Where's the Kicking Beef?

It looks like Coach Estes has more laminated cards than kickers


Brown is usually the last Ivy League team to announce its football recruiting class each year, but this time the Bears have beaten Columbia, Cornell and Yale to the punch with this list released yesterday.


Once again, this new Brown class has a pretty strong local flavor with three Rhode Island high school grads and another six players from the New England area. That's nine total New Englanders out of 26 total incoming frosh, or almost 35%.

One surprise for me is only one kicker is on the list. Brown's kicking woes were about as bad as Columbia's were last season, (maybe worse), but the Lions are bringing a lot of talented kickers, according to published reports. It's possible Brown Head Coach Phil Estes has a walk-on kicker or two up his sleeve, and we'll keep an eye out for that.


Ex-Teammate Alert!

Based on what I've seen about our incoming class for 2014, only one of our projected freshmen could be playing against his former high school teammates in Ivy play. That would be Nick Melka from Benet Academy in Lisle, Illinois, who is reportedly coming to Columbia and his current teammates Michael Runger and Philip Schmidt are going to Dartmouth. I'll keep an eye out for the Cornell and Yale lists to see if Nick will be alone on this list for this particular year.