Typically I only tune into the ESPY Awards for the occasional hilarious sports-related skit and to see Seth Meyers completely tear apart professional athletes. This year, however, we’ve got some Ivy League representation to make things a bit more interesting. Cornell lacrosse player Rob Pannell is nominated for the “Best Male College Athlete” category, and it is certainly well-deserved: Pannell led the nation with a scoring average of 5.24 points per game, currently has a 52-game scoring streak (the longest current streak in the NCAA), and was named the USILA Player of the Year.

Pannell does face some stiff competition, though: Heisman Trophy winner and NCAA football champion, Cam Newton, NCAA Tournament Most Outstanding Player and basketball champion, Kemba Walker, and champion of the Mormons and white people everywhere, Jimmer “The Jimmer” Fredette. (There’s also a hockey player from Miami-Ohio … not really sure why they threw him in there.)

All of these guys (minus the hockey player) get round-the-clock media coverage from ESPN, making this a difficult task for our hero, Rob. Just take a look at the online poll in this Columbia Spectator article, where they ask readers, “Will Rob Pannell receive more than 5% of the vote?” This is the most depressing online poll I have ever seen.

Folks, we need to use the power of the Blogosphere and the Twitterverse to get Rob some votes. Head to the ESPYs website to cast your vote, and make sure to spread the word to your Ivy League brethren. Remember, a vote for Rob is not just a vote for the Ivy League and the sport of lacrosse, but also lax bros, upper-class suburbia, upper-class suburban lacrosse moms, and to extrapolate even further, the entire east coast of the United States.

Note: If Rob Pannell does somehow win this, I expect to be personally mentioned during his acceptance speech on live TV.

It has certainly been a year to remember for Ivy League graduation speeches. While Amy Poehler gave a Harvard student the finger, Tom Hanks decided to visit the campus of Yale so he could get into character for his new movie. Rudy Giuliani provided Cornellians with a fun-filled drinking game (Drink every time Rudy mentions “politics,” “terrorism,” or “9/11”), and Columbia’s guest speaker asked every student at Barnard to friend her on Facebook. Princeton snagged Brooke Shields (HOT) and Mayor Michael Bloomberg (NOT AS HOT). At UPenn, Denzel depressed students by encouraging them to fail. And lastly, Brown University decided to be really hipster by choosing a guest speaker that none of us have ever heard of.

Yet it is quite clear that none of these guest speakers could measure up to Dartmouth College’s Conan “Coco” O’Brien, who definitely delivered the goods. Conan, whose last graduation speech came in 2000 at his alma mater, Harvard, knocked this one out of the park by cracking an abundance of hilarious jokes at the expense of Dartmouth and the rest of the Ivy League. Here’s my favorite line of the speech:

No, Dartmouth, you must stand tall, raise your heads high and feel proud. Because if Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are your self-involved, vain, name-dropping older brothers, you are the cool, sexually confident, lacrosse-playing younger sibling who knows how to throw a party and looks good in a down vest.

Brown, of course, is your lesbian sister who never leaves her room … And Penn, Columbia, and Cornell, well frankly, who gives a shit?

Congrats to Dartmouth and Conan for winning IvyGate’s first annual “Kick-Ass Graduation Speech Award,” and enjoy the entire speech in its YouTube glory below:

The Princeton men’s basketball team squared off against the Kentucky Wildcats in the first round of the NCAA Tournament today. We recorded our own thoughts on the game, presented in semi-intelligible form below.

(Final Update) Well, the game was close. Waaaay closer than we expected. Princeton even had a five-point lead for a little bit! We were impressed. But then the wheels sort of came off, Princeton played sloppy basketball towards the end, and Kentucky’s ragtag band of (let’s be honest, probably hired) hoops stars eked out a victory. Princeton suffered defeat in much the same fashion it beat Harvard last weekend — with a last-second field goal. Tough loss, boys.

Final score: 57-55, Kentucky.

Anyway, on a non-ironic note — and as a Cornell fan acquainted with both soul-shattering, last-minute defeats, and losing to Kentucky — some props to Princeton for playing way better than anyone thought they would today. While losing doesn’t lend itself to quite the same level of braggadocio, apparently you brought the campus together, or something. That’s what the Daily Princetonian live-blog said anyway, right before challenging Kentucky coach John Calipari to a duel. So, that’s cool.

After the jump, check out all our coverage from the game.

