Brown defeated Columbia in the last game of last year's football season to secure a share of the Ivy championship.

Yes, believe it or not, Brown does have varsity sports teams — and a handful of fall teams have been nationally ranked and competitive in recent years. Sports editor Andrew Braca gives a run-down of games to watch this season in Tuesday’s Herald.

The football team is ranked third in the Ivy league for the season, behind Harvard and Penn, after coming off a co-championship season last year. (And they beat co-champs Harvard head-to-head, so the Crimson’s championship rings don’t shine quite so brightly as Bruno’s.) The Bears will be preparing to face off against intrastate rival URI in their homecoming game this season:

Football, Oct. 3:
Homecoming games are often exciting, but last year’s 24-22, rain-soaked triumph over Harvard will be hard to top. This year, the Bears will square off against the University of Rhode Island in the battle for the 94th Governors Cup, seeking to avenge a 37-13 loss to the Rams last year.

Six All-Ivy selections return from last year, but Bruno will be breaking in a new quarterback.

Are the third-ranked Bears underrated or past their prime? We’ll have to wait and find out.

As colleges nationwide welcome back thousands of students, many schools are taking the initiative to fight off swine flu by quarantining sick students on arrival. Brown hasn’t yet established a “leper colony,” but Health Services will be handing out flu kits — complete with masks, thermometers and other medical miscellany — and has put out a list of recommendations for students in an effort to combat the worldwide epidemic, The Herald reports today.

You may have missed the campus’s first case of swine flu — it occurred in late May after many students had already left campus. Two Rhode Islanders have already died from the virus, and health officials are expecting up to half the state to contract H1N1.

But the real casualty could be fashion: the Irish hipster community has wasted no time adding the face masks to their wardrobes. If “surgical-mask chic” catches on at Brown, Health Services might just have to charge.