What do you mean by overboard. Considering you posted this in the Adsense forum are you asking for a review of you Ad placement, or did you just post in the wrong place?
It's certainly not overboard IMO. I'd be tempted to include a vertical ad unit in the left most column and also use a horizontal ad unit in between some of the content panels in the main middle column.
and get rid of that broken "-->" at the top of the page I said to make them white so the URL under the ads on the right does not stand out so much (and I dont like yellow)
my board site is the same color scheme as the official colors of the sec http://www.secsports.com <--see i have been meaning to get rid that --> havent gotten around to it yet
The page is not loading properly because of an "invalid argument". BTW, I noticed the W3C icon at the bottom of the page. Does your page normally validate?
I'd remove the ads from the welcome page. re: tos "content pages only" no thankyou login etc. Perhaps if you added a paragraph about the board just under the ads it would count more as content.
my page has a error right now because i upgraded VB software to 3.5 and my portal software isnt compatible yet. lonecrow.. thats not really a welcome page it usually has content. That part of my site is just having errors right now for the above reason.