If you are a sports fan, then you have probably heard of ESPN online columnist Bill Simmons. Simmons is also known as "The Sports Guy" where "sports" refers to "the NBA, American League, New England Patriots, and nothing else." The Sports Guy has a massive fan following thanks to his rare mutant power of using Al Pacino movies as analogs for any and all real-world situations. His fans are very loyal and will often cite his opinions in sports discussions. But in Simmons' reader mailbag from Friday, one young fan--a Sam from New York--happily admitted to taking his devotion to another level.

I'm 18 and just graduated high school. When my college decisions came in in April, I narrowed down my choices to Dartmouth and Princeton and had no idea what to do. Whether it's teenage indecision or my relative laziness, the only thing I could think of was your pure hatred for Princeton. So I chose Dartmouth. You, Bill Simmons, made the biggest decision I have ever made. Most likely, you will be responsible for whatever shenanigans I go through in life. Just wanted to let you know and say thanks.

Congratulations Dartmouth! A kid who makes a major decision largely based on the opinion of an ESPN sports columnist he has never met is now yours. Don't be surprised if his fall class schedule is influenced by Jayson Stark's NL Wild Card prediction.

Now in Bill Simmons' response to Sam's e-mail, you might expect him to feel slightly apologetic for the way in which Sam apparently hangs on his every word. You'd expect Simmons to write, "Gee Sam, I'm flattered at how much my opinions matter to you, but you shouldn't let what I think influence your decisions--especially one as important as which college to attend. There are plenty of reasons for you to opt to attend Dartmouth over Princeton and plenty of reasons to opt for the reverse. However, my opinion that anyone who attends Princeton is an a-hole should not be a factor."

But that isn't a very funny response. So instead, Bill Simmons writes this: Read the rest of this entry »

We've heard it all before. "Cornell shouldn't be in the Ivy League." "It's practically a safety school." "You're not really an Ivy Leaguer if you majored in the Ag School." "Yes I am and you look like a pre-op transexual." What has not been discussed is where the Big Red would go should they leave or be kicked out of the Ivy League--it being an athletic conference after all. Stepping up to fill that void in the discourse is Cornell basketball blog The Cornell Basketball Blog. And boy are they setting their sights high.

Most of the Big 10 schools are large public universities set in collegetowns. The Big 10 schools not only excel in athletics, but they are also regularly ranked among the top national academic universities at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Cornell is very much all of the above.

As for athletics, Cornell is a national power in several major sports, including indoor and outdoor track (men's and women's), wrestling, ice hockey, and lacrosse. Even the Cornell men's basketball team made two consecutive trips to the NCAA Tournament and finished 2008-2009 with an RPI better than a pair of Big 10 teams (after finishing 2007-2008 ranked ahead of five Big 10 teams).

Since upstate New York is the one place where hockey players are kind of a big deal, Cornell's men's hockey team kindly offers its star power to a Cornell Senior Prom ad featuring a fully choreographed locker room rendition of N'Sync hit "Bye Bye Bye." Though sadly lacking shower scenes- and I'm still not sure whether that soulpatch is part of the costume or in earnest- there's much lifting of shirts, stroking of abs, and awkward shimmying of shoulders, which is good enough for me.

The Daily Prince reports in "Quidditch sweeps into Princeton":

Monday afternoon, the Middlebury Quidditch team stopped at Princeton University as part of its annual spring break Quidditch tour in an attempt to promote its ground-bound version of the sport at other American universities. So far this year, Middlebury has visited Bard and Penn and has games scheduled against Columbia and Vassar.

The role of the snitch is filled, not by an enchanted, plum-sized, golden-feathered ball, but by a hyperactive college student dressed in yellow with a penchant for running and wrestling. To capture the snitch, one of the seekers must grab a black sock hanging from the snitch's shorts.

No word on Dean Dolores Umbridge's (Nancy Malkiel) take on the game.

A confession: The current editors of IvyGate are an effete crew of muscle-atrophied weaklings. As such, we have no way of evaluating the content and/or accuracy of the Sun's NCAA basketball blog, though we find the graphic design on the top banner quite nice. (If any of your more robust Ivy Leaguers are interested in sportswriting, do drop us a line!)

Luckily, Insider Higher Ed has created the only March Madness bracket we are capable of understanding, one that pits brains vs. brains and forgets the brawn! In "A Bracket Not to Bet On" IHE crunches each team's academic stats via some complicated voodoo known as "math" (yeah, we're not too good at that, either -- thank god for the Humanities) and finds that Cornell would make it to the Final Four, if only smart points could be swapped for athlete points. And oh, what a voodoo that would be, one that I wished for daily in middle school gym class but, alas, never arrived.

A few surprises: Due to the team's (not the school's) smart points, Cornell beats Stanford straightaway, then trounces Marquette. Davidson goes further than anyone expects, and Vanderbilt drops out early.

