1) In his weekly column, Forde-Yard Dash, ESPN writer Pat Forde listed some key rivalry matchups this weekend in college football. One of the five he profiled was the 125th edition of The Game.

Yale at Harvard (31). This is the 125th meeting, which is something very few rivalries can say. Harvard is 8-1 and trying to win the Ivy League. Yale is 6-3 and hoping to grab a share of the title, but needs help. Harvard has regained the White House but doesn’t move in until 2009. For now, a Yalie still sits in the Oval Office. As for this game: close favors the Crimson. Harvard is 4-1 in games decided by four points or less. Yale is 1-3.

2) Looking for a quick preview of the men’s soccer NCAA game this Friday?  Collegesoccernews.com has you covered. They consider Penn’s goalkeeper “a prime timer,” which only means a Dick Vitale wannabe writes for them. (HT to Noah Becker)

3) Philly Hoops Insider, the new Philadelphia college basketball blog from the Philadelphia Daily News, has started to produce some quality posts. Each entry could easily make Random Ivy notes, but in the interest of space, only the best items will appear here. That said, I’d strongly encourage any Big 5 fan to check there every day, since it appears as if they’ll be multiple updates daily.

The biggest two items so far are a piece by Fran Dunphy on his team’s roadtrip to Charleston, S.C., as well as Dick Jeradi’s thoughts on City 6 teams so far this year.

1) Why is Howard upseting Oregon St., 47-45, worth posting here on a blog dedicated to Penn sports?  It’s not for the requisite references to Beavers head coach Craig Robinson’s famous in-law (if you don’t know who I’m talking about you clearly have never read an article that mentioned Craig Robinson). It is because the two coaches — Robinson and Bison coach Gil Jackson — have Ivy League ties. Robinson not only was an assistant under Glen Miller and then his replacement at Brown, but he also played for Princeton in the 1980’s. Jackson, meanwhile, served as an assistant coach at Penn under Fran Dunphy for 16 years.

2) Here’s a quick rundown of “Morning Madness,” as Penn travels to Drexel today at 10 a.m. for the first time in school history.

3) I wanted to get the Week 1 poll results of the Schuylkill 16 out before the Drexel game, as it’s clearly the biggest S-16 game of the week.  After the jump, my week 1 votes.

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Note: As we move into basketball season, items about the Big 5 will be included in “Random Notes”

1) Philly.com has launched a new college basketball blog dedicated to City Six hoops. Not only will the blog have posts from the Inquirer’s college sports staff of Mike Kern, Bob Cooney and Dick Jerardi, but five of the six City Six coaches will also post their thoughts.

Interestingly, Villanova’s Jay Wright — in classic we’re-too-good-for-the-rest-of-the-city fashion that Villanova demonstrated when it almost left the Big 5 — “was not able to make the commitment because of his busy schedule during the season,” according to the first post. Is his schedule really that much busier than any of the other coaches? The only possible answer is that the Big East does involve more traveling than the other conferences represented in the city, as the Wildcats travel to Wisconsin, Florida, Illinois and Indiana for conference play. (Ironically, their farthest non-conference game is at Madison Square Garden.)

2) Nittanydelphia, a blog dedicated to Penn State and Philadelphia sports, is publishing previews of all Big 5 teams.  Here is Penn’s entry. From there you can find the other schools’ as well.

3) Many preseason publications had the Harvard men’s basketball team finishing as high as third in the conference. One key reason voters saw the Crimson moving up from seventh to third was 6-foot-10 freshman sensation Andrew Van Nast. However, Van Nast has injured his shoulder and will miss the entire year. The Crimson are not completely out of luck, since they do return all five starters from last year.

4) Looking over the Sagarin NCAA football ratings, four Ivy League teams are ranked above at least one FBS team. Harvard is the top Ivy team at no. 135 and is ahead of eight FBS teams, including Washington State of the PAC-10.  No. 156 Brown is ahead of two FBS schools, and both No. 162 Penn and No. 165 Yale are ahead of No. 171 North Texas.

