On a snowy Saturday afternoon in the final game of the 2008 season, it was strength versus strength as Cornell hosted Penn in the annual Trustees Cup. The Red boasted the Ivy League’s top-ranked offense while the Quakers entered with the Ancient Eight’s stingiest defense. The old mantra that a good defense trumps a good offense held true, as Penn’s 23-6 victory sent Cornell on the way to its first losing season since 2004.

There are a lot of things you can do in 2:39 — listen to Joe Cocker’s version of “You Are So Beautiful To Me,” run a really quick half mile, watch a Saturday Night Live skit — but making a 17-point fourth-quarter comeback is not one of them.

After such a strong start to the football team’s season — winning its first three games and upsetting preseason Ivy-favorite Yale — it is easy to be disappointed with the squad’s 4-5 (2-4 Ivy) record going into its final contest. Tomorrow, the Red will have the opportunity to send its large class of 33 seniors off with a win at Schoellkopf Field — a place where this graduating class has posted a 15-5 record over its four years on the Hill.

Every year college football programs around the nation struggle to fill the void that is created when its senior class graduates. This is the norm, not the exception, as Cornell can attest. With 33 seniors on the 2008 roster, Cornell will be hard pressed to develop a class of players as dedicated, intense and knowledgeable about the game of football as this year’s batch of seniors.

Even with the Ivy League title out of sight, the football team still has a couple of games to look forward to, starting with Saturday’s afternoon matchup against Columbia. Cornell entered last weekend’s 37-14 win over Dartmouth with generous motivation stemming from a 51-39 defeat a year earlier. The team will have its own reasons to get pumped this weekend, as the team will travel to New York City for a contest that can be termed as a state championship.

Sun News Editor Jasmine Marcus asked Nathan Ford a few questions about the primetime shout-out.

On Saturday at Schoellkopf Field, Dartmouth football head coach Buddy Teevens had no desire to run the ball. When Teevens handed the reigns to freshman quarterback Conner Kempe, he was giving him more than just his first collegiate start, Teevens was giving Kempe the opportunity to be Colt Brennan for a day.

If the Cornell football team thought it had trouble scoring in the red zone, on a gray and overcast Saturday afternoon at Schoellkopf Field, Dartmouth’s woes in such situations put everything into perspective. After junior running back Randy Barbour capped a 13-play, 76-yard opening drive for Cornell with his fifth touchdown of the season, Dartmouth marched the length the field to attempt a 26-yard field goal from inside the red zone. Senior linebacker Graham Rihn had other plans, however, deflecting the ensuing kick to sophomore cornerback Andy Wade, who returned the loose football 69 yards to pay dirt. The Red never looked back en route to a 37-14 cakewalk over the winless Green.

After a disheartening loss to Princeton last week, the Red will look to move back to .500 with a win over Dartmouth at Schoellkopf Field tomorrow afternoon. In last week’s contest, the team had 555 yards of offense but still lost by five points. The loss was the Red’s third Ivy loss of the year, making it nearly impossible to win an Ivy League title. But that sentiment wasn’t obvious on the field yesterday evening as the team prepped for another Ivy League foe.

Cornell football fans certainly remember Kevin Boothe ’06 dancing in the desert last February after the New York Giants shocked the world in Super Bowl XLII. While few outside of the Cornell football community and perhaps Boothe’s own family were aware of his contributions to the victory, Boothe was in on numerous special play opportunities and made the Red proud on those occasions. While the ranks of former Ivy Leaguers playing on Sundays parallel the number of states that went Red this past Tuesday, two members of this year’s Cornell squad hope to make the transition next season to the NFL. Senior left tackle Steve Valenta and senior safety Tim Bax hope to follow in Boothe’s footsteps someday, but first they must catch the eye of an NFL scout. Two teams that have scouted the pair are the Jacksonville Jaguars and Indianapolis Colts, according to Bax, the hard-hitting safety who leads the Red with 61 tackles this year.