The next baseball Hall of Famer and…the Pittsburgh Steelers

Posted on August 11, 2009 by Sandlapper Spike

Neil Best of Newsday had a blog post on Monday about Luis Tiant and the new ESPN documentary about Tiant, The Lost Son of Havana.  Best asked Tiant about not being a member of the baseball Hall of Fame and got an “I don’t care, except I really care” response from the former pitcher.  This got me thinking about the Hall, but not really about Tiant (a very good pitcher in his day, but not quite Hall-worthy, although he certainly has the right to wonder how Catfish Hunter got in and he didn’t).  Of course, it doesn’t take much for me to riff about the Hall, as anyone who peruses this blog can tell (just a few examples:  here, here, and here).

Anyway, I took a quick look (not for the first time) at potential eligibles for next year’s ballot.  First, here are the returnees and the percentage of votes they got in the last election:

Andre Dawson (67.0%); Bert Blyleven (62.7%); Lee Smith (44.5%); Jack Morris (44.0%); Tim Raines (22.6%); Mark McGwire (21.9%); Alan Trammell (17.4%); Dave Parker (15.0%); Don Mattingly (11.9%); Dale Murphy (11.5%); Harold Baines (5.9%)

The list of newly eligible players likely to appear on the ballot:

Roberto Alomar, Kevin Appier, Andy Ashby, Ellis Burks, Dave Burba, Andres Galarraga, Pat Hentgen, Mike Jackson, Eric Karros, Ray Lankford, Barry Larkin, Edgar Martinez, Fred McGriff, Mark McLemore, Shane Reynolds, David Segui, Robin Ventura, Fernando Vina, Todd Zeile

Last January I wrote that “… the only one of those players with a shot [at getting elected next year] is Dawson.  He’s going to get in eventually, but I’m not sure if his support will jump from 67% to 75%+ in one year.”

Well, I still think Andre Dawson is the only one with a shot at making it next year, but I now believe that he’s got a very good chance.  Why?  Because I have come up with a theory about the baseball Hall of Fame that revolves around…Lynn Swann.

Lynn Swann was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in his 14th year of eligibility.  It was (and is) a controversial selection, as there was (and is) considerable disagreement about whether or not he deserved enshrinement.  Swann was famous in his day, and played for a well-known franchise.  The casual fan probably rated Swann higher than many who followed (or studied) the sport with more intensity.  This is due in part to Swann not having A) a particularly long career, and B) an overwhelming statistical record.

Now, does that description in the preceding paragraph remind you of a certain baseball player recently elected to Cooperstown?  Jim Rice, maybe?

Rice was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in his 15th year of eligibility.  It was (and is) a controversial selection.  Rice, like Swann, was famous in his day, played for a prominent club, did not have a long career, and has a Hall of Fame argument that is more about visceral reaction than bottom-line accounting.

In 2001, Lynn Swann got his bust in Canton.  The very next year, his teammate and fellow wide receiver, the outstanding (but lower-profile) John Stallworth, was elected.  Stallworth, it has been said, had to wait for his own enshrinement because Swann’s candidacy essentially stood in the way.  Once Swann finally made it over the line, however, the voters apparently came to the conclusion that you couldn’t have a Hall of Fame with Lynn Swann in it that didn’t also include John Stallworth, because Stallworth was at least as good as Swann, if not better.

In 2009, Jim Rice finally has his plaque in Cooperstown, and who do we find leading the list of returning candidates?  Andre Dawson, who like Rice was an outfielder who debuted in the mid-1970s, and who arguably was just as good a player as Rice, if not better.  Like Stallworth, Dawson was a star, but not as big a star as Rice or Swann were at their respective peaks (although Dawson did win an MVP with the Cubs, his best years were spent in Montreal, more or less hidden from many casual fans and a few sportswriters).

Now, there are good arguments to be made that Dawson is not a Hall of Fame player, with his career .323 OBP foremost among them.  This is not unlike Stallworth, whose career totals, while solid, do not scream “automatic Hall of Famer”.  However, Jim Rice is now in the Hall.  Dawson, to most observers, was at worst equal to Rice, and was probably better (particularly if you account for defense — Dawson played over 1000 games in center field and won eight Gold Gloves).

Stallworth went to Alabama A&M.  Dawson went to Florida A&M.  Both A&Ms, both HBCUs — I think my little theory should get a bonus for that…

There is a difference when it becomes time to tally Hall of Fame votes, though.  Canton’s legends are determined by a relatively small group of less than 50 voters.  Last year 539 members of the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) cast ballots for the baseball Hall.  It’s generally easier to reach a consensus among smaller groups, especially since the pro football voters actually meet and discuss candidates as a group, as opposed to the baseball voters (who mail in their ballots).

Despite this, I think the “Rice is in, so Dawson has to be in” point of view will still take hold, at least enough to sway the additional 8% of the electorate Dawson needs for enshrinement.  It helps that there is no “lock” among the new candidates, although Larkin, Alomar, and McGriff will all draw significant support (as might Edgar Martinez).

Next year will be Dawson’s ninth year on the BBWAA ballot.  Stallworth was elected to pro football’s Hall after being named a finalist for the eighth time.

I’m rooting for The Hawk to make it.

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The NCAA attacks its own (again)

Posted on August 7, 2009 by Sandlapper Spike

On Thursday afternoon the NCAA issued a press release entitled “Executive Committee adopts wagering policy”.  Included was the following statement:

“No predetermined or non-predetermined session of an NCAA championship may be conducted in a state with legal wagering that is based upon single-game betting (high school, college or professional) in a sport in which the NCAA conducts a championship.”

Single-game betting is defined as wagering that involves either a money line or point-spread wager. The recommended policy would not apply to those states that may offer parlay betting, lottery tickets or sports pools/pull tabs.

What this apparently means is that effective immediately, schools in Delaware and Nevada will no longer be able to host any postseason NCAA events.  This includes even those events for which they would have qualified to host by merit.

The policy change will result in the University of Delaware not being able to host an FCS playoff game.  Also affected in that state is Wesley College, which has an excellent football program at the Division III level.  Delaware is a perennial FCS power that has hosted 22 postseason football games, while Wesley has hosted eight Division III playoff games.  The Blue Hens and Wolverines have each hosted playoff games as recently as 2007. 

The University of Nevada-Reno hosted a skiing regional in March and has the capability of hosting other regionals in sports like volleyball, basketball, and baseball.  The opportunity to host those regionals is now off the table for that school (as it is for UNLV). 

Faring a little better than Nevada and Delaware were the state schools in Montana.  There was a fear that the NCAA’s stance would also prohibit events from being held in that state, but the new policy allows sports pools (as opposed to single-game betting), so Montana avoided getting the Nevada/Delaware “treatment”.  This led to a predictably mealy-mouthed response from the Montana state attorney general:

“I applaud the NCAA for coming to a commonsense conclusion that preserves Montana’s right to host playoff and tournament games,” Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock said in a prepared statement. “Montana wholeheartedly supports its student athletes. Along with the NCAA, we remain committed to protecting the integrity of collegiate sports.”

What he is really applauding, of course, is that part about Montana (or Montana State) still getting to host playoff games.  He surely can’t serious in supporting the NCAA’s “commonsense conclusion”, since there isn’t anything sensible about it.

Look, I understand the NCAA’s concern about this issue.  There are two points, though, that need to be made.

1)  It isn’t the fault of the schools.  The colleges and universities in Nevada and Delaware have nothing to do with the gambling laws in those states, and can’t do anything about those laws anyway.  Why punish the student-athletes and institutions for something over which they have no control?

The NCAA presumably is hoping that this new policy will cause the politicians in the state of Delaware to reverse themselves (I can’t imagine even the NCAA thinks things will change in Nevada), but the organization has to know that losing an occasional playoff game is not going to be enough to stop the state from instituting single-game betting.  The legislation passed easily in both houses of the Delaware state legislature.  The state is hoping to generate more than $50 million in revenue from sports betting in the first year of implementation alone.  I’m afraid a playoff game against Southern Illinois or Northern Iowa isn’t going to make that kind of cash.

A cynic might think that the NCAA is punishing its member schools in the states because, well, they are the only entities that the NCAA can punish.  It’s like a version of the old Jerry Tarkanian line, “The NCAA is so mad at Kentucky it gave Cleveland State two more years of probation.”

2)  There have been plenty of schools with gambling scandals from states with no state-sponsored gambling.  Toledo, Northwestern, Florida, Maryland, Rhode Island, Maine, and Arizona State  (just to name a few) all had serious gambling incidents involving student-athletes just in the last two decades.  What Delaware is going to do won’t matter a whole lot in the grand scheme of things.

That is what really upset Nevada-Reno director of athletics Cary Groth.  As she put it:

“It’s outrageous,” Groth said. “Having worked in a non-betting state, in Illinois, it was more of an issue for us to monitor betting for our student-athletes than it is here at Nevada because there’s so much more awareness (here)…All anybody has to do is get on the Internet, or pick up the phone, to place a bet (anywhere in the U.S.).”