1) What does Princeton have in common with Indiana, Maryland, Stanford, Texas Tech and Arkansas?  According to the San Francisco Chronicle, they’re all “esteemed basketball programs” that might finish last in their conferences.

2) Basketball players have always been some of the most obvious BMOCs on campus here at Penn.  And even though he’s only a sophomore, Tyler Bernadini has been selected by Comcast SportsNet as Penn’s representative for their “Big Men on Campus” series.

3) ESPN The Magazine has come up with one stat for each Division I team that best represents both last year and future results. (Unfortunately, the link requires a subscription to ESPN Insider).

Here is Penn’s, with the rest of the league after the jump. The team’s are ranked in order of predicted finish.

2 ) Penn

74.5

The Quakers are coming off of their first losing season since 2000-01, but led by Ivy ROY Tyler Bernardini, they’re well-stocked to challenge Cornell … if they D up. Penn gave up 74.5 ppg last season, its worst performance in 20 years.

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1) The Bulletin profiles Penn freshman point guard Zack Rosen, saying “He’s not a showman. He’s a point guard. A throwback floor general who counts wins instead of numbers. Classic Ivy League.”

2) Remember how the NCAA pushed back the three-point line this year for men’s teams?  Well in case you don’t, here’s a summary of the changes and potential impact from The Washington Post. It will be interesting to see how this effects Ivy League teams’ chances of earning a major upset, whether in the regular season or NCAA tournament.

3) Yale Sports Publicity released a season preview of the Bulldogs’ men’s basketball team.

4) As part of Penn Athletics’ marketing push for men’s basketball, fans can now bid on a “Men’s Basketball Player Experience” in which the winner and one guest can sit next to a former Penn great.  First up is last year’s captain Brian Grandieri.

5) As you can see on the schedule, nine men’s basketball games will be aired on television this year, with the highlight being the 10 a.m. Drexel game on ESPN Nov. 18.  The hat tip goes out to The Cornell Basketball Blog for pointing this out.

That site is one of the best sources of Ivy League basketball news, and while it does focus on Cornell, it normally is relatively unbiased. However, this time the blog is extremely opinionated in discussing Penn’s basketball broadcasts.

Talking about a strange decision, the Philadelphia/South Jersey area television network, CN8 opted to broadcast five of Penn’s games, including on the road at Dartmouth and in the Palestra gainst Princeton. Now those are some attractive games. Not! If it is not paintful enough, the gods of television also decided to show Penn at Princeton on ESPNU. We would like to see the tv ratings on that one. Just no love for Cornell– the Ivy League’s defending champions, the Preseason Favorite and the Ivy League school with the largest alumni base.

First off, besides the Princeton and Dartmouth games mentioned above, the games that CN8 will televise are the Villanova, Saint Joseph’s and Temple games (as well as the one against Harvard).  Clearly televising Big 5 games is a good move for a Philadelphia-based television station.

Second, the reason for the Princeton away game being televised on ESPNU (or why last Friday’s football game at Princeton was on ESPNU) is that Princeton has a deal with ESPNU to cover several games throughout the academic year.  In fact, in each of the last three years the Penn at Princeton basketball game has been on ESPNU.

Finally, Cornell will get at least two televised games, against Indiana and Syracuse, as well as potentially more if they go far in the preaseason NIT. (If you click “details” for each game on the schedule you can see the media information.)

All said, does this reaction by The Cornell Basketball Blog remind anyone else of Andy’s Cornell opinions on The Office two weeks ago?

1) The Penn-Brown football game this Saturday will be nationally televised on Versus as the Ivy League Game of the Week. And unlike last week’s fluff game between then-winless Columbia and still-winless Dartmouth, this game will actually be important. Both teams enter the game with 3-0 conference records, so the winner will be in the driver’s seat of the Ivy title race.

Only twice before have Brown and Penn met with undefeated Ancient Eight records. Penn won both in 1984 and 1986 en route to league championships.

2) Both the men’s and women’s basketball teams have their preseason intrasquad scrimmages this weekend, just before the homecoming football game. And in case you need some practice watching morning basketball before the men’s team takes on Drexel at 10 a.m. Nov 18 you’re in luck:  The men’s scrimmage starts at 10:45 a.m.

