COLLEGE NOTEBOOK
Have Gridiron, Will Travel

   To prove again that college football is 
more than point spreads and wire service 
polls, Newsday's John Jeansonne visited 11 
campuses in 10 states  -  plus the District
of Columbia  -  took in six games and filed
eight reports this fall. These are his 
leftover impressions.

The Beat Goes On
   
   Providence, R.I.  -  "And now," the 
public-address announcer called excitedly, 
"the cleverest band in the world!  -  the 
Columbia University Marching 400!"
   On the field, the Columbia band was 
neither marching nor 400. It stood, 21 
strong, huddled together to keep warm in a 
minus-8-degree wind chill. That was the 
clever part. Columbia's football opponent, 
Brown, was said to offer seminars in 
"applied Leggo," [sic] as the Columbia
band "forms Brown's academic structure."
   The band wasn't forming anything, of 
course.
   The Columbia band claimed Brown is known 
for "Charlie Brown, university president, 
and Werner von Brown, university 
pyrotechnics director." Then Brown, 
admitting it had gotten a variance on 
minimum academic requirements "so we could 
have a band," sent its musicians onto the 
field and did a salute to Jessica Hahn, 
forming a big red A.
   The game, featuring one team bent on 
finishing second among the Ivies and another
team willing to throw itself on a ticking 
bomb to end its national-record 40-game 
losing streak, couldn't have been better
theater. Each play  -  each snap  -  was 
excruciatingly vital, every yard of severe 
worth to Columbia, which refused to take 
notice of the biting wind and threw the ball 
with striking efficiency. Columbia 
eventually lost by three points, on a 
fourth-down Brown option play with less than 
a minute on the clock, after Columbia 
apparently had stopped the drive on a Brown 
fumble the play before.
    "Break our backs, break our knees," goes 
an old Columbia chant, "we have better SATs."