Groth added something else, just to stir the pot a little more:

“The NCAA has become such a monopoly on so many things, it’s not right,” Groth said, adding all states affected by the ban are home to non-Bowl Championship Series schools.

You knew that would come up, didn’t you?  Again, cynicism rears its ugly (but often intelligent) head.

—

I think another hot-button issue (at least, hot-button to the NCAA) is going to be affected by this policy, too.  The “non-predetermined” aspect of the ban will surely come to the attention of (among others) the South Carolina chapter of the NAACP.  As Tom Yeager, commissioner of the CAA, put it in an article written three weeks ago about the Delaware situation:

[Yeager compared] the wagering policy to the NCAA’s stance on South Carolina and Mississippi still flying the Confederate flag.The NCAA allows schools in those states to earn the right to host an NCAA championship event. Clemson, in South Carolina, hosted a recent baseball playoff. But the state would not be awarded a predetermined host role for a larger event, such as an NCAA basketball tournament regional.

Yeager argued that the wagering policy should not be any more stern.

“We continue to support the stand the NCAA has taken but also recognize that member institutions really aren’t part of a fight and shouldn’t be disadvantaged when having earned the right to host [NCAA] games on their campuses,” Yeager said.

It’s hard to argue with Yeager’s last point in particular (member institutions are just bystanders when it comes to these issues).  It’s also not unreasonable to suggest that if the NCAA is going to ban hosting even when merited for the likes of Delaware State or UNLV, the same principle presumably should apply to Mississippi State or Clemson.  The fact that there are four BCS schools in those two states may or may not be a factor.

You can bet there will be more to come on that front.

—

There are other aspects of this issue that need to be addressed (will the NCAA continue to sanction the Las Vegas Bowl?), but the bottom line is that here again we have an NCAA policy that will mostly, if not entirely, only affect its member institutions and its student-athletes in a negative manner.  I’m not sure who in the organization thought it was a good idea.  I only hope that, like the Andy Oliver case, it comes back to bite the NCAA in a major way.

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Thinking big can be small-minded

Posted on August 2, 2009 by Sandlapper Spike

Georgia Southern University recently published a commissioned report entitled “Football Reclassification Analysis” (although dated June 12, 2009, it wasn’t released to the public until July 30).  You can download the full report and appendices here.  Even if you aren’t particularly interested in the specific issue of reclassification from FCS to FBS, there is still a lot of interesting information in the report.  (The report, incidentally, is 113 pages long.)

I’m going to make a few observations and comments based on some of the issues raised in this report and in other places, but first I’m going to give a brief history of Georgia Southern football, trying to show at least in part why reclassification is such a burning issue for that school.   I’m also going to do some comparing and contrasting with other schools, including The Citadel, but also larger FBS institutions from the ACC and SEC.

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Georgia Southern was a sleepy little teacher’s college for most of its history (the school was founded in 1907).  Its football program had been established as a varsity sport in 1924, but was suspended during World War II.  By the early 1980s, the school had increased in size and there was a groundswell of local and institutional support for reinstating football.  To re-start the program, the school hired longtime Georgia assistant coach Erk Russell.  He was, to say the least, a great hire.

Russell took the football program from club status to I-AA, fashioning an eight-year record of 83-22-1, with three national titles, the last of which came during his final season as coach, when the Eagles were 15-0.  Those numbers, while very impressive, don’t begin to describe his impact on the school.  Stories abound about him (how ‘Beautiful Eagle Creek’ became so beautiful is my personal favorite).  He was already something of a legend before he even took the job, as this 1981 article from Sports Illustrated suggests.  Tony Barnhart put it best when he wrote that “with the possible exception of Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant in Tuscaloosa, no college campus in America still feels a stronger presence of one man than that of Erk Russell in Statesboro.”

Tangent:  amazingly and unjustifiably, Russell is not in the College Football Hall of Fame, because he was only a head coach for eight seasons, and that organization requires a minimum of ten years for eligibility.  What makes his absence worse is that just this year, former Marshall coach Jim Donnan was inducted into the Hall.

Donnan only coached six seasons at Marshall (winning one title), but was also the head coach of Georgia for five years, and was thus deemed eligible to be enshrined as a member of the Hall’s “divisional” class, for non I-A schools.  I’m not going to rip Donnan; he also was the offensive coordinator at Oklahoma in the late 1980s, and deserves credit for that, but he isn’t close to being in Russell’s league as a coach, either on or off the field.  The Hall really needs to make an exception in Russell’s case, not as much for the benefit of his memory, but for its own relevance.

The program that Russell built had staying power, too, despite a revolving door of coaches since his retirement.  GSU has won three additional titles post-Erk, including two under the leadership of the estimable Paul Johnson, the only one of the succeeding coaches to measure up to Russell in the eyes of the Eagle faithful.

Now, 20 years after Russell retired and almost 30 years after he christened a drainage ditch “Beautiful Eagle Creek”, which would become the symbol of the program’s rise, there is a significant group of fans/boosters at the school who want to leave FCS and go “bigtime”, with all the risks involved in that jump.  It’s not like the pot of gold at the end of the FBS rainbow is full, either.  Appendix 1 of the study is a report on reclassification published by the NCAA in 2007.  Included in the report is the following paragraph summing up the benefit of “moving up the ladder” in college football:

Though [there is] evidence of some increase in enrollment diversity, it is far from overwhelming. We conclude that the primary benefit of reclassifying is an unquantifiable perceived increase in prestige.

There you have it.   Prestige.  Moving up is unlikely to provide a monetary benefit (it’s much, much more likely to result in just the opposite).  Increased enrollment, or a change in the type of student enrolling, could result from the move, but there are many different (and better) ways to skin that cat, if you want to skin it.  No, moving up to the FBS ranks is about something else, something almost primal.

I should add that while the push to move to FBS has come with more urgency from some quarters in recent years, the possibility was always in the back of the minds of at least a few individuals from the beginning of the program’s resurrection. Part 6 of the report, a study of facilities, references that the current football stadium (in use since the 1984 season) could eventually be enlarged to seat 75,000 spectators.  That didn’t surprise me, because in 1993 a GSU administrator told me that Paulson Stadium had been designed with that potential level of expansion in mind.

However, the desire of a certain number of supporters to move the program to FBS status has grown in recent years, and it’s not too hard to figure out why.  There are three schools in particular that Eagle fans would probably like the program to emulate — South Florida, Boise State, and Marshall.

The University of South Florida has only existed since 1956, and its football program didn’t start until 1997.  In its first game, USF defeated Kentucky Wesleyan 80-3 before a home crowd of 49,212.  I guess the folks in Tampa were really ready to watch some local college football.  The following week USF played its first road game and suffered its first loss, falling 10-7 to none other than The Citadel.  (The Bulldogs would lose to the Bulls in Tampa the next season, 45-6.)  USF would spend four years at the I-AA level before moving up to I-A, joining Conference USA in 2003 and then the Big East in 2005.  In eight years the program went from non-existent to membership in a BCS conference.

Boise State University was a junior college until 1968, with a very successful football program at that level.  It joined the Big Sky Conference in 1970 and competed in that league until 1996, winning the I-AA national title in 1980.  In 1996 the Broncos moved up to I-A and joined the Big West Conference.  Since 2001, Boise State has been a member of the Western Athletic Conference (WAC).  Of course, the Broncos are best known for their undefeated (13-0) 2006 season, which included a famous overtime win over Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl.

In contrast to South Florida and Boise State, Marshall University has actually fielded football teams since the 19th century.  In 1953, the school joined the Mid-American Conference (MAC), only to be later be suspended from that league in 1969 following allegations of 144 recruiting violations in football and basketball.  Then, in 1970, tragedy struck in the form of an airplane crash that killed 75 people, including 45 football players and coaches.

The program began anew, struggling (understandably) even after joining the Southern Conference in 1976.  However, Marshall football began a long stretch of on-field success in the mid-1980s, culminating in two I-AA national titles in the 1990s before moving back to I-A in 1997, where it continued to win consistently for some time (initially as a member of the MAC; it later joined Conference USA), participating in eight bowl games.

You can see why each of these schools might make Georgia Southern fans envious.  South Florida didn’t even have a team until 1997, and it’s in a BCS league!  Boise State moved to I-A in 1996, and it’s on TV all the time, playing home games on that crazy smurf turf, and played (and beat) Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl!  Marshall was in the Southern Conference, just like Georgia Southern, and went big time and won!  Given all that (plus the fact GSU is located in an area rich with football talent, unlike Boise State and Marshall), why can’t Georgia Southern be like those schools?

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The short answer is that it can’t be like those schools because, well, it just isn’t quite enough like them — at least in some critical facets needed for success in moving up to I-A.  Let’s look at some of the things discussed in the report:

— Student enrollment at Georgia Southern (undergraduate and graduate) is listed at 17,764.  This would be on the lower end in the FBS ranks, although not overly so.  In the Sun Belt Conference (the league the report uses most often for program comparisons), Georgia Southern’s enrollment would rank 7th out of 10 schools.