3) On the heels of a documentary about the 1969 “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29″ game, this Saturday, NESN will air a 90-minute documentary on Ivy League football.

We normally don’t make a big deal out of Penn football players who win Ivy League Player of the Week awards, since there are so many of them you can get on the list for just 73 total yards.

But the following nod certainly deserves recognition.  After earning two interceptions, recovering a fumble, deflecting two passes and notching six tackles — including one for a loss — senior defensive back Britton Ertman received FCS National Defensive Player of the Week honors, as announced by The Sports Network.

(Since I hate having a short, two-paragraph Buzz post, I thought I’d throw in this nugget:  The women’s basketball team was picked sixth in the Ivy League media preseason poll.)

In case you were worried that Penn Athletics was only focusing on marketing the men’s basketball team, the women’s basketball team is also receiving the wisdom of Nelligan Sports Marketing.

Against Drexel Dec. 19, the team will attempt to set an all-time attendance record for a home game as part of the yearly “Pack the House” Challenge. Part of the campaign also includes getting school groups to come to the Palestra — a necessity, since the game is during winter break.

Of all the women’s basketball games I’ve been to, the most spectators I’ve ever seen is about 200. So there’s certainly a lot of seats to be filled in the Palestra. Also it’s interesting that both the women’s and men’s games against Drexel this year are part of NCAA-wide gimmicks. The men’s team will play at Drexel for the first time ever, and it’ll be at 10 a.m. as part of ESPN’s 14-hour hoops marathon.

Here are two other Random Ivy notes:

1) Ivysport.com, which for the most part is a site that sells Ivy League apparel, has an “infopedia” on the Ivy League. Most of you probably already know the vast majority of what’s on this site, but in case you ever want to find out which Ivy League school doesn’t have a Latin motto (Cornell), or you want to see a good timeline of Ivy League history, this is the site for you.

2) Pumped up for college basketball after The Line?  Well here’s a reason to like every single basketball team in America.  Penn’s reason:

Glenn Miller has himself a deep rotation. Darren Smith and Tommy McMahon missed last season. Zach Rosen leads the recruiting class that’s pretty awesome. Harrison Gaines has an awesome rich man name. And the Quakers have four returning starters. Flat out.

A blog dedicated to  Columbia football — yes, the same Columbia football team that is currently on a 12-game losing streak — just wrote a post about Al Bagnoli and the quick turnaround of the Penn football team he masterminded in the early 1990s.

But as Quakers fans know, the last four years have brought zero Ivy League titles and three straight losing Ivy campaigns. Why the decline?  Well, according to the post, maybe Penn President Amy Gutmann is to blame.

But 2003 was the last time Penn won the football title. And that’s also when current Penn president Amy Gutmann came on the scene.

Could the two incidents be related? When I asked Bagnoli last year if he felt he was getting enough support from the administration, he mostly shrugged. I get the feeling he had more to say … but couldn’t.

And then later:

For all I know, Gutmann is supporting athletics more than anyone at Penn, but the time parallels here are pretty clear. This is not only the longest championship drought for Bagnoli, his Quaker teams have had three straight losing Ivy seasons! And basketball fell off a cliff in 2007-08 for the first time in… forever.

Oh, and quarterback Robert Irvin is also to blame, says the blog, despite the fact that he was injured for all but 1.5 games last year and performed well in his sophomore season when he earned honorable mention All-Ivy honors.

Although this post is more than a little suspect — Gutmann surely can’t be blamed for Penn’s football woes — the blog, Roar Lions Roar, actually does have some legitimate information. Some links of note for Penn fans:

Will Lions WR Austin Knowlin have a big game on Saturday?

Is there a rivalry between Penn and Columbia?

Scouting Penn

Don’t know how this one fell through the cracks, but director Kevin Rafferty submitted a film about the infamous 1968 football game between Harvard and Yale that ended in a 29-29 tie to the Toronto International Film Festival last month. Here’s a review of the film.