering and Applied Science promises to suck less
• Yale: Judy Blume speaks at Master’s Tea, attendees treated to complimentary freckle juice and superfudge

Hey prospective college students! Are you struggling to decide which college is the right one for you? Well have no fear, because USA Today has come to your rescue with their brief write-up of some researcher’s rankings of the nation’s best college towns.

The college town is one of the most important factors for prospective students in making their college decision. After all, in a typical freshman’s week of studying, crying, and having sex (not necessarily in that order), he or she has a massive two hours of free time to spend in the town. And when that student is in said town, it must contain the resources necessary to allow the student to fulfill his or her important tasks of running to Wegmans and buying pot (not necessarily in that order). Determining suitable college towns is not something to be taken lightly. That is why dozens of researchers and statisticians spent months laboring to identify the towns with the most optimal sketchy bar-to-student ratios.

And in the end, Ithaca came out on top! This is truly a great day for Cornell (and to a lesser and more communications-based extent, Ithaca College). Take that Columbia and Harvard! Ithaca truly is gorges, just like your mom.

Oh, and about those quotation marks in the title. First, Ithaca technically was the best college town in America. This article was written back in the beginning of September–well before the great Pig Microbe Armageddon of 2009. We didn’t know about this article until now because, well, it was in USA Today and we haven’t stayed in any hotels in the past month.

Secondly, a “college town” is defined in this instance as a metropolitan area with a population of under 250,000 people. There were four categories in total, with the other four consisting of metropolitan areas with over 250,000 people, over 1 million people, and over 2.5 million people. In that last category, New York was number 1 and Boston was number 3. So Columbia and Harvard may not necessarily agree to “taking that”.

Finally, the towns Ithaca beat in its category include State College, Ames, and Iowa City. This competitive situation is known in economic game theory as the “guy with one leg versus the three guys with no legs in the Tour de France” condition.

Okay, so maybe its not so great a ranking for Ithaca. Cornell recognizes this, as they didn’t even mention the article on their website. Though that may be due to this ranking’s lack of wizarding movie tie-ins.

College rankings are generally quite zany, but this year’s lists have taken ridiculousness to a new level. We’ve seen the Princeton Review name Columbia as topping the list of the best college towns–with Barnard coming in third despite being located three yards away. We’ve seen Forbes rank Cornell as the 207th best university in America thanks to a formula that assigns a 25% weight to RateMyProfessors.com. We’ve even seen GQ magazine redefine the Jeremy Piven Hierarchy of Assholery™ by sticking Brown at the top of their “Douchiest Colleges” list.

It’s all made for great amusement (and page views, cha-ching!). However, we here at IvyGate feel we can do one better in terms of ludicrousness, while at the same time create a college ranking equally as reasonable as anything U.S. News can produce. (Ivy League schools only, of course.)

Like Forbes, we’re also going to utilize a website in our ranking methodology. However, we’re going to show up those flat-tax pussies by giving our chosen website 100% of the weight. Also, the website we’ve chosen is one that, like RateMyProfessors, is very popular with college students. The difference between IvyGate’s data source and Forbes’ is that ours is a trusted source of factual information and it is a better teacher than any professor in history–because no professor has encyclopedic knowledge of British monarchs, the periodic table, and Seth Rogen movies. Our chosen source of college ranking data is Sporcle. Read the rest of this entry »

Well we’ve come to that point in the summer where its time for the temporary IvyGate editors (Max and Michael, not that it matters) to say goodbye. It hasn’t been a great season for the Ivy League though. Cornell lost everyone’s social security numbers. Harvard is broke and is trying to own English. A Brown student and a Yale student competed to see who could be more annoying. Californians don’t understand us. Don’t even mention lacrosse. And we seem to be forgetting something. What could it be? Oh well, it probably wasn’t important.

But the worst news of all came just this week. Forbes Magazine, the nation’s premier experts on all things list-related, released their ranking of America’s Best Colleges. Here are the sobering results:

1. Army

2. Princeton

3. Caltech

4. Williams

5. Harvard

6. Wellesley

7. Air Force

8. Amherst

9. Yale

10. Stanford

11. MIT

12. Swarthmore

13. Columbia

14. Centre

15. Haverford

…

…

…

Umm, it’ll be a while until we reach the next Ivy League school, so we’ll warp ahead after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

The Princeton Review released its 2010 guide to the Best 371 Colleges last week. Along with overviews for every one of those arbitrary number of schools, the Princeton Review also released their college ranking lists in various categories. The lists are determined by surveys taken by current students at every school, and the categories run the gamut from schools with the most accessible professors to schools with the most stoned professors.

To see these lists, you could buy the Princeton Review book for $25. If you’re smart, you could just go to the Princeton Review website to see them. But if you’re lazy and can put up with not-great formatting, we’ve got all 62 of the rankings right here. Every single one, including those without any Ivy League schools on it. And because we felt like it, four of us have added our own commentary to the lists below.

In reading through the lists, we point out the good (Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia have the top three best libraries), the bad (No Ivy League schools classified as “Dodgeball Targets”), and the absolutely ridiculous (It appears Yale had only one student fill out a survey and it happened to be on opposite day). But mostly, our group of one Harvard grad (Adam), one Cornell grad (Max), and two Princeton grads (Maureen and Michael) just riff on everything. We’re just like the Satellite of Love Crew. Heck, one of us is even named Mike! So please join us, will you, as we blow up the Hitler building. There may even be railing kills. All the lists are after the jump, including an Ivy League school summary at the very end. Read the rest of this entry »

• Columbia: Shots fired in Morningside Heights, gunman either really hates or really likes Glenn Beck
• Cornell: Zamboni driver accepts buyout package, to return to his old life of wearing ridiculous costumes at home
• Dartmouth: Collis Governing Board to renovate space formerly used as a social space for students to create a social space for students
• Dartmouth: College receives $3-million NSF grant, students disappointed to learn that there is no NSFW grant
• Harvard: Prosecutors identify alleged Kirkland shooter and no, it is not Skip Gates
• Harvard: Ashley Judd to bring Heat to Cambridge, hopes to have a De-Lovely time
• Penn: Wharton now accepting the GRE, our long national nightmare is over
• Penn: Transfers struggling to find on-campus housing, may be forced to relocate to Drexel
• Princeton: Hispanic man arrested for exposing himself on campus, this is all Sonia Sotomayor’s fault