Around the region, the schools in the state of Florida lead the way in student enrollment.  The University of Florida has 51,913 students.  Central Florida has 50,254, while South Florida, Florida State, and Florida International all have 38,000+.  No other school in the southeast has as many students.

— Georgia Southern’s alumni base would be a potential problem.  While second in the Southern Conference, with an estimated 75,000 living alumni, GSU would rank at or near the bottom of almost every FBS conference in this aspect.  This is important because alums are where most of your donors come from, and it is exacerbated in GSU’s case because of the school’s history of being primarily a teacher’s college until the last 25 years or so.  Basically, a lot of those 75,000 alums don’t have that much money.  Another thing Georgia Southern doesn’t have going for it in this regard is a law school or medical school that would presumably put out some well-heeled grads.

Maryland has an estimated 480,000 living alumni, easily the most among the schools in the conferences evaluated in the report.  Florida, with 330,000, is second, ahead of Florida State (285,551).  Three other schools (North Carolina, Georgia, and South Carolina) are in the 250,000-265,000 range, almost 50,000 ahead of the school with the next largest alumni base.

Tangent:  in part to check the accuracy of the report, I asked The Citadel’s External Affairs Office for its best estimate of the military college’s number of living alumni.  As of July 30, the number was 32,961.  GSU’s report had The Citadel listed as having 32,000 living alums, good enough.  The representative from External Affairs pointed out to me that “wiggle room” was needed with these types of estimates, since it is hard to keep track of all alumni, living and dead.

She was quite correct about that, as the latest edition of The Citadel’s Alumni News magazine demonstrated.  Each edition lists the oldest living alums of the school, but the spring publication noted that the two oldest living alumni, as listed in the previous issue, were actually both deceased — one of them having died in 1988.  The actual oldest living alumnus of The Citadel is a doctor in Augusta who reportedly still practices medicine at the age of 99, having delivered over 15,000 babies during his career.  Yowza.  Okay, back to football.

— Georgia Southern’s budget for athletics in FY2008 was just over $9 million, and was actually one of the smallest budgets in the Southern Conference.  Furman had the largest budget in the league, at $15 million (just ahead of Appalachian State).  The Citadel actually had a larger budget than GSU.  Obviously a move to FBS would require a significant increase.  According to the report, to achieve a budget that would be average in the Sun Belt, Georgia Southern would have to increase its budget by $5.1 million per year (56%).  Those figures rise to an additional $15.2 million (167%) for an average C-USA budget.

There were seven schools in the SEC with FY2008 budgets in excess of $70 million, led by Florida ($106 million).  No ACC school had an athletic budget that large; Duke (at just under $68 million) came closest.  The only FBS school in the region with a smaller athletic budget than Georgia Southern is Louisiana-Monroe, a school with an identity crisis if there ever was one, having in recent times changed its school name (from Northeast Louisiana to Louisiana-Monroe) and nickname (from Indians to Warhawks).  ULM, with an athletic budget of under $8 million, has never had a winning season at the FBS level since moving up in 1994, which made its 21-14 victory in 2007 over Alabama that much more embarassing for the Crimson Tide.

— To increase its budget, GSU is going to need to expand its base of athletic donors.  We’ve already seen that’s a problem due in part to its relatively small alumni base.  Georgia Southern had 2,110 members of its booster club, and raised around $1 million, in FY2008.  How does that compare to other schools?

Well, on the bright side, GSU has more booster club members than any school in the Sun Belt.  That doesn’t say much for the Sun Belt, though, because GSU would rank last in the ACC and SEC, and close to last in C-USA.  There are two schools in the SoCon with more donors.  Appalachian State is one of them, and the other is…The Citadel.  As of 2008 there were approximately 3,000 members of The Citadel Brigadier Foundation.  Wofford and Elon have almost as many boosters as GSU.  If you combined the total number of living alumni from The Citadel, Wofford, and Elon, that number would still not equal the total living alumni from Georgia Southern.  You see the problem.

The number of athletic donors by school varies widely across the region, even at the ACC/SEC level, in part because some schools require joining a booster club as a prerequisite to buying season tickets.  That said, Clemson’s 23,000+ strong donor list is very impressive.  North Carolina State (20,256) also has a sizeable booster club.  On the SEC side of things, only the Mississippi schools and Vanderbilt have fewer than 10,000 booster club members.  None of the non-BCS schools in the region can compare, with the exception of East Carolina (13,483).  Florida Atlantic has 500 athletic donors.

— The report compared home attendance for the 2007 season, which I found puzzling (it should have been a five-year average or something of that nature).  Also, I am referring to these figures as 2007 attendance numbers because that is what they are, not from 2008 as stated in the report.  The review of attendance figures is one of the weakest sections in the document.

Based on these 2007 numbers, however, GSU would have work to do, ranking in the middle of a listing that includes Sun Belt schools and behind every institution in the ACC, SEC, and C-USA (even Duke and UAB).  It’s actually worse than that, though.

From the report:  “It is important to note that reported attendance is not paid attendance…average paid admission for Georgia Southern home football games was approximately 9,500…”

Um, wow.  Students don’t have to pay to attend GSU football games, and so when you take them out of the mix, along with gameday personnel and comps, basically only half of the people at Paulson on a given Saturday actually paid to go to the game.

— The population base around Statesboro is not a natural for revenue generation, for several reasons.  One is that there simply isn’t that big a base.  GSU has fewer people living within a 50-mile radius of its campus than any school in the Southern Conference, and would rank near the bottom of most other leagues.  That’s not necessarily a deal-breaker, though.  Many of the SEC schools, for example, are located in less-dense population areas.

A bigger problem, however, is that GSU’s market is demonstrably younger than most areas.  According to the report, the median age of the area around Georgia Southern is 31.7, which is the lowest such figure among every school surveyed for the report except UT-El Paso.  The Citadel has the second-youngest demographic area in the SoCon, but that market’s median age is 36.5, markedly higher than GSU’s.  This age differential has a lot to do with another comparison outlined in the report, Household Effective Buying Income.  Georgia Southern’s market ranks last in the SoCon in HEBI (at $32,272), and would be near the bottom of FBS conferences in the region.

In looking at the figures for this category, I noticed that the schools in the regions with the highest median age (in other words, those that skewed older) were either located in Florida or were within 50 miles of at least part of the Blue Ridge Mountains (Virginia Tech, Tennessee, Marshall, and Clemson).

— The corporate base around Georgia Southern is also small, ranking last in the SoCon (488 corporations within a 50-mile radius).  The Citadel, somewhat surprisingly, ranks next-to-last in the league (747) despite its Charleston location.  GSU would rank near the bottom of FBS in this category.  The lack of corporate entities hinders GSU’s (and The Citadel’s, for that matter) ability to sell advertising, sponsorships, PSLs and suites, naming rights, etc.

— Earlier I mentioned that Georgia Southern would have to increase its athletic budget if it moved to FBS.  One of the considerations there is that to comply with Title IX, GSU would have to add women’s scholarships to match the extra 22 scholarships allocated to football (as FCS squads can only have 63 schollies, not the 85-scholarship limit of FBS schools).  So whatever monies are spent for football essentially would have to be doubled for gender equity purposes (Georgia Southern is not in a position to cut another men’s sport).  GSU would add a women’s golf team, and increase expenditures for women’s sports across the board (presumably including the women’s swim team, which just eyeballing the numbers appears woefully underfunded).

The report concluded that the minimum yearly operating costs for Georgia Southern to operate an FBS program would be a little over $14 million, about a 40% increase over the current budget, but that’s not even taking into account the necessary capital improvements that would have to be made.  From the executive summary:

…a total capital expenditure of $84,374,391 is estimated, and, if all bonded, would represent an annual facilities cost of $5,484,154 plus $812,500 in additional annual maintenance costs.

That’s a whole lot of money that would need to be raised by a school with a relatively undersized booster club and a small alumni base, located in a region without a lot of people (and where the people that are there don’t have on average a great deal of disposable income), and with few corporations around to provide a quick influx of serious cash.

Let’s go back to South Florida, Boise State, and Marshall, and compare them to Georgia Southern.

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— South Florida has a student enrollment of 42,785, and an alumni base of 180,000.  Over 40,000 people showed up to watch the football team play its first game ever (its 2007 average attendance:  53,170).  It doesn’t have that big a booster club (3,260 donors), but has a significant corporate base (3,896).  USF could probably sell most of its sponsor packages even if it were limited to the local strip clubs in Tampa.  The Bulls had an FY2008 athletic budget of over $32 million.

Georgia Southern shares a time zone with South Florida, but quite honestly there is little else the two schools have in common.

— Boise State is a school of a similar size to GSU, both in student enrollment (slightly larger) and alumni base (slightly smaller).  Boise State’s athletic budget of $26.55 million (FY2009) dwarfs Georgia Southern’s; it spends about the same amount of money on its football program as GSU spends on its entire athletic budget.  Boise has a huge advantage in its corporate base, with lots of tech, agricultural, mining, and timber companies (including Simplot, Micron, Boise Cascade, and Albertsons).  This probably helps account for its ability to spend that kind of money for athletics and its ability to raise money  for its athletic facilities.  BSU has a waiting list for football season tickets and over 4,000 members in its booster club.

