Does anyone actually know what anthropology is?

What does Evo love more: nationalization of oil or speaking at Columbia?

Should GS deans be chosen in the same way as GS students--far too late?

Did you know that, like, East 116th is TOTALLY less gentrified than, like, Columbia? I think she actually saw a poor person!

Can Columbia sports only win through not telling anyone about injuries to players?

Bwog's Friday Sports Roundup is back!

Football: After so many close defeats to start the season, the Columbia Lions won their first Ivy league game in two years last Saturday, 21-13 against Dartmouth. In the wind and rain, quarterbacks Shane Kelly and Millicent Olawale powered an offense that put up almost 400 all-purpose yards, while the defense stepped up to hold Dartmouth's passing game to only 79 yards (partly thanks to Andy Shalbrack and Adam Mehrer's interceptions). Olawale (7-7 for 111 yards) was named Ivy League offensive player of the week for his efforts. This weekend, the Lions take on Yale in New Haven. The game will be televised on the YES network - Bwog finds it ironic that the one game available on Columbia's cable system is during the weekend many Columbia students are not on campus.

Cross Country: The men's and women's cross country teams finished second earlier today in the Ivy League Heptagonal Championships in Van Cortlandt Park. The women finished second to heavily-favored Princeton, who set a new championship record with only 17 points. But Columbia's women outpaced the rest of the pack, with special congrats going to senior Megan Lessard, who finished 8th. The men's team came even closer, losing out to Princeton by only 3 points. 7 Columbia runners finished in between 10th and 20th. On November 15th, the Lions will compete in the NCAA Northeast Regionals, also held in Van Cortlandt Park.

Aint nothing better than people behind mics (Religion!) (Education!)

Next stop Bonnaroo

Harvard, Brown, Penn > Princeton, Cornell, Yale

Fun with euphemisms (this ran yesterday)

Is that a banana in your costume? Or are you really a banana?

Preview to the protest

Fight! for your right! to... Project Runway!

A mysterious tipster clues us in...

Our men's club water polo team won the New York State Championship today, huzzah! On the way, we beat Syracuse and, yes, NYU.

As fourth seed, we beat Army (West Point) 7-4. This means that Columbia gets to go to club championships in Ohio.

This news comes two years to the day as Bwog last reported the team's triumphs.

More photos after the jump.

You read the title correctly - sports coverage on Bwog. Stop pointing at the pigs above us. We know they're there.

With the start of a new school year, we felt it was time to turn over a new leaf in the Bwog-sports relationship. In the past, we've generally only reported on sports either as champions or, more often, as a punchline. There are hundreds of our classmates practicing day after day, though, and there's a lot of great stuff to cover in their efforts. We'll be doing our best to give them some coverage, and we ask that you do your best to help us in our occasional ignorance at the intricacies of some of the less well-known sports. On to the what's up this week in the land of sport.

Football: The Lions open their season tomorrow at home against Fordham. The teams have split the last two games, with coach Norries Wilson winning his debut 37-7 in 2006, but then losing in 2007 27-10. To win, the Lions will have to do better on the ground, both on offense with the running back duo of senior Jordan Davis and junior Ray Rangel, and from the whole defense, which gave up 353 yards last year against Fordham.

Unfortunately, the team may be without junior wide reciever Austin Knowlin (led the team with 988 yards and 11 TDs in 2007) and junior linebacker Drew Quinn (second in tackles in 2007) - both have been left off of the starting lineup in the media guide. For a more in-depth preview of the team and the rest of the Ivy League, the Spec has a football supplement.

"I can't say it was the best decision"

Press releases: an overworked reporter's best friend

Homelessness: nobody's best friend

School spirit: still sort of lacking (unless it's for water polo)

Plus: Columbia's Safire on pimple-toms and booby caresses!

Bwog's a little late with this item, but we didn't want any more time to go by without congratulating the Columbia men's soccer team on their 3-1 victory yesterday over UC Santa Barbara, who were ranked 6th in the country (and who won the national title two seasons ago).

Despite being outshot 22-7, the Lions held on to bounce back from their Friday night loss to SUNY Stony Brook. Sophomore Bayo Adafin (pictured at right in a photo by Columbia University Athletics) scored all three goals, and has recieved several national and regional awards, including being named to the College Soccer News National Team of the Week.

The team's next game is at LaSalle on Wednesday, and their next home game is on the 26th against Quinnipiac. Also, we recommend Adafin get in touch with some European clubs - some of them could use forwards for the Champions League this week.

As those who watch the Olympics closely know, it abounds with the more obscure sports that only the Ivy League has enough money to field teams in. Not surprisingly, then, the Ivy League has fielded its fair share of Olympians over the years, even as other conferences have taken over the role of being the NBA and NFL's minor leagues. There are enough, in fact, that somebody out in the Internets decided they deserve their own blog. Even less surprisingly, the historical medal count indicates what many a Columbian could have already guessed: Columbia has contributed only 35 Olympians and 13 medalists, significantly below the next lowest, Brown (51 Olympians and 25 medalists).That's waking the echoes of the Hudson Valley. Still, Bwog wishes best of luck to the Columbians competing in dressage, the 400 meters, and, of course, fencing. Hopefully some of their events will actually be on in prime time.

