Sprint Football Entertains Navy

By wpengine | October 10, 2003

There is plenty that Cornell sprint football head coach Terry Cullen could be dreading as his team heads into its match-up against Navy (3-0), the defending Collegiate Sprint Football League champions, 7 p.m. tonight in Ithaca. But instead, he is maintaining an optimistic attitude.

“I’m looking forward to it,” said Cullen about the game. “We’ll see if we can step it up a notch.”

Having had 18 of 22 starters return this year and riding a 12-game win streak into today’s showdown, Navy is the clear favorite to win the league championship again this year.

“They are unlike any team in the league,” commented Cullen about the Midshipmen. “They are head and shoulders above everybody.”

Navy boasts impressive defensive numbers through its first three games this season, having given up a mere 6.3 points per game while holding opposing offenses to a paltry 176.7 yards of total offense.

On the other side of the ball, the Red will try to bottle up a balanced Navy attack that has averaged a respectable 24 points per game with the league MVP at quarterback. However, the Midshipmen’s weak point on offense has become apparent, as they have already turned the ball over 14 times this season.

Meanwhile, Cornell (1-1) will try to ride the waves of momentum into this match-up after its impressive 46-18 trouncing of Princeton two weeks ago. The Red’s offense dominated the Tigers’ defense as the team racked up over 480 yards of total offense. Led by freshman Michael Fullowan’s 12 carries for 143 yards and three touchdowns, Cornell’s rushing attack accounted for 250 of these yards.

Cullen commented that he was impressed how Fullowan has “stepped in” as the team’s new starting tailback after it lost the original starter, sophomore Ben Hertzberger, due to illness.

Not to be outdone by the ground game, sophomore quarterback Alec Macauley threw for two scores and 189 yards to round out the balanced Cornell offense. Admitting that he is surprised at how well the passing game has been this year, Cullen said that, “We threw the ball extremely well.”

Senior Henry Kim was the receiver of choice for Macauley, as he led the team with five receptions for 78 yards.

“Kim was dominant out there,” said Cullen. “They couldn’t cover him.”

The defense, too, looked much improved after giving up 41 points to Army in Cornell’s first game. The Red held Princeton scoreless throughout the second half while also preventing the Tigers from converting any of its extra point attempts. Further, the Tigers had just 219 total yards as Cornell held them to a mere 62 yards in the air.

With a new coaching staff, Cullen described that, “We didn’t know what to expect from Princeton. We made some adjustments at half.”

The adjustments paid off as Cornell shut down the Tiger offense in the second half.

The Red has already made impressive strides on defense over its first two games, as Cullen commented that, “all in all, we are getting better on defense.”

Also, there have been a few pleasant surprises for the Red on defense. Most notably, the play of senior defensive end Ryan Walker has improved dramatically from last year. Walker notched 1.5 sacks and four tackles in the Princeton game.

“He has become dominant on the defensive line,” said Cullen.

Archived article by Scott Reich

Prof. Altschuler Publishes Book on Rock 'n' Roll

By wpengine October 15, 2003

All Shook Up: How Rock’n’Roll Changed America, by Glenn Altschuler Ph.D. ’76, Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies, was published last month by Oxford University Press. The book is the fourth in the publisher’s series called Pivotal Moments in America History. Prof. Altschuler, who teaches a two-semester course on American popular culture, said, “I have given some thought to the relationship between rock’n’roll and controversies over rock’n’roll and the 1950s for some time in my class, so it was a wonderful opportunity when the Pivotal Moments series approached me to take the project on.” All Shook Up places rock’n’roll and its surrounding controversies in a social and historical setting with chapters dedicated to such issues as race, sexuality and generational conflict. On his reasons for writing All Shook Up, Altschuler said, “the aim of the book was to show not only that conflicts over rock’n’roll provide a window to some of the conflicts of the 1950s, but to make the point that there are greater continuities between the 1950s and 1960s than we sometimes think there are.” Eric Alterman, in a book review for The Atlantic Monthly, said [All Shook Up] is “one of the first to do rock-and-roll the significant service of locating it within the cultural and political maelstrom it helped to create.” Alterman’s review continues to say that “Altschuler surpasses the admittedly sparsely populated field in the nuanced way he places the music within the conflicts — racial, sexual, commercial, and political — that it variously helped to encourage, exacerbate, and (occasionally) ameliorate.” Prof. Steven Pond, music, also believed that this book covers aspects of rock and roll never previously addressed. He said that “one of its chief virtues is the way that Altschuler’s analysis dovetails with Reebee Garofalo’s work and with Simon Frith’s work. In both cases, rock’n’roll is treated as social history, but in Frith’s case it’s with a decided Anglo orientation, and Garofalo’s concatenation of social, political, and economic issues leaves room for Altschuler’s discussions of sexuality, public policy and teenage identity struggles.” Some reviewers have criticized Altschuler for not exhibiting sufficient musical expertise to cover the topic of rock and roll. “In the end, however, All Shook Up commits the unpardonable rock’n’roll sin of failing to satisfy. While Altschuler does fine when he digs in, he ultimately covers the decade from the birth of rock in the mid-Fifties to the arrival of the Beatles in the U.S. in 1964 in less than 200 pages. Consequently, the book runs out of steam in about 1960 and races through topics that could easily warrant a book in themselves. And, although he makes few mistakes, Altschuler’s discussions of music never feel fluent,” wrote Anthony DeCurtis in a review for the Oct. 16 issue of Rolling Stone. Altschuler believes that he and DeCurtis have a conflict of interest in the book. “Reviewers always have their own tack on things. When your book is subject to mass circulation publications like this, then sometimes your purposes are lost in the shuffle a bit. This is a book about the 1950s, so when a reviewer says that the events of the 1960s are rushed through, then perhaps there is a gap between my aims and that person’s purposes. And that’s OK — perfectly OK,” he said. On the aims of his book, Altschuler said it was to “use a mass-culture phenomenon like rock’n’roll, and in this case the hysteria that erupted over it, to think about the values of the era in which those controversies occurred. [Also], to look in a serious way at what rock’n’roll reveals about teenage sexuality, about generational conflict, about racism and integration and most importantly, about the emergence of teenagers as a separate identity with consumption patterns that were distinctive and important in the 1950s.” With these aims in mind, the book is an account of the social history of the 1950s, an era in which rock’n’roll played an integral part. Altschuler hopes that some of the issues of the 1950s that arose through rock’n’roll will be enlightened to his readers, which are supposed to include both students and general readers. Altschuler said, “although it’s designed for undergraduates, [it] certainly aims to meet a general reader. Not somebody who’s really looking for insights about the music, per se, but about the era in which the music appeared.”Archived article by Tony Apuzzo
Harvard Blanks Gridders With Stellar Defense