IHE's complete academic bracket is downloadable on their website, or visible on our website, after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

I started watching Last One Standing (streamable here) expecting the worst: Advertised as an imperialist fantasy pitting testosterone-pumped Western athletes against tribal warriors in caged death matches the world around, it seemed a little outside my ANTM schtick. But the presence of Harvard senior and Natural History major Corey Rennell necessitated IvyGate supervision. LOS turns out to be a ridiculously addictive BBC/Discovery observational documentary, featuring heartstopping sequences of Zulu stick-fighting, Mongolian wrestling, and long-distance running with the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico. Oh, and the cast is total eye candy.

After the jump: Pictures of Corey playing sports in various states of undress, and our interview, including discourse on compassion, sustainability, and anal sex.

Read the rest of this entry »

Spanking the Daily Princetonian last Wednesday distracted us from the real news in that day's paper: STRANGER SNAPS PICS OF NUDE MALE ATHLETES. Some perv, apparently, was hiding in a bathroom stall in the Caldwell Fieldhouse, taking secret photos of naked dudes showering after track and lacrosse practice; the athletes gave low-speed chase (presumably in shower sandals, wielding back-scratchers) but he disappeared around a corner.

Two things. A) The suspect should totally email us, we're desperate for IvyGate Galleries submissions, and B) track star Ted Price '10, who witnessed the incident, described him as having a "well-done mullet" and "handlebar moustache." We really have nothing else to add.

Hey, remember when we wrote the other week about Harvard's unconscionable number of black coaches -- y'know, zero -- out of 41 head coaching positions? All better!!! The Crimson last week hired Tommy Amaker, who is black, to lead its men's basketball program. Given that the last African-American to hold the title left 16 years ago, we can look forward to equitable representation in December 2071. (We think that math is right.)

Actually, the real news is that Amaker comes to Cambridge from freaking Michigan, which must make it feel like the rims are set at an elementary-school eight feet. How ever did Harvard land him? Amaker's shit performance in Ann Arbor (no tourney berths in six years) certainly has something to do with it, but the truth is much simpler: a fat paycheck. A very reliable source tells us Amaker will make $225,000 a year; at Harvard, that works out to about $20,000 per win.

The shepherds of diversity at Harvard surely cluck with approval at this morning's headine in the Crimson: "UNPRECEDENTED DIVERSITY IN CLASS OF 2011." Some stats to stroke: the 2,058 new kids make up "the most socioeconomically and racially diverse group [ever] accepted to Harvard," at 11 percent black, 20 percent Asian, 10 percent Latino, and 2 percent Native American -- "record highs for minority groups" -- and just under 20 percent are foreign/dual/etc citizens. And most significantly, fully one quarter will qualify for a program that waives or lowers tuition for families at certain income levels.

Attaway, Harvard. Hopefully the other Ivies' numbers will mirror yours when they come out. Credit is largely due to recent munificence from your admissions and financial aid offices, who should be feeling pretty swell today. But, um, when you're done toasting those guys, could you please send them the hell over to the athletics department?

Students on spring break last week may have missed this humdinger front-pager in the Boston Globe with an equally seismic headline about diversity at Harvard: "A COACHING VACANCY: HARVARD HAS 41 VARSITY SPORTS -- AND ZERO BLACKS AT THE HELM." Needless to say, there are also no African-Americans among the athletics director or his 13 senior administrators. "Harvard," the Globe reports, "has not employed an African-American head coach in any sport since Peter Roby guided the men's basketball team from 1985-91."

1985, you'll note, is the year before most members of the polychromatic Class of 2011 were born.

Who's the happiest team in college basketball right now? UNLV, thrilled to be the lowest seed still alive in March Madness? Ohio State, still giddy from their improbable last-second comeback against Xavier?

Not a chance. It is good to be a Princeton Tiger tonight, as coach Joe Scott will announce at 5 p.m. tomorrow that he's leaving the flaming wreckage of his program to take the top spot at Denver. What'd he accomplish while in town? As the Princetonian explained last week in a piece about widespread demands for his head on a pike:

Against Monmouth on Dec. 14, 2006 the Tigers scored just 21 points -- tying the Division I record low for a game since the inception of the three-point shot. Just two weeks later, Princeton fell to Carnegie Mellon, the first defeat at the hands of a Division III program in school history. And this season, Princeton did the unthinkable, falling to last in the Ivy League for the first time ever.

You may remember Scott from our January post about the teensy li'l issue of his players hating him so much they left the team -- eight of them over three years. (And you may have noticed we don't have any Princeton ads up in this piece anymore, butthat'sallwe'regonnasayaboutthat.) We have to admit, part of us is sad to see Scott go; we were hoping to dine out on him and Harvard's Tim Murphy as a kind of batshit coaching duet for years to come. Alas, alack, we'll have to find another clipboard-wielder to hate on. Goodnight, Joe Scott. You were too beautiful for this world.

(Princeton's on spring break right now, but we'll update with reactions when we get 'em.)