In honor of the Yankee Stadium's final season, this year's MLB all-star game will take place in the Bronx on Tuesday. To remember some of baseball's most interesting historical moments, Bwog Film Rental Analyst Brandon Hammer suggests you check out one (or two or three) of the following movies.

The Pride of the Yankees (1942):

Those who yearn for the glory days of the Bronx Bombers will find comfort in this 1942 film. Starring Gary Cooper in the lead role, The Pride of the Yankees is a beautiful biopic about Columbia's own Lou Gehrig, whose endurance to last 2,130 consecutive games (the equivalent of more than 13 baseball seasons) brought him the nickname the "Iron Horse." Cooper's performance is powerful; he captures the essence of a man who was known for his kindness and humility, a man who, though his life and career were cut short by a terrible disease, considered himself "the luckiest man on the face of the earth." The film also features and intriguing performance by Babe Ruth as himself, as well as a reenactment of Gehrig's famous speech of July 4, 1939.

It's official, Bwog tipster Jarid Maged informs us:

"about 2 minutes ago, columbia won the ivy league title in baseball. 7-5 over dartmouth in game 3 of the ivy league championship series in hanover. i am not making this up. tried snapping a shot of the pile after the game, but my stupid computer wouldn't allow anything from windows media player. but damn. they won something huge in sports for once. now they move on to the ncaa tournament."

Congratulations, boys.

Licensed music and university lectures!

CC and GS...

CCSC and overblown controversy.

University Writing essay and travel photography!

Columbia and losing...again....

Bwog daily editor Mariela Quintana floats into the surprisingly happy go lucky world of Ivy League fencing.

The Columbia Fencing team did not carry themselves with the athletic aggression that one would expect at their final competition of the season. The mood Wednesday evening at Dodge Fitness Center evoked memories of the indoor soccer tournaments of my youth, where gossiping with the girls on my team was as important as our competition. Family and friends of the athletes comprised the majority of the audience. Fencing Moms chatted and younger siblings ran around, begging for attention from the fencers. The social atmosphere carried over to the athletes, who munched on Goldfish and joked with spectators between bouts. Had I only known about the informal milieu that fencing offers, perhaps I would not have given up on organized athletics.

Columbia men's basketball came into this evening's game against Cornell with high hopes—after all, some sports prognosticators and portents had picked the Lions in the preseason as league champions, and opening league play with a hard-fought six-point loss at Ithaca against Cornell, there seemed to be no reason that the senior-studded lineup couldn't better their performance at home in the veritable high-school gym that is Levien.

A win would mean a respectable 1-1 record with twelve ostensibly easier league games to go; a loss would consign Columbia to the cellar of the Ivy League, with a pitiful record of 0-2 and prospects for a league championship dim for not just one but probably several years. So how did the Lions respond to what may have been the biggest basketball game in years? In a word, poorly. Cornell came out of the gate strong by scoring ten unanswered; Columbia's clunky offense failed to score until more than six minutes had elapsed.

Robert Kraft's recent donation to Columbia got the Lions some sort-of-big-time sports coverage. Gregg Easterbrook, who writes the 6,000- word Tuesday Morning Quarterback column for ESPN's Page 2, wrote a paragraph on Columbia's fundraising program.

Easterbrook writes that Columbia may be trying to move into the upper tiers of Ivy athletics by, like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, schools he says are offering de facto athletic scholarships even though Ivy rules forbid them.

Kraft's New England Patriots have also been accused of bending (or breaking) the rules, but are 6-0, while Columbia sits at 1-4.

- DHI

The last day of class has come and gone, and with it a year of Columbia sports marked by unusual success: some of our vaunted athletic squads have indeed emerged atop the Ivy League pissing match. For those of you watching at home or not watching at all, don't feel bad—all the winning teams compete in sports that most people see only in the Olympics, if ever. In case you're ever forced to answer the question, "How did the Lions do this year?", Bwog generalist CML presents a lightning recap of 2006-2007 Columbia sports.

Football: The football team garnered widespread attention and critical acclaim by sucking far less than it normally does, clawing its way to a 3-0 non-conference record against hardcore competition from Fordham, Georgetown, and Iona, and even mauling two out of seven of our fellow Ivy collegian-cracksquads for a final record of 5-5. Columbia's small community of sports fans is still wondering how they pulled that off, given the offense's utter inability to score and propensity to fuck up at critical junctures, but then again, most people at Columbia are unable to score because they fuck up at critical junctures. Look for Coach Norries "John Coffee" Wilson to magically whip quarterbacks Craig "Tom Hanks" Hormann and Millicent "No Green Mile Analogy" Olawale into shape for our viewing pleasure.

Men's Basketball: The basketball team ascended to unprecedented heights of mediocrity, finishing with a 16-12 record (7-7 in Ivy play). Most discouraging were the two drubbings that the Lions received at the troglodytic hands of Penn; most encouraging is the fact that Penn loses its best players — including the awesome Ibrahim Jaaber — and Columbia loses nobody whatsoever, leading Bwog to believe that, with the Lions' ethnic and skillwise diversity (Baumann, Nwachukwu, Matsui, et al.), they can come together to form one Light-Blue Rainbow Coalition that will send the rest of the Ivies to anti-oppression training and finally reach the first round of the NCAA tournament, where they will once again lose by 43 to Duke.

OTHER SPORTS AFTER THE JUMP