It’s hard to compare a school in a part of the country so different than that of GSU, but I think it would be safe to say that Boise State has had an advantage over Georgia Southern as far as having money to spend on its program is concerned (including key capital projects).  BSU also had about a 20-year head start on GSU in terms of trying to move up to Division I-A.  The Broncos also got a little lucky, in my opinion — particularly with the expansion, and then contraction, of the original WAC.  The timing was just right for Boise State to move into the decimated WAC after the split.

The other thing going for Boise State is that, as far as FBS football is concerned, it’s the only game in town for miles around.  There is no FBS school within 300 miles of Boise State (and there is no major professional sports franchise in the area, either).  Boise, particularly with its corporate presence, is just large enough of a metro area to provide the resources needed for the school to successfully compete at the FBS level, especially given the lack of local (or even regional) competition.  In contrast, there are numerous college football programs in a 300-mile radius around Georgia Southern, including Georgia, Georgia Tech, Clemson, South Carolina, Florida, Florida State, and Auburn, plus NFL franchises in Atlanta, Charlotte, and Jacksonville.

— Marshall’s student enrollment is a bit larger than Georgia Southern’s.  Its football attendance is larger (the Thundering Herd averaged over 24,000 fans in 2007).  Its population base is larger and notably older (by about eight years in median age).  Marshall has an athletic budget of over $21 million.  MU has 2,900 booster club members; in 2008, its booster club raised $1.65 million (as compared to GSU’s $950,000).

I’ll say this, too.  Marshall had an enormous amount of success in the period in which it transitioned from I-AA to I-A, with multiple conference titles in both the Southern Conference and the MAC (although someone needs to tell the sports information department that the Thundering Herd did not win the SoCon in 1992, as stated in its media guide; Marshall won the national title that year, but The Citadel won the league crown).

My perception of Marshall is that at least at one time it had one of the more passionate fan bases around, one that “traveled well”, as the saying goes.  I often wondered, though, how sustainable its success would be as it moved further up the football ladder.  There are limitations to a football program from a non-flagship school based in Huntington, West Virginia.  Since moving to C-USA, Marshall has endured four consecutive losing seasons, and perhaps more ominously has not had a winning record to date in conference play.

This recent lack of success may have been covered up just a bit by a movie, but the school administration has to be concerned.  Marshall’s booster club donations dropped by 22% this past year.  The economy undoubtedly played a large role in that, but once things start going downhill, it can be hard to stop the rush down the tubes.  Marshall may have won a lot of games in the 1990s and early 2000s, but that won’t prevent it from ultimately becoming another who-cares FBS program with no notice on a national level if it doesn’t get back to winning, and soon.

—

When you digest all that information, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion other than Georgia Southern should stay right where it is, at the FCS level.  I can understand why some GSU fans would be less than satisfied with the program’s current status, though.    There are several things that feed this frustration:

— One factor is the “small time” perception of FCS football, exemplified by this rather silly piece of commentary by New York Daily News writer Filip Bondy, who is upset that his alma mater, Wisconsin, is playing Wofford this season.  Bondy is apparently unaware that Wisconsin could have (and should have) lost last season to an FCS school (Cal Poly) and was tied at halftime two years ago with one of Wofford’s fellow SoCon brethren (The Citadel).  It’s usually hard to take seriously a writer for a New York City tabloid when college football is the subject (or perhaps when anything is the subject), but that’s the kind of thing that’s out there.  (Bondy also seems annoyed at having to pay $41 for a ticket, but that isn’t too surprising a price for a BCS home game.  I tend to share his annoyance on that front, however.  North Carolina is charging $50 for single-game tickets for contests against The Citadel and Georgia Southern this season.)

— Then there is the disparity in schools within the Southern Conference itself, a historic problem for a league that has always been a grab-bag of regional colleges and universities, some of which have very little in common with each other.  If you are a Georgia Southern fan, it may be hard to get enthused about regularly playing small schools like The Citadel or Wofford as opposed to “like” institutions such as Appalachian State (or Marshall, back when it was still in the league).  There is also the complaint (groundless, in my view) that the conference has drifted more into the small and/or private school arena, particularly with the recent admission of Samford (at the expense of, say, Coastal Carolina).

I can understand some of that angst.  GSU fans want the conference to go in the direction that GSU wants to go.  The thing is, though, that the reverse is also true.  It can be very frustrating to be a supporter of a school like The Citadel and have to compete on a yearly basis in the conference with much larger schools with very different missions, and it has been that way for decades.  This is a league that as recently as the 1960s still had schools like West Virginia and Virginia Tech as members.  East Carolina was in the SoCon until 1976 (not to mention all the ACC/SEC schools that were in the league in the first half of the 20th century).

The Southern Conference was the ideal spot for Georgia Southern when it needed a place to land.  The conference hasn’t really changed.  Whether Georgia Southern’s priorities and expectations have changed or not is another matter.

— Another thing that may be causing frustration (or perhaps concern) is that in 2010 there will be another GSU playing FCS football, namely Georgia State, which has received a surprising amount of publicity for its entry into the football world (thanks to hiring Bill Curry, I believe).  Again, you have the “prestige” issue in play.  Georgia Southern fans want to be in the same galaxy with Georgia and Georgia Tech, not Georgia State.

What’s amazing (at least to me) is that Georgia State isn’t alone in starting a football program right now.  It won’t even be the only new program in the Colonial Athletic Association, as Old Dominion will begin play this fall.  Also soon to be lacing up the ol’ pigskin:  South Alabama (which plans on playing in the Sun Belt as an FBS program), UT-San Antonio (which has hired Larry Coker and also plans to eventually play at the FBS level), and UNC Charlotte.

South Alabama has already lined up games against Tennessee, Mississippi State, North Carolina State, Kent State, and Navy, according to this article by ESPN writer Ivan Maisel.

Tangent:  one part of the reclassification report I am dubious about is its estimate of how much money “guarantee” games would bring to the program.  Page 5-44 of the report outlines potential guarantees ranging between $150,000 and $500,000, but as Maisel’s article notes, much larger sums of money are being thrown around for a lot of these types of games (Tennessee will pay South Alabama $850,000 to come to Knoxville in 2013).  I think the report was a little too conservative in that section.

Given the current state of the economy, I was expecting less expansion of athletic programs and more news along the lines of Centenary dropping to Division III (the linked article comes complete with a couple of semi-nasty quotes from Tim Brando, of all people).

— You also have various conspiracy theories floating around that the current Georgia Southern administration adamantly opposes any move to FBS, and may even prefer to “dial down” athletics in general at the school.  There are some particularly strident fans who suggest that the current administrators have been less than competent.  These sentiments seep out in various ways, including message boards and, somewhat amusingly, Wikipedia.  The current wiki entry for Paulson Stadium includes the following paragraph:

Constructed at a cost of $4.7 million, the stadium was designed with two expansion phases in mind. The first would increase the capacity to approximately 35,000, while the final phase would expand seating to 50,000. However, because of the lack of effort on the part of school leadership, neither of these additions have been implemented. Permanent light fixtures were added prior to the 1994 season.

Of course, the report commissioned by GSU isn’t for these types of fans, because they wouldn’t believe anything in it anyway unless it said “GSU MUST MOVE UP TO FBS NOW!!” on the cover page.

—

Incidentally, The Citadel also studied whether or not it should move up to the FBS level  — in 1995.  At that time, a new rule had been enacted by the NCAA that required major-college teams to win six games against I-A competition in order to qualify for a bowl bid.  The rule meant that playing I-AA schools was counterproductive for the bigger schools.  The Citadel lost potential guarantee games against LSU and Clemson as a result, games the military college needed to balance its budget.

However, the school didn’t really want to leave I-AA, and when the NCAA changed the bowl-qualification rules to allow one victory against a I-AA school to count towards six bowl-worthy wins, The Citadel elected to stay right where it was.

—

So, to sum up…Georgia Southern has a winning tradition and a loyal fanbase.  That’s not enough to make a move to FBS, though.  You need to have the right resources to build and maintain an FBS program (that’s a polite way of saying you need a lot of cash, both on hand and in the future).  In 2009, Georgia Southern simply doesn’t have enough going for it to develop those resources, no matter how hard it squeezes the proverbial turnip.  Maybe down the road it will have the ability to successfully move up to that level, but for right now its fans should enjoy what they already have.

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Trying to fill a stadium

Posted on July 15, 2009 by Sandlapper Spike

Note:  Yes, this is long.  It needs to be, though.  (Believe it or not, it could have been longer — I did some judicious editing.)  It can be read in stages if necessary, I suppose.  It’s one of the two longest posts I’ve made on this blog, along with my rundown of The Citadel’s brutal hoops history, which was made prior to basketball season.  After I made that post, the basketball team had one of its best campaigns ever.  If that’s the kind of karma attached to long essays, then the average attendance at Johnson Hagood Stadium will approach 20,000 fans this season.

