Congrats to Cornell offensive lineman Kevin Boothe, who was taken in the sixth round (176th overall pick) in yesterday’s NFL draft by the Oakland Raiders.

Today, a pair of Princeton Tigers — defensive back Jay McCareins (Arizona Cardinals) and tight end Jon Dekker (Pittsburgh Steelers) — joined him, at least for now, on NFL rosters. Yale quarterback Jeff Mroz signed with the Dallas Cowboys.

Brown running back Nick Hartigan will likely sign with a team soon.

But no Penn players are expected to be signed this year. And according to this story, the squad has no major pro prospects in next year’s senior class.

Very recently, Penn used to have a couple players sign with NFL squads every year. Now the team will likely go two straight years without having a player make an NFL squad. It’s interesting how the squad’s drop in pro prospects has coincided with its drop in Ivy League wins.

Close to 50,000 people turned out today for the Penn Relays at Franklin Field — about 20 of them were Penn students.

It’s a shame that more students didn’t take a study break on such a beautiful day and head down to the Relays. But you can’t blame them.

First, the athletic department does absolutely nothing to promote the event to students on campus. This is not a surprise, however, as the school never promotes any of its events to students.

But if that wasn’t enough, the University charges students the full price of admission to the Relays on Saturday ($20 for general admission). This is ridiculous for a number of reasons, the biggest of which is that Penn students pay tuition that funds a large chunk of the athletic department. Also, there are always a couple thousand seats that go unsold. Why not sell those at a discount to the closest customers, Penn students?

They’re called the Penn Relays for a reason — this is the University’s event. Too bad the school has no interest in having students show up.

A big knock on Fran Dunphy has been that he’s been dominant inside the Ivy League but not as good against noncoference opponents. Many hope that Glenn Miller will have more success outside the Ancient Eight, particularly against major conference programs.

So I decided to take a look at how the two coaches have done against common nonconference teams. Here’s what I found:

- The two have 14 common opponents (Army, Boston College, Canisius, Holy Cross, Lehigh, Navy, New Hampshire, Providence, Quinnipiac, Rhode Island, Rider, San Francisco, St. Mary’s and Texas).

- Dunphy is 20-10 against these teams, meaning he won 67 percent of his games. Miller is 12-25 (44 percent).

- Miller is the only one to beat Providence, Rhode Island and Rider. Dunphy hasn’t beaten a nonconference opponent that Miller hasn’t also beaten.

- Over half of Dunphy’s wins (12 to be exact) against these common opponents have come against Lehigh, a team that Miller has beaten twice in two tries. If you take away his 13 games against the Mountainhawks, his winning percentage is very similar to Miller’s — 47 percent.

So what does this all mean? Well, it seems to suggest that Miller could be better than Dunphy outside of the Ivy League. Dunphy has a better record against these common opponents, but his wins have all come against teams from minor conferences (New Hampshire, Holy Cross, Quinnipiac, Lehigh, Army and Navy). Miller has played the better teams in this group (Providence, Rhode Island, Holy Cross) more often and has actually beaten them. Let’s not forget, that Miller did it with much less talented players.

Hopefully, Miller can lead Penn to the most important nonconference win of all — an NCAA Tournament victory.

At Hey Day today, Penn president Amy Gutmann gave the juniors a three-question quiz before officially pronouncing them seniors.

Question 1: Which famous coach just left the Red and Blue for the Maroon and the Blue?

You stumped me Dr. Gutmann. Fran Dunphy indeed left the Red and Blue, but last time I checked, Temple’s colors are cherry and white. There’s no blue in there.

Still, I give her credit for implying that Penn basketball is one of the three most important things students should know about.

I attended my first Penn baseball games of the year this weekend, and all I can is “yuck.”

The Quakers lost three out of four (the one game I missed was the win) to Cornell in miserable fashion. Penn was outscored 56-25 by a Big Red squad that had just five wins all season coming into this weekend.

Now, I wasn’t surprised by the fact that Penn lost. Heck, I wasn’t even surprised that they lost by such a huge margin.

No, what really got to me about the baseball team was just how many errors they made. In total, they committed 12 on the weekend.

At times, this team looked worse that my Little League team that went 0-26 one year. Players were crashing into each other when going for fly balls, letting grounders slip between their legs and letting baserunners get out of run-downs.

And this lack of fundamentals has been a problem for the Quakers all season. They now have 91 errors on the year. The next-worst team in the league is Columbia, which has only 64.

Last year, Princeton had the most errors on the season — 88.

Any way you look at it, this is flat out embarassing.

If Penn was losing games because its batters couldn’t hit far enough or its pitchers couldn’t throw hard enough, that would be understandable. After all, former coach Bob Seddon left this program with a dearth of talent.

But you don’t need to be that talented to call off a teammate on a fly ball. Even the least-talented of teams has no excuse for being anything short of fundamentally sound.

Baseball is the one sport where your opponent can’t really cause you to make errors. Nobody defends you as you try to make a catch or throw.

And let’s not forget that this team might not have the best players in the league, but every player was pretty darn good in high school. Every player on Penn made was able to get recruited to play Division I baseball because they didn’t make these types of mistakes.

It’s unreasonable to demand that Penn win more games. But even if it keeps losing, the team should stop doing it in such an embarassing way.

It’s certainly sad to see Fran Dunphy leave Penn. He was a fantastic coach, a great guy and to me — as well as countless other sportswriters at The Daily Pennsylvanian — the greatest journalism professor at Penn.

You see, this University has a lot of things (heck, we even have a huge white button sitting in the middle of campus) but one thing it lacks is a journalism department. Those of us with an interest in the subject are left to fend for ourselves at a student-run newspaper, learning from each other and every so often from the people we cover.

