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.

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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.

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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.)

As we may have mentioned, this weekend we journeyed to No'th Cackalack as guests of the illustrious, happily moneyed Duke University. Between Skoal, sweet tea, and other firsts (hotel staff calling us "mister"), we took in the first Duke lacrosse game since The Business.

We tried mightily to prepare for our trip to Duke, but plans were thrown into chaos early: the Drawl-English language cassettes we ordered were lost in the mail, nowhere in Brooklyn would serve us sorghum, and then, the day of the trip, airport security confiscated our brand-new Axe Body Spray. How would we blend in with the natives now?!? We arrived in Durham in a fever, feelin' swell on 105 minutes of sleep, and set off for Duke's Koskinen stadium anyway. Historic game, versus hated Dartmouth, beautiful crisp afternoon: we don't need a map, sir, the sweet strains of ACC tailgating in the air will point the way.

Except. The pre-game tailgate in the stadium's lower parking lot -- the upper one was closed to accomodate the national media, which didn't really show up -- was nearly dead. A few SUVs with beer in the trunk; a coupla lifer Dartmouth fans with great-great-grandchildren swaddled in green. But nothing like the rollicking beerfest we'd imagined. Later, we found out a school VP had emailed the entire campus with a request to wear official Duke apparel proudly, leave signs at home, and generally put the ix-nay on the ape-ray okes-jay. ("We have much to gain as a community with our best effort and even more to lose with our worst") Amazingly, the students played along: not a single violent Dartmouth chant, no burning Mike Nifong in effigy, no nothing to make for the ultimate IvyGate post. It was clear, though, fans had done some research on the enemy for heckling purposes; one Dartmouth player with by the unfortunate name of Tim McVeigh got special attention. But for the most part, Duke lacrosse fans were ridiculously well behaved, especially for a sport where the goal is to crosscheck your opponents' faces in.

The few references to last year's non-season were remarkably mannered: girls wearing Reade Seligmann No. 8 jerseys. A lone parking lot banner supporting the players.  Ubiquitous "innocent" blue rubber bracelets.  T-shirt report: there was, like, one guy with a "Disbar Nifong" [Ed.: we really wanted to buy one, but couldn't find a seller -- little help, Duke readers?], and a couple creepy more were trying to sell a model with a circle-and-line-through "Duke Administration" -- they actually talked us out of buying one.

When the team took the field, it was to the crowd's unqualified roar. Lacrosse games usually get decent attendance, regulars there said, but nothing like this. In the crowd, there was a consensus that nobody was winning Duke's first game back but Duke, in a massacre. And so it was: After a year off the field, the Blue Devils turned an early 1-3 deficit into a 17-11 pimpwalk. They despatched Denver the next day too, 13-9, in the rain.

Where we went to school, most people think that you can have school spirit without sports. Some kids there even take pride in having crappy teams. But as we sat there on the bleachers, mint tobacco firmly implanted in lip, tongue conspicuously not in cheek, we found ourselves actually caring what happened to the kids running around the field with sticks. And it felt great. We're as lazy as ever, but suddenly the 40-minute bus rides uptown to Columbia's Baker Field seemed like they might have been worth it.

Whoa, today's Brown Daily Herald has a major scoop: Brown is actively recruiting Reade Seligmann, one of the three Duke rape case defendants, to transfer and play for its lacrosse team. That's it, basically -- no other details, besides Coach Lars Tiffany saying  Seligmann likes Brown, and Brown likes him likes him back. We'll hold the editorial comments as we get ready to visit Durham this weekend, but obvs, this is a huge vote of confidence in Seligmann's innocence. Anyone at Duke or Brown have more info?
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