—

In 2007 The Citadel went 7-4, its first winning season in a decade.  There was plenty to be optimistic about in 2008, especially since the major renovation work to Johnson Hagood Stadium had been completed in the off-season.  Lots of folks were expected to come out to see if the Bulldogs could maintain their success while enjoying the comforts of a stadium with actually decent restroom facilities.  Instead, the school averaged almost 1,500 fewer fans per game than it had in ’07 (and 2,000+ fewer than it had in 2006).  What happened?

Well, the answer to that is complicated.  I want to address some of the issues related to attendance, and attendance specifically at The Citadel’s home football games.

I want to start, though, by pointing out something that is obvious, but gets forgotten about sometimes when alums talk about attendance.  For a school of The Citadel’s size, its historical football attendance is great.  Not good, great.  Even in a disappointing year (last season the average attendance per home game was just 12,261), The Citadel had an attendance-to-undergrad ratio of 6 to 1.  Do you know how many schools out there (especially FCS schools) would kill for even a 2 to 1 ratio?  Schools with just 2,000 students and a small alumni base really shouldn’t be doing that well.  It says a lot for the school’s loyal alums and fans that the attendance is as good as it is.

Having said that, attendance has been better before, and needs to be better again.  Anyone who looked at the budget numbers presented in an article by Jeff Hartsell of The Post and Courier a few weeks ago can see the importance of having Johnson Hagood Stadium filled with fans.  If attendance doesn’t start to get better, Ed Conroy is going to have to start scheduling road games against every Big XII school, not just Texas and Missouri.  The money from football props up the entire department of athletics.

The key to increasing attendance, of course, is winning.  Win more games, get more fans.  It’s a simple concept.  The only thing you have to remember about it is that success on the field generally leads to more ticket sales in the following season; there tends to be a one-year lag.  Of course, that’s if you have just one good year at a time (like going a decade between winning seasons).  Putting together a string of successful campaigns usually (but not always) leads to a more permanent base of fans.

—

When I opine about issues, I tend to illustrate my points in a statistical manner.  Numbers usually don’t lie, so I use them to back my point of view.  (Also, I use them because I’m a dork.)  Now, there are plenty of stats available when it comes to attendance, and I’m going to use some of them, but with a little bit of a caveat.  Let me explain what I mean.

The Citadel has had four modern-day directors of athletics — Eddie Teague, Walt Nadzak, Les Robinson, and the current AD, Larry Leckonby.  I have no way of knowing how each of them approached counting attendance at home games.  There are different ways to add up the numbers, and there is no guarantee that the way The Citadel’s numbers were counted was consistent over time.  It may be, for example, that sometimes season ticket holders were counted whether they were at the game or not, and it may be that sometimes they were only counted if they actually showed up.

I have occasionally wondered if other schools secretly counted the folks tailgating during the game, along with the teams, on-field personnel, the working (and non-working) press, concession stand employees, and mascots.  That’s not likely to be the case at The Citadel (and in the case of the non-game attending tailgaters, you’re talking about a not insignificant number.)

I have had multiple sources suggest to me that Larry Leckonby counts people who actually show up — no more, no less.  If that is the case, I applaud his philosophy.  I would count attendance the same way, although I would also count General, because he certainly deserves to be counted.

This uncertainty about published attendance figures was brought home to me one day while I was looking at the 2006 football media guide.  I spotted game writeups for the two playoff games in 1992, the win over North Carolina A&T and the loss to Youngstown State, each played at Johnson Hagood Stadium.

I attended both of those games.  I distinctly remember there were worries about the attendance, particularly for the first game against the Aggies, which took place on the Saturday after Thanksgiving Day, while the cadets were on furlough.  The Citadel had to have at least 12,000 folks show up to A) not lose money (there was a guarantee to the NCAA involved) and B) show that it merited hosting another playoff game.

Well, everything came up roses for The Citadel.  Plenty of folks showed up on a beautiful November afternoon to watch the Bulldogs pummel the MEAC champs, 44-0.  The next day’s edition of The Post and Courier featured a column by Ken Burger in which he detailed the “drama” behind the scenes, as representatives from the NCAA seemingly kept putting up roadblocks to the Bulldogs’ chances of hosting another game, only to eventually be bullied into submission by a pushy Walt Nadzak.  Burger wrote:  “although Citadel officials cannot announce the official attendance until after an NCAA audit, crowd estimates are about 17,000 were on hand.”

I was one of those on hand, seated right next to The Man From Macon (my ears are still ringing from his delirious shouting), and that estimate of 17,000 sounds about right to me.  Even more fans attended the game the following week; I would say that slightly over 18,000 came to see that matchup.

Then I came across the box in the ’06 media guide, and there were the “official” attendance figures:  12,300 for the North Carolina A&T game; 13,021 for the Youngstown State game.  What?

The NCAA came up with those numbers, after an “audit”.  Both figures are laughable.  I’m fairly confident that 5,000 people didn’t sneak into each game for free.  At any rate, it’s just another example of how you have to be careful when evaluating historic attendance trends.

—

While I wouldn’t want to bet my life on the complete accuracy of the numbers, I think evaluating them under certain parameters is instructive.  Also, I’ve got a theory on attendance that needs at least something solid behind it.  Anyway, here we go…

If you take the per-season home attendance average of the last four seasons, and then average those seasons together, you get a cumulative season average of 13,073.  That’s for 2005-2008.  If you then go back exactly twenty years, to the 1985-1988 seasons, you get a cumulative season average of 14,582.  That’s a difference of 1,509.  One reason I picked those years as a comparison is that the record on the field was very similar — 20-25 (2005-08), and 20-24-1 (1985-88).  It’s not an exact match, to be sure — the ’80s record includes Tom Moore’s last two campaigns and Charlie Taaffe’s first two seasons, while the last four years are the sum total of the Kevin Higgins era — but I think it’s a pretty good comparison.

If you go back to 1975-1978, the cumulative average for that four-year period is 16,584.  However, The Citadel in those four seasons had a slightly better record (22-22).  That period marked the transition from Bobby Ross to Art Baker.  Perhaps a better comparison to the two eras in the preceding paragraph would be the first four seasons under Ross, 1973-1976, when the Bulldogs were 19-25 overall.  Attendance in those seasons averaged out at 14,902.

So basically, from two and three decades ago until now, with similar teams, there appears to be a dropoff of between 1500-2000 fans.  You will find a lot of longtime Bulldog fans who will tell you that over the years the “base” has declined by just that amount (some will say even more, but I believe they’re thinking about stretches when the school had several successful seasons in a row).  1500-2000 fans is a big deal for a school of The Citadel’s size.  That would be like South Carolina or Clemson drawing 10,000+ fewer fans per year, and we’re talking about a longterm decline, not just a one- or two-season blip.

In comparing recent attendance to that of past seasons, I had to be careful and select similar, or at least remotely similar, circumstances, both on and off the field.  For instance, you can’t compare anything to 1989, when Hurricane Hugo disrupted not just the season, but the entire Charleston area, nor can you match “apples to apples” with 2004, the year following demolition of the West Stands, when the seating capacity of JHS was listed at 12,500.

2004 also featured the cancellation of a game against Charleston Southern (thanks to another hurricane threat), a season finale against Western Carolina that took place at the same time as a televised Clemson-South Carolina game, and a Thursday night “special” against Benedict that turned out to be an attendance disaster, with only 5,127 fans showing up.  (What I remember most about that Benedict game was “voice of the Bulldogs” Sam Evans beginning his public address announcements by saying, “Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to what’s left of historic Johnson Hagood Stadium.”)

I also didn’t want to compare the recent attendance issues to periods of consecutive winning seasons, like 1979-81 and 1990-1992, or to the malaise of the late 1990s-early 2000s.

The key to the difference in the compared eras lies in the makeup of The Citadel’s base of supporters, which can be divided into two groups:  alums and their families, and those fans without an obvious connection to The Citadel.  I believe the eroding of the base has much more to do with the second group.

—

First, however, I want to discuss the “alums” category, including some things on which not everyone may agree, and for which I can’t point to a specific statistic.  What I believe, though, is that by and large graduates of The Citadel are significantly less likely to be natural supporters of the school’s athletic teams than, say, alums of larger state schools.

Not only are there more students at larger schools, but a higher percentage of those students grow up rooting for that particular school.  Quite a few of them actually choose to go to school based on their lifelong support of its athletic teams.  Those students eventually graduate, and so there is a fairly sizable base of true-blue fans just from that group.

Nobody who is not on athletic scholarship chooses to go to The Citadel because of its varsity sports teams.  Because of this, I think that a smaller percentage of its students are destined to become lifelong devoted fans of college football, hoops, etc.  That’s true of most small schools, of course.  (I believe The Citadel has fewer sports fans among its students than even among other small schools, however — at least, that was my impression when I was in school.  That also applied to things tangentially related to sports.  Was there buzz on campus for Bull Durham or Hoosiers?  No.  Full Metal Jacket, yes, a thousand times yes.)