Dunphy used to tell me that everyone at a University is supposed to learn from each other. And his relationship with our newspaper definitely an educational experience unlike any other. He recognized the enthusiasm writers at the DP had for covering his team, even if he would always chide us for writing about him too much. He knew that it was our job to criticize him if he was doing something wrong.

At the same time, he was unafraid to call you out when you asked a bad question. I’ll never forget the press conference after a loss at Yale my sophomore year, when I asked Dunphy about how “many were speculating” that he’d use a smaller rotation of players. In reality, I was the only one speculating and it was a bad question.

“Who speculated that David?” he shot back at me.

I was speechless. Coaches aren’t supposed to be the ones asking questions at press conferences after the games. But it taught me the art of asking better and more honest questions.

Dunphy was never afraid to tell me when he disagreed with something I wrote. There was the time he called me out for printing an incoming recruit’s SAT scores. And then there was the time he criticized me for something I wrote about a small golf tournament that Penn lost — he didn’t like that I noted that a Penn player had the worst score in the entire tournament. He was probably right.

And despite his criticism, he always was willing to talk to us. He always answered every question honestly.

But it’s not just DP writers that Dunphy respected. Jack Scheuer, who has covered Philadelphia sports for over 30 years, pointed out the other day that once the regular basketball game of Philadelphia sportswriters at the Palestra conflicted with a Penn basketball practice. Guess who moved to another court? Dunphy’s team.

So on behalf of all DP sportswriters who have had the pleasure of working with Dunphy over the past 17 years, I’d like to say thank you. Thanks for teaching us how to ask good questions. Thanks for teaching us how to write better stories. Thanks for teaching us about the history of the Palestra.

Thanks for teaching us that it’s not a good thing when your opponent makes more free throw than you’ve attempted. Thanks for telling us every week that you had “a lot of respect for our opponent” because they are a “very good basketball program” with a “very good basketball coach” who leads a “very good basketball team.” Thanks for teaching us to stick up for ourselves. We’ll miss you.

Major kudos to the men’s lacrosse team for its win over Cornell the nation’s second-ranked team — today at Franklin Field.

The Quakers should be one of two undefeated teams in the nation right now (No. 1 Virginia is the other). But they played a bad game against Harvard last week, losing 13-8 to a Crimson squad that previously had just two wins.

Still, the 8-6 victory by Penn today is a fantastic feat. Hopefully, this will lay the groundwork for lacrosse becoming a popular spectator sport at Penn.

The spring sports season normally is a miserable time for the Quakers. Baseball and softball are simply unwatchable. Golf never plays on campus, and tennis and track compete at Penn just a couple times per year. Maybe lacrosse will even start drawing more fans to Franklin Field than football in a few years.

Now let’s just hope that the team doesn’t go into a men’s soccer-esque late season losing streak. If the Quakers keep this up, they might even make it to the Final Four, which Penn is hosting at Lincoln Financial Field.

Congrats to George Mason, the No. 11 seed that defeated No. 1 UConn to earn a spot in the Final Four. It’s a great accomplishment for the Colonial Athletic Association team and speaks volumes on on the new parity in college basketball.

However, with the win, George Mason has buried yet another piece of Penn basketball history.

Before today, a mid-major team hadn’t been to the Final Four since 1979. And who played in that Final Four? None other than the Penn Quakers. Larry Bird’s Indiana State team also represented mid-majors in the Final Four that year.

Now we’ll see if George Mason can do what the two 1979 teams couldn’t — win a national championship.

What did I do tonight after spending a week in Dallas for the NCAA Tournament? I headed to the Wachovia Center. But it wasn’t to catch a sporting event. Instead, I saw a Billy Joel concert.

And can you guess what the Piano Man was wearing at the end of his set? A backwards Penn cap. He wore the hat, which featured Penn’s new split-P logo and an adjustable back, for two songs: “Big Shot” and “Still Rock and Roll to Me.”

I haven’t been able to locate a picture of the hat online, but it seems Joel got it after someone threw it to him from the front row. When he emerged for his encore, the cap was gone.

Still, nice product placement for Penn in front of 20,000 screaming fans.

DALLAS — It was a glorious media day today at the American Airlines Center. I’ve got to give Mark Cuban and the rest of the guys behind this arena all the credit in the world. It is by far the nicest stadium I have ever been in.

But the day started with a quick visit to the Grassy Knoll (after all, we are in Dallas) where we bumped into the Penn team. A CBS cameraman was there following around the team, probably for footage during tomorrow’s tournament game. Steve Danley was wearing a mic.

The best open practice of the day belonged to Memphis. Picture this: on one end of the court, every player on the team engages in a slam dunk contest; on the other end, coach John Calipari plays baksetball with bunch of little boys. Looks like their game plan for tomorrow against Oral Roberts involves lots of jams and five-year-olds. Should be interesting.

And the day ended with a bang, as we dined at the only West End establishment that was a) open at 11 p.m., b) not too expensive and c) wasn’t Friday’s. Of course, we’re talking about Hooters.

Without further ado, here’s the quick daily recap of how we’re doing and a quick scoreboard that will change topic every night. So long, and remember, coyotes wail along the trail (clap, clap, clap, clap) deep in the heart of Texas.

Quote of the day: “In the paper the other day [Texas coach] Rick Barnes had a quote about how well we dribble and that’s when I knew they hadn’t started watching our film.” — Steve Danley

Basketball games watched so far on this trip: 21 (All the NCAA Tournament games, and a couple NIT and ESPN Classic matchups to boot)

Nightly scoreboard
Number of Dallas Maverick players that we saw and actually recognized — 2 (Keith Van Horn and Devin Harris)
Number of Dallas Mavericks we saw but had no idea who they were — 1