Columbia: Past, Present & Future

Brad Losee gets some nice press


This week's promised look at the best returning offensive lines will have to wait one more day as there is some general news that needs to be updated first.

New Football Site

A number of alums have alerted me to a great new football Columbia football website coming directly from the football office. The embedded video on the home page sure looks a lot like a highlight reel for the 2009 season and there are a lot of other features.


This is a great site for fans and everyone else for that matter. I like it a lot.


Nice Piece on Losee

I usually stop highlighting the local news media's coverage of incoming freshmen players after the official announcements are made about each of them coming to Columbia.

But I should stop doing that because the summer months seem to bring more clarity and accuracy to the writers assigned to these stories.

When the Ivy recruiting process is still ongoing, we keep seeing stories that refer to athletic scholarships and other mistakes like "Dartmouth University," and 11-game seasons.

A good example of a nice and accurate story came out this weekend about incoming defensive lineman Brad Losee in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Some of the highlights include the fact that Harvard and Cornell were also interested in Losee.

Losee seems like he could fit into the Lou Miller mold at Columbia. Perhaps, like Miller, he'll start out playing more like an outside linebacker and then put him on the D-line after he bulks up a bit between freshman and sophomore year. I think this is a track that Will Paterson is currently on for the Lions as well.

Speaking of Minnesota, Fortune Magazine just named Eden Prairie, MN as the #1 city to live for 2010. That's the home of senior Mark Muston.

But it doesn't stop there. If you click through the names of top 100 cities, it seems like every one has some kind of connection to Columbia players, past and present.


Death of a Legend

A lot of you probably saw that legendary Yankees P.A. announcer Bob Sheppard died yesterday.

Sheppard had a Columbia connection. He got a Master's in Speech Therapy from CU in 1933 and went on to teach speech at his undergraduate alma mater, St. Johns.

He debuted as Yankee PA announcer on April 17, 1951, with the Yankees' home opener, a win over the Red Sox.

But many people outside of New York are unaware that he was also the P.A. announcer for the New York Giants football team from 1956 through 2005.

Sheppard was also my virtual neighbor, living just three towns over in Baldwin, NY.