That makes the fact the athletic teams are supported as well as they are by the alumni all the more remarkable.  I think it has a lot to do with the natural camaraderie built up by four years in the corps of cadets.  Alums come back for the games, but they really come back to see each other, or just to be part of the experience that is The Citadel again, even for just a Saturday afternoon.  It’s a nice vibe, complete with the justly-celebrated tailgating scene (which may be too good a scene when it comes to trying to increase attendance inside the stadium).

One of the things I have noticed, though, is that there is a bit of a “doughnut hole”, if you will, among alums attending games.  Basically, when I go to games I see a lot of alums representing the over-50 crowd, and I see a fair number of young grads, but there is a gap between those two groups in the gameday support.  You don’t really see a lot of guys in their 30s and 40s, at least in comparison.  Some might disagree with me on that, but this has been my observation.  I could be wrong, of course.

Obviously those alums in their 30s and 40s are more likely to have school-age kids, and perhaps because of that, they don’t have as much free time (or discretionary income).  I would guess that’s not particularly unusual for a college alumni fan base.  That isn’t to say there aren’t a good number of kids at the games, because there are.  However, the lack of grads in that age group at football games is noticeable (at least to me).

Okay, that’s my riff on alumni support.  Now I want to talk about the other potential game attendees, and why there aren’t as many of them as there used to be.  Here comes my theory.  (Drum roll.)

Television.

—

Back in the good old days (which weren’t really all that great), the NCAA controlled regular-season college football broadcasting.  It had extremely restrictive rules on how often schools could appear on TV, and also limited the number of overall telecasts.  As late as 1978 there were a total of 58 college football games broadcast on TV during the regular season (13 of which were televised nationally).  Last season there were 58 televised games involving FBS and FCS schools just in the third week of October.

Change came as a result of a 1984 Supreme Court decision that ruled the NCAA’s way of doing things violated the Sherman Antitrust Act.  Schools (and conferences) were thus free to negotiate TV deals for themselves.  The decision also coincided with the rise of cable television, notably ESPN.  Suddenly there were outlets that needed programming, and schools and conferences that had programming to offer.  The world of college football hasn’t been the same since.

It used to be that if you lived in the Lowcountry and wanted to see some college football action, but you didn’t want to drive up I-26 to Columbia (or further up the road to Clemson/Athens/Atlanta), your one option was to head to Johnson Hagood Stadium to watch The Citadel.  The odds that you could watch one of the state’s major college teams on TV instead were not good.  Between 1969-1978, there were seven televised Clemson regular-season football games  (one national, six regional).  In that same period, South Carolina only appeared on TV during the regular season five times (all regional broadcasts; the Gamecocks did not have a nationally televised regular-season game until 1980).

Even after the Supreme Court decision opened the floodgates, South Carolina did not draw a lot of TV time; for example, in 1989, the Gamecocks appeared on television during the season just once (in a 45-0 loss at home to Clemson — ouch).  This was partly due to South Carolina still being an independent in football at the time.  Once the Gamecocks joined the SEC, appearances on the tube became a more regular occurrence.  Clemson was on TV more often during the 1980s, thanks to deals the ACC had with Raycom and ESPN, although the Tigers’ appearances on TV during the early part of the decade were mostly on tape-delay, due to Clemson being on probation.

Now, of course, you can see the Tigers and Gamecocks almost every week on TV, along with many other major college programs, at every time of day and night.  You can also see a select number of FCS teams in action, but not nearly as many, and mostly as part of regional telecasts.  The Southern Conference has a modest agreement with SportSouth to show eight league games all season (The Citadel will appear in just one of them).

The constant TV exposure for Clemson, South Carolina, and the rest of the FBS schools is great for them.  It promotes their programs, and increases their respective fan bases.  For schools like The Citadel, though, it can be a problem.  Trying to attract fans who aren’t naturally affiliated with the program means competing against a lot of other entities, especially in a city like Charleston.  The Citadel isn’t on TV enough itself to get the publicity benefits that accrue to the bigger schools, and then football fans have the option to watch those other schools on television.

As an example, let’s look at last season and what the folks selling tickets at The Citadel were up against for each home date:

  • The home opener (8/30) was a night game against Webber International.  Attendance was announced as 11,247.  Quite honestly, I think The Citadel was lucky to get that many fans for what was a de facto glorified scrimmage.  South Carolina had played on Thursday night, but Clemson played Alabama in primetime in a much-hyped affair (the lesson, as always:  don’t believe the hype).  Locally, the ticket office also had to compete against a bluegrass/BBQ festival held at Boone Hall Plantation.
  • The next game at JHS came against Princeton on 9/20.  13,120 fans attended that game, most of whom would be mystified by what went on at halftime.  This was an afternoon game.  South Carolina played Wofford at night in Columbia (that game was on PPV).  Clemson played an afternoon home game against South Carolina State.  Another game of interest in the region, Florida-Tennessee, was played that afternoon as well.  An extra local competitor was the Scottish Games and Highland Gathering, held at Boone Hall, which drew 6,000 people that Saturday.  I’m guessing bagpiper groupies were not sure which event to attend.
  • On 9/27, Western Carolina came to town for a 1pm showdown.  Clemson played Maryland that afternoon in a game televised by Raycom.  South Carolina had another PPV home night game, this time against UAB.  North Carolina played Miami at noon in the only other regional game of any consequence.  Attendance for this game was only 11,216, and I don’t think the presence in town of the MOJA Arts Festival had a whole lot to do with it.
  • Elon played at The Citadel on 10/11 in a game slightly impacted by rain (but more impacted by hideous SoCon officiating).  This day was a good example of how 21st-century college football TV choices are different from those in the ’70s and ’80s.  The Citadel hosted Elon at the same time as the all-important Texas-Oklahoma game (that ultimately wasn’t quite important enough for the Longhorns) AND a road game for South Carolina that was televised by Raycom.  Also on TV that day were Georgia-Tennessee and Notre Dame-North Carolina.  The City of Charleston also conspired against the ticket office with its Taste of Charleston weekend (although the main event was held on Sunday).  Total attendance:  12,582, on a Parents’ Day Weekend.  Oof.
  • Georgia Southern played at Johnson Hagood on 11/1, opposite the Coastal Carolina Fair and a host of locally interesting TV games:  Georgia-Florida, Tennessee-South Carolina, and Clemson-Boston College.  11,190 people made it to JHS.  Many of them probably wished Kevin Higgins had gone for two in overtime.
  • Homecoming (on 11/15) was held opposite South Carolina-Florida (on CBS) and Duke-Clemson (on Raycom).  14,213 fans watched The Citadel escape (thanks, Andre) with a win over a wretched UT-Chattanooga squad.

Another thing that wasn’t around in 1978 (or even 1988) is the Charleston Southern football program.  Heck, back then CSU wasn’t even CSU; it was Baptist College.  I’m not sure how much of an effect the Buccaneers’ home games have on Bulldog home games played the same day, to be honest.  They may not have much impact, but every potential ticket not sold counts, in a manner of speaking.  For the record, last season CSU and The Citadel played at home on the same day on 9/27 (CSU attendance:  2,541), 11/1 (3,213), and 11/15 (2,434).

In 2009, incidentally, CSU and The Citadel will again have three home games on the same day, the first three home dates on the Bulldogs’ schedule.  Clemson or South Carolina will play home games on each of The Citadel’s five home dates, although for none of them will both of those schools be at home.  Times for those USC/Clemson games won’t be known until later in the season because of television.  Those TV “windows” also mean that it’s impossible to guess what other national/regional games might have an impact on the schedule (other than Florida-Georgia, which is pencilled in for 3:30 pm on 10/31; The Citadel plays Samford at 1 pm that day).  Also, as far as special local interest events are concerned, this year’s Scottish Games will take place the week before The Citadel’s home opener, much to the relief of the bagpiper groupies.

Compare today’s options for local area sports fans to those of 1978.  South Carolina had no games televised that year.  Clemson had only two regular season games televised (despite an 11-1 season).  If one or both were on the road or playing a rather lame opponent at home, then your choices were usually limited to a sole TV game, often featuring teams of limited interest.  A big football fan might very well be inclined to watch the local team play VMI or Delaware or Marshall (all of which were on the home schedule that year).  He would probably bring his transistor radio along and listen to Bob Fulton or Jim Phillips (or perhaps Larry Munson, which might have been more fun) while watching The Citadel.

I think that’s a big deal.  It’s hard to get the casual fan to the stadium these days.  Now, once you get him to Johnson Hagood (or at least to the tailgating areas), then you stand a decent chance of keeping him.

Anyway, that’s my theory.  The non-affiliated fan who might have been a potential customer/convert twenty and thirty years ago has more sporting options on a gameday Saturday, because of television.  He is probably more inclined to become a fan of an FBS school if he wasn’t already, because it’s easier to follow those teams now even from a distance, because of television.  FCS schools like The Citadel don’t benefit from increased exposure because they simply aren’t on the tube nearly as often as the FBS schools.  They could make up lost ground if they were on at least as often, but they’re not, so they don’t.  It’s a triple whammy.

—

So, what to do about it?