By wpengine October 15, 2003

No. 23 Harvard (4-0. 2-0 Ivy) struck early and often on Saturday, scoring 20 points in the first half en route to a 27-0 win over the football team on Schoellkopf Field. Fast start and offensive prowess aside, however, it was a failed fourth-down conversion by the Red that stands out as the turning point of the game. Trailing 20-0, Cornell (1-3, 0-2) began its third possession of the second quarter on the Harvard 38-yard line. The Red drove 33 yards on 10 plays to place itself at third-and-one on the Crimson five-yard line. Unfortunately for the Red, rush attempts by senior fullback Todd Newell and sophomore tailback Andre Hardaway failed, keeping Cornell off the board as time ran out in the half. “We had just driven the ball 40 yards, and the majority of the damage was on the ground. We were banging out six yards, we were banging out nine yards,” explained head coach Tim Pendergast, “and I felt like we had two chances to get a yard, and I really felt like we could do it. But we came up short.” “If they had scored before halftime, it’s a completely different game in the second half,” Harvard linebacker Dante Balestracci said. “Being able to stop them on fourth down like that and just run off the clock and go into halftime up 20 points was huge.” The sequence of plays was the personification of the stinginess the Crimson defense displayed throughout the game. Drive after drive, Harvard frustrated the Red, limiting the Red to 247 yards of total offense. “The defensive strategy was let’s make them throw the ball to win, because although they did a good job of that, they’re more of a running football team,” said Harvard head coach Tim Murphy. “We don’t want them to dominate the tempo of the game, and we wanted to make them play a little left-handed, so to speak.” The strategy paid off, as the Cornell offense was handcuffed all day. Meanwhile, the Harvard offense, led by junior quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick, continued its assault on the rest of Division I-AA. Fitzpatrick passed for 165 yards and rushed for 83 more to pace the Crimson’s 375 yards of total offense. The Crimson scored touchdowns on three of its first four possessions of the game. On Harvard’s second possession, running back Ryan Tyler culminated a 10 play, 62-yard scoring drive with a five-yard run for a touchdown. Kicker Adam Kingston missed the extra point attempt, giving Harvard a 6-0 lead. On the very next possession, Fitzpatrick called his own number, running 10 yards for a touchdown and a 13-0 Crimson lead. Harvard’s third score came on a five-yard touchdown reception by Brian Edwards early in the second quarter. The trend of offensive efficiency did not continue into the second half, as the Cornell defense finally began to clamp down. “I think we were a little more conservative in the second and third quarters. We wanted to pound the ball a little bit and run some time off the clock. We thought that our guys would be able to dominate the line of scrimmage,” said Fitzpatrick. “A lot of credit to them, they stopped our running game in the second quarter a lot. They were definitely a good defense.” Harvard got on the board again late in the third quarter on a 64-yard touchdown reception by Corey Mazza. “I thought that our defense really fought tooth and nail, and really came up with some big plays ourselves against a really talented outfit who’s averaging 531 yards per game and 41 points,” Pendergast said. Junior punter Mike Baumgartel was again a bright spot for the Red. He averaged 44.7 yards on six punts, including a long of 61 yards. He had two punts land inside the Harvard 20-yard line. “Mike’s a consistently very excellent performer for us,” said Pendergast. “I don’t know what the numbers say, someone might be a yard in front of him in the league average, but Mike’s the best punter in the league.” Another positive point for Cornell was the return of sophomore tailback Hardaway, who rushed for a net of 46 yards on 19 carries. This game marked Hardaway’s return from injuries that limited him for the first three weeks of the season. “Being an athlete, being a ballplayer, being a competitor, there’s no better place I’d rather be than out on the battlefield,” he said.Archived article by Owen Bochner