Hockey viewing is as fun there as probably any school in the nation. That arena is legit. Lax and soccer can also be a lot of fun to watch if you have any appreciation for either of those sports. Men's basketball... not so much. I'm not even sure if they charge admission for baseball, lax, soccer, etc. If they do, it's less than bottled water in NYC.
Agree with Alkie's assesment of Columbia basketball. It's fun to watch IVY conference play...Columbia will probably suck, but they may recruit a stud or 2 on of these days. Baseball is notoriously terrible there (despite last year), and it's a pain in the ass to get to the field (or the soccer, football, track facilities).
During my time up in these parts I saw Fernando Perez, Ross Ohlendorf, and Will Venable play ball, so it's not all v-neck cashmere sweaters and crappy athletics.
Football, basketball (m/w), hockey (m/w), soccer (m/w), and lacrosse (m/w) are the only ticketed sports (and really, all those tickets are dirt cheap...even relatively popular men's hockey is $10 for an adult single game ticket).
As for men's hoops, Dartmouth has an incredible structural disadvantage to the absence of any backyard recruiting base. Hanover, NH is just about the last place a talented male basketball player with any sort of athletic ambition would want to be. You would think that Columbia is a sleeping giant (in Ivy terms) given their location in NYC. Even with elevated academic requirements, you would have to like your chances of putting a team of pretty good players together without going too far from campus. Penn, Princeton, and, more recently, Cornell have had such dominance in terms of Ivy men's basketball championships - it is surprising that Harvard, Columbia, or Brown haven't been able to leverage their urban locations into a solid recruiting pipeline to challenge those "powers."
But enough about Ivy sports. I can hear everyone's disinterest growing...