Well, that’s the million-dollar question.  The Citadel has hard-working, competent people whose very jobs involve trying to improve its numbers at the gate.  They know what they’re doing, and I’m not going to pretend to be as expert as they are on the subject.  Having said that, I have some opinions, some of them of the macro variety, some micro…

Obviously, I think it’s most important to cater to the local “outsider” to bring up the numbers.  At this particular time, though, it also wouldn’t hurt to redouble efforts with the alumni base, which has seen a decade of poor on-field results overseen by a series of coaches, and games played in an aging stadium with facilities that were, frankly, unacceptable.  Out-of-touch alums need to be introduced to the “new” Johnson Hagood Stadium, which is clean, has a cool video board, is wheelchair-accessible and family-friendly, has an electrical system that won’t fail when the french fry machines are turned on, etc.  Plus, the current coach is entering his fifth season.  Stability!

I think it’s important to emphasize what makes going to a football game at The Citadel unique and fun.  The essential uniqueness, of course, is the corps of cadets.  That’s what The Citadel has to offer that other schools don’t.  It is key that the corps be energized for those three hours on a Saturday afternoon or early evening.  I believe the administration needs to make it worth the cadets’ while (weekend/overnight privileges, that type of thing) to be a primary source of entertainment.

The corps needs to be at least semi-organized for providing its special brand of mayhem.  I actually like that the cadets have been moved to the East Stands; it makes them more visible (and, for the visiting team, noisier).  Now it’s time to accentuate their enthusiasm, preferably in as zany a fashion as possible.  All I ask is that “Hey Baby” gets dropped.  Please?

Speaking of music, the band needs to be more incorporated into the scene than it is now.  There needs to be some coordination between promotions and the band in terms of not just when music is played, but what is played.  Note to some alums:  quit asking them to play “Dixie”.  Those days are over.

My other comment about music is that (old fogey alert!) the pre-game rap/hip-hop/heavy metal routine at about 200 decibels is extremely grating and, to me, not in keeping with the general gameday experience at The Citadel.  I know the football players like to get wound up by listening to some of that stuff, but there is too much of it right now.  I’m not asking for the current mix to be replaced by Frank Sinatra tunes (although that would cool in a retro-hip way), but there needs to be a little balance.  Also, I can go to any game and listen to somebody abuse the sound system while playing the latest in headbanging drivel.  Games at The Citadel need to be (and should be) different.

In keeping with trying to impress potential new fans, it never hurts to accentuate the military aspects of the gameday experience.  Pre-game flyovers are always good.  Guys parachuting in with the game ball, halftime shows featuring various specialty outfits (military marching bands or drill units) — those things tend to go over well.

That reminds me — what happened to the Touchdown Cannon Crew?  Now there just seems to be a Touchdown Cannon Dude.  Where are the riflemen?  There is probably a story behind their absence.  One thing this brings to mind is that, whenever possible, it’s nice to keep some continuity in the school’s gameday traditions.  The Citadel is big on tradition, although you would never know it by looking at its football uniform history.

Another thing to emphasize when trying to recruit new fans is the affordability aspect of going to games at Johnson Hagood.  In the current economy, in particular, this has to be a plus.

If you want to have decent seats at South Carolina games, for example, you have to give a lot of money to the Gamecock Club just to have the option of buying season tickets.  Then you have to pay a “premium” on those same seats.  Then after finally getting to buy the tickets the sucker customer needs to buy an expensive parking pass just to be able to park near Williams-Brice Stadium.  When you include travel costs, concessions, etc., soon (to paraphrase Everett Dirksen) you’re talking about real money.  All that for USC games, and we’re not talking about the USC that wins Rose Bowls, but the USC that has never played in a major bowl.  38-35!  Enough said.

Another thing to emphasize, or improve, is to make the games “kid-friendly”.  There are plenty of kids at games, but there needs to be a lot more.  Ticket promotions, giveaways with children in mind, the whole nine yards.  Some of this is already happening, which is good.  Another idea would be to have a specific organization just for youngsters — the Junior Bulldog Club, say.  Members could get perks, like being able to go out onto the field with the players before the game for the coin toss or some other type of ceremony, not unlike what you see at international and domestic European soccer matches.  After all, indoctrination should occur early in life.

Speaking of kid-friendly, one of the best things The Citadel has done in recent years is re-establish the live mascot program.  General and his good buddy Boo are kid magnets, as is their cartoon friend Spike.  I’ve actually heard a few gnarly old codgers grumble about Spike (some of the gnarliest codgers aren’t that old, either).  Those people are morons.  Mascots, in general, aren’t really meant to entertain somebody who is busy trying to figure out where he put his flask.  They’re largely there to keep children entertained while their father is screaming at the coach for running the ball on third-and-ten.  Just keep that in mind.

Finally, I have to say something about the cheerleading program.  Larry Leckonby needs to take a hard look at that issue and make some decisions.  It’s a part of the gameday experience that is currently a complete disaster.  Whether we outfit the cheerleaders in camo and go the gung-ho route, or revert to the days of importing them from other schools (probably not feasible), or simply not have cheerleaders at all, something needs to be done.  The current situation is not good at all.  The lack of enthusiasm for the program from the corps of cadets (and from the cheerleaders themselves) is disturbing.

—

In conclusion, I do think attendance should improve this season, barring something unusual happening.  The home schedule is much more interesting, with games against instate schools Presbyterian, Furman, and Wofford, along with a visit from Appalachian State.  The best way of increasing attendance going forward, of course, was best expressed by former Bulldog assistant coach Al Davis:  “Just win, baby.”  Since you can’t always count on wins, though, you have to do all the “little things” to try to fill a stadium.  Here is hoping that Johnson Hagood will be packed with fans this season and beyond.

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ESPN’s college football announcers for 2009

Posted on July 9, 2009 by Sandlapper Spike

On Thursday, ESPN released its assignments for its college football studio and game coverage.  There was a fair amount of movement among its announcing teams this season.  Some comments:

  • The Brad Nessler-Todd Blackledge tandem should be excellent.  Blackledge no longer has to worry about trying to decipher various off-the-wall comments by Mike Patrick.  Nessler doesn’t have to prop up Bob Griese (who to me has faded badly as an analyst in recent years) or make room for Paul Maguire’s observations.  Erin Andrews will roam the sidelines for this team; let’s hope she doesn’t get hit by a ball.
  • Speaking of Maguire, according to a column in USA Today he was supposed to have a “reduced role” this season, with “the occasional game” and some studio and radio shows.  However, the man who still holds the record for the longest punt in The Citadel’s football history is not listed anywhere on the release (and the release is fairly extensive, listing some “additional” commentators like JC Pearson, Jon Berger, and Shaun King).
  • Griese is going to be part of a three-man booth working the noon ESPN game.  Dave Pasch gets to referee Griese and Chris Spielman.  That strikes me as possibly being a mismatched combo.  Griese and Spielman are both Big 10 guys, though.  I think Pasch is one of the better play-by-play guys ESPN has on its roster, but he’s probably precluded from drawing primetime assignments due to being the radio voice of the Arizona Cardinals.
  • One of my favorite announcers, Sean McDonough, will work ABC games with Matt Millen.  Millen was a solid analyst on NFL telecasts before his extremely ill-advised stint as GM of the Lions.  I think moving back to broadcasting on the college side is probably a good move for him.  Oh, and this team also draws a sideline reporter, Holly Rowe.  It’s a shame she isn’t working with Ron Franklin.
  • Mike Patrick moves from ESPN Saturday night to one of the regional ABC slots, teamed with Craig James (who will also continue as an analyst on the Thursday night package) and sideline reporter Heather Cox.  Britney Spears will not be impressed.
  • Carter Blackburn, formerly of CBS College Sports TV, will be calling games on ESPNU.  It appears he’ll primarily be working west coast games.  His announcing sidekick is listed as “TBD”.
  • Pam Ward is back for the noon game on ESPN2, with Ray Bentley back for at least the third year in a row as her analyst.  I’m just glad I’m not a fan of, say, a mediocre Big 10 school…
  • Todd Harris got a regular play-by-play gig, working Saturday afternoon ESPNU telecasts with Charles Arbuckle (really, it should have been Bentley).  I sincerely hope those will be “interactive” broadcasts.

Then there is ESPN’s SEC announcing roster.  I wanted to delve into this a little deeper, because I’m curious to see how ESPN approaches its contractual relationship with the conference.

Aside from the SEC primetime games that will air on ESPN (which will mostly be called by Nessler and Blackledge), there will be a regular ESPN game on Saturday night, an occasional afternoon game on ESPNU, and the syndicated regional package put together by ESPN Regional Television.  The full list of affiliates for the regional package won’t be announced until the SEC Media Days in a couple of weeks, but it’s anticipated the “footprint” for the broadcast will be significantly larger than what it was under Raycom/JP/Lincoln Financial.

The ESPNU night game will be called by Eric Collins and Brock Huard.  Neither of those guys has an SEC background, or even a background in the southeast, which is at least semi-interesting.  Huard is a former Washington quarterback who worked games last season with Bob Wischusen.  Collins has called college football for ESPN before (working with Shaun King on a semi-regular basis, if I remember correctly), and currently works the TV side of L.A. Dodgers broadcasts for the 38 road games for which Vin Scully doesn’t travel.