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If you haven’t heard about the wonderful Internet meme “fuckyeahnouns,” you probably successfully barred yourself from Facebook during midterms. Don’t despair, though. This addictive procrastination epidemic — in which you simply type in a noun, and a fitting, meme-ified picture pops up — is about to bite you, too!

Here is its representation of IvyGate and the Ivy League:

(Note: We’re not sure who this guy is, but he seems super enthusiastic about our blog. We approve.)

It’s good to know that the visual representation of hating the Ivies is Justice (and Cornell alum) Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

For some of our Ivy  favorites, follow the jump.

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Forget money: all you need to buy love these days is an Ivy League diploma. At least that’s the word according to IvyDate.com, a new online matchmaking site for (you guessed it) Ivy League alums.

IvyDate was founded by two graduates of Harvard Business School, which–given that school’s sheer abundance of white-collared yuppies with $500 glasses and $2,000 laptops and ten cents of common sense and zero percent compounded interest in the sex department–frankly surprises no one. Beri Meric & Philipp Triebel, both former investment bankers (which also explains a lot), have thrown themselves into the business of Your Sad Pathetic Love Life with a blessed fervor characteristic of coked-up, laid-off wheeler-dealer types. Their big sell is to help you have the social life you never had because you were too busy being an Ivy Leaguer:

We developed our idea for IvyDate based on the fact that exceptional singles often sacrifice romance for their careers and community. So we set out to create a simple, easy-to-use, members-only platform that makes outstanding romantic connections a reality for highly driven men and women who value intellectual curiosity, love of learning, drive, and determination.

Meric, Treibel and their dedicated team of Harvard-grad lackeys do all the work for their clients: there are no databases to peruse, no sketchy emails from Bob@ILoveNathanHale.net. Instead the folks at IvyDate spend hours mysteriously matching up “likeminded (sic) individuals” in dark smoky rooms behind closed doors in the dead of night at the top of the Tower of London. Or something.

The site, which is based in New York, London and Boston, has expanded its list of qualifying schools to include MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics. That says a lot about the sorts of people involved in this Ivy-League-Yenta trading-card game: not only are they very choosy about college sweatshirts, but they’re also quite keen on dental health care and 401(k)s. They also don’t mind pimples and robots. Hey, there’s no way we’re getting dental in this line of work–where do we sign up?

Oh, wait. You have to be accepted before you can meet your future Daddy Warbucks:

We review all prospective members, and award membership to a diverse range of exceptional individuals with truly engaging profiles.

Well shit. Guess that excludes everyone who isn’t a former investment banker from Harvard Business School.

When it comes to Ivy League pride, sometimes the classic, hideously overpriced school sweatshirt just doesn’t cut it. Every eighth grade valedictorian and Japanese tourist on earth owns a Harvard sweatshirt–even that freaky homeless guy at the bus stop has one from Cornell. God, how are we supposed to show our school spirit and simultaneously let the rest of the world know that we’re genuine, certified Ivy League snots?

Praise be to New Balance, purveyor of all things douchey, for giving us the answer: fugly Ivy footwear.

According to EUKicks, a blog for sneaker fans (hey, it takes all kinds), the company will be releasing a line of Ivy-League-themed hiking shoes this January. The shoes, which are riffs on an existing model of New Balance sneaker, will come in hues “inspired” by each university’s colors, and will feature an interpretation of each school’s crest on the tongue.

Bwog’s already raising its eyebrows at the Columbia version, whose two tones of blue aren’t “Columbia blue,” apparently. That’s a bit fussy of them, seeing as how the Princeton shoe is a random stinky beige and Dartmouth’s is inexplicably black.

New Balance has decided it will only manufacture six flavors of Ivy League sneaker. Cornell and Yale, you’re out of luck. No doubt Yalies have enough idiotic hipster footwear to tide them over for the next eight centuries, but it’s a shame about Cornell–this could really have put them on the map, you know?

In theory, this sneaker gimmick suggests that anyone who’d like to walk all over the Ivy League can now purchase the means to do so. But in practice, we can’t help but think that the primary consumers of these hideous foot turds will be the same jerks who play squash at the Yale Club or wear their Princeton tie pins on job interviews. In the highly unlikely event that New Balance makes a profit on their Ivy League line, it’ll be because our navel-gazing has gotten so intense that it now includes the entire lower halves of our bodies. Either that, or because the vast population of goth kids at Dartmouth decides to start wearing them ironically.