The SEC regional broadcast was traditionally the Dave-Dave-Dave show, or Dave Times Three.  However, all traditions must end sometime, and thus only one of the Daves was brought into the new ERT package.  That would be play-by-play man Dave Neal, the de facto TV face of the SEC.  Neal will be working with Andre Ware, not one of my favorite analysts but probably still better than his Dave predecessors (Rowe and Archer).  The sideline reporter will be Cara Capuano, who SEC fans will undoubtably identify with completely, since she’s from California and has a degree in cell biology and biochemistry from UC-San Diego.  Capuano will double as the host of the new weekly SEC show on ESPNU.

The regional broadcast will also have a studio show hosted by Rob Stone and Matt Stinchcomb, which is convenient, since the ESPNU studio for Saturday afternoons will also be Stone and Stinchcomb.  UGA fans will be in Dawg Heaven on the U, since Stinchcomb will be working afternoons in the studio, and appearing in the studio in primetime will be another former UGA man, David Pollack.

I’m just ready for the games to start…

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When tradition is less than permanent: The Citadel’s football uniforms

Posted on June 12, 2009 by Sandlapper Spike

It’s June, so that means it’s a perfect time for me to blog about one aspect of The Citadel’s football program that has always annoyed me — namely, the uniforms.  For a school as tradition-laden as The Citadel, you would think that the football uniforms would have remained largely unchanged over time.  You would be very, very wrong to think that, though.

Now, why should anyone care about how football uniforms look?  I’ll tell you why.  It is all-important to success on the gridiron.  I have personal knowledge of this.

Many, many years ago, I began my star-crossed athletic career by participating in my hometown’s Pee Wee football program.  I was assigned to a team which I will not name, so as to protect the innocent.  The coach took one look at me — very tall for my age, and even skinnier for my age — and decided that I would make an ideal left tackle.  He also elected not to play a tight end on my side of the field, so I was what pigskin cognoscenti call the “weakside tackle”.

During games, opponents would often overload my side of the field and race into the backfield, tackling the ballcarrier for a loss despite my heroic efforts.  The coach would then blame me for the failure of his game plan, which he thought brilliant, never seeming to understand that running a delayed handoff on every play was not necessarily the way to go.

However, the biggest mistake he made came when selecting the jerseys for our team.  We received orange jerseys with black numerals on them, very plain indeed.  I was given a jersey with the number “2” (certainly a fine number for an offensive tackle).  The reason?  I was the second player in line.

After being washed, the jerseys turned a orangery-pinkish color, gradually turning even pinker as the season progressed.  The iron-on numerals were also of poor quality.  My numeral started falling apart by the second half of the first game, with the bottom part of the number almost completely gone by the third game.  By the time the season was over the number “2” had essentially turned into the punctuation mark “?”.  (Wearing the “?” was probably appropriate, since most of the time I was not really sure what the coach expected me to do.  He was the Ray Handley of Pee Wee coaches.)

It is almost needless to say, but without the pride and confidence instilled by wearing quality jerseys the team struggled and barely finished above .500 for the season.

The folowing year’s campaign was completely different.  The new coach was much better, as he actually knew what he was doing.  We ran a sound offense featuring two tight ends (I was the “blocking” TE; in retrospect it is a bit puzzling that we always ran the ball to the other side).  We also had four players on our team who eventually played college football, which helped.  However, none of that was as important as the improvement in the quality of our jerseys.

They were black, of good material, with significantly superior iron-on numerals (which were white).  Even better, they had “hoop” stripes on the upper sleeves, with red in the middle bordered by white.  Very classy.  I should also mention that no one on the team had to wear a “kicker” number.  Everyone had a number “50” or above.  I was number “86”.  Hines Ward would have approved.

The team powered through the regular season undefeated, and in the title game whipped a pack of green-shirted hoodlums to win the city championship.   I have always credited the uniforms for providing much-needed confidence and an “edge”.  Without them, perfection would never have happened.

—

The Citadel has gone through so many helmet design changes that the guy at The Helmet Project can’t keep up with them all.  He very politely states on his website that “The Citadel has a large and interesting helmet history”.  Interesting is one word for it…

Another helmet devotee, who runs a fine blog called The Helmet Archive, has drawn more of the old helmet designs used by the Bulldogs over time.  I would encourage anyone halfway interested in this topic to peruse this link [edit: now disabled], which shows most of the helmet designs worn by the Bulldogs since 1960.  The Helmet Archive also has a link to a photo page that shows many of the helmets/uniforms The Citadel has had over the last 50 years.  It’s good stuff (the pictures, that is; the uniforms, not so much).

Generally speaking, when it comes to most of the designs, I have two basic complaints about The Citadel’s uniforms, besides the fact they’ve changed too many times:

1)  The helmet logo is usually either too detailed or just looks stupid (sometimes both)
2)  The jersey (and on at least one occasion the helmet) often doesn’t have the “The” in “The Citadel” on it

I find that second issue particularly grating.  Look, if the name of the school is going to be on the front of the jersey, that’s fine — but get the name of the school right.  The lettering needs to be just large enough to be read by someone watching the game on TV (that’s right, TV; I’ll get to that in a minute) and the name should read “THE CITADEL”.  This has not always been the case in the past, and it isn’t the case in the present, either, as can be seen with this shot of the current jersey.  Is it too much to ask that the correct name of the college be used?   I hope not.

The photo of the current jersey also illustrates the problem with the lettering not being clearly legible.  This shows up more in the away uniforms, as the light blue color of the lettering doesn’t show well on white (especially on a sunny day).  Again, it doesn’t look that good on television, either, and it needs to “pop” on TV (the same is true for the helmet logo).  I would make the lettering a little larger, put a thin navy border around the letters to further distinguish them (“shading”), and obviously it should read “THE CITADEL”.

Another aspect of the jersey/pants that I would like to see changed is the current striping on the pants/shoulder area (the “side panels”).  That really needs to go.  I realize that it’s a Nike thing, so getting rid of it is probably easier said than done, but it’s just not a good look.

At least we no longer have the chevrons.  I would like to thank the person who decided to get rid of Ellis Johnson’s chevrons.  No coach at The Citadel seemed to put more thought into uniform design than Johnson.  Despite this (or maybe because of it), his teams played in what I consider the worst of The Citadel’s modern-day togs.

Not only did they feature chevrons on the shoulder pads (I should note that he wasn’t the first Bulldog coach to have them), but in his third year as head coach (2003), the team would wear the most abysmal of all of the Bulldogs’ helmet designs, which is really saying something.   Between the “gray shell” helmets and the chevrons, this was the nadir of The Citadel’s football uniform history.

The helmet featured a color that is not one of The Citadel’s primary (or even secondary) athletic standards.  Johnson didn’t like the way the blue helmet looked on blue jerseys, and stated that the gray shell exemplified the “storied history of the long gray line”.  Whatever.  The fact is that it clashed badly with the jersey; the logo borrowed from the New York Giants’ 1980s-1990s design (which wasn’t so hot to start with); and it naturally said “CITADEL” instead of “THE CITADEL”.  Just awful.  The Bulldogs actually kept that basic design for four seasons, too.  It is no surprise that The Citadel didn’t have much on-field success during this era.

Not that the gray shell look was the only poor helmet design; far from it.  Look at that photo link again.  Pick which decal of a bulldog is funnier — is it the one from 1964, 1967, or 1971?  Tom Moore’s coaching tenure featured a helmet design that just said, in text, “The Dogs”.  Robert Hill deserved better.  I don’t mind the helmets that just had numbers, although I see no particular reason to emulate Alabama (or Georgia Southern, for that matter).

The successful teams of the Charlie Taaffe regime had a script “The Citadel” decal in the style of one of the school’s marks of that time, a theme not unlike the current helmet design.  One of the more interesting (and better) logos was the “Star of the West” design employed during the late 1970s.  You can see this logo in a very cool picture found by the above-mentioned Helmet Archive site.  The problem with going back to that look is that A) trying to explain the “Star of the West” thing to people could be trying, and B) everyone would think we were imitating the Dallas Cowboys.

(Also notice in that picture the striping on the jersey and the pants.  Is that navy — or black?)

I don’t have a big problem with the current helmet design, but it’s not easy to see in person or on television.  I think it’s important to look good on TV, and if we’re going to have “TV numbers” on the shoulders and names on the backs of the jerseys (which I assume is also for recruiting), then we need to have a decal that shows well in HD.  I’m not a designer — I’m just a crabby individual who knows what he doesn’t like — but I would suggest that simple is best.

Some variation of the block “C” would, I believe, be the best way to go, with an appropriate border color to make sure it was easily visible.  It’s been used in the past on white-shelled helmets, but I think blue helmets are the best bet.  Put a white block “C” with a navy “shaded” border, and a stripe across the top (three stripes, actually — white surrounding navy), and you may have something.  It wouldn’t hurt to experiment with a few other color options.

Speaking of color options…

I came across a gallery of photos taken