Then again, they’re also going to be sold by Mita, a Japanese company. We might have to eat our words about out-Ivying all those Japanese tourists.

Apparently all the Ivy League shenanigans this past semester have inspired Smart Crew to create a piece of “artwork” which has been deemed ”Ivy League League Vandals 2010.”

A tipster sent us a picture of this graffiti and a link to the website entitled Smart Crew USA Writers Club.  According to Wikipedia, Smart Crew is:

a graffiti crew from Queens, NY, that was formed by SYCO13, MEY (Meyhem Lauren) and LUK around 1997. Throughout the years, the crew has acquired members and has become a collective of various artists including DCEVE, KORN, ACTION BRONSON, and MARTY. Their crew logo consists of an Old English style “S” with the image of a graduation cap on top.

First,  Smart Crew’s fans decided to introduce this artwork with an Einstein quote – “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.” So to fully learn  — you better, right now,  forget  everything you just crammed in the last few weeks. I’m sure that won’t be too hard.

Here are the pictures:

If Einstein wasn’t enough, that had to boost their Ivy cred and cram a Marx quote saying “the smart people will get it” at the bottom of their post.  Really, Smart Crew fans did you have to pull a Faulkner?

Ok, so smart people, do you GET IT? Leave your reactions and musings on how this adds to something in the comments below.

With a media clusterfuck, finals, and frigid temperatures, Columbia and probably the rest of the Ivy League is in great need of comfy sweaters and holiday cheer.  On Harvard Time, who is no stranger to media attention, just released a video that gives us just that,  along with a computer generated fireplace.

Thanks to all our tipsters who sent this in!

An I’m-relatively-positive-it’s-a-porn-pseudonym “Cooper.” We at Ivygate have a penchant for hastily avoiding gooey gossip like this, but a well-exposed tipster’s turned us on to what could possibly be the world’s smartest porn-star. For this “stunningly handsome hunk” on Fratmen.tv (we’ll spare you the hyperlink), who claims to be “East-coast born and bred” and an “ivy-leaguer,” stripping down seemed more bang for the buck than suiting up. What could possibly drive “Cooper” to porn? Well, what could possibly drive Kurt Schneider to this dirty film? No one’s really meant to answer these questions.

We’ll remain skeptical – at least until someone can prove us otherwise. And Cooper, some advice: razors can shave even where you can’t see.

Helicopter parenting of the Black Hawk variety and classic kiddie exploitation have converged to produce the Ivy League’s next scary superstar: Fatima Ptacek. She’s a nine-year-old supermodel, raking in $250,000 a year, while appearing in national ad campaigns and chilling with Michelle Obama; on the side, she’s an award-winning gymnast, horseback rider, chess wiz, and Spanish/Mandarin Chinese speaker. Oh, she’s also starred on Saturday Night Life, and is appearing in a Catherine Zeta-Jones movie in a few months. So, Ivy League masses, prepare to feel more overwhelmed by your classmates than ever before, because, in Fatima’s words:

My dad said I’m allowed to go to Harvard, Yale or Columbia.

Why is herr father so adamant?

Barack Obama studied at Harvard, and I really like him. I want to be a lawyer. I was thinking of maybe going to the Olympics, but you know what? That’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I want to be in the court and fight for people saying, ‘My client is innocent!’

Such high sell-out ambitions at such an early age? Sounds like Ivy League material to us…  Get a load of the supposed secret to her success, according to her manager:

She’s ethnically ambiguous.

Regardless, something tells us Fatima won’t need the affirmative action bump come admissions season. Especially considering her Common-App ready childhood (or lack thereof):

Fatima is up every day at 6 a.m., preparing for school at PS 150Q, where she is in the Academy for Intellectually Gifted Children. At least twice a week, she cuts out of class early with her mom to ham it up at auditions and casting calls in Manhattan. She finishes her homework in the car on the way back to Flushing — for a three-hour workout at a Russian gym, Lana’s Gymnastics Club, three or four nights a week. Fatima finally hits the hay at around 10 p.m. Weekends are eaten up by horseback riding and five hours of Mandarin class on Saturdays.

We predict that this talented young woman will have several things to look forward to in her future, or combinations thereof: peaking early, burning out, world-domination, soulless careerism, the Presidency of the United States. Or maybe just following in Emma Watson’s footsteps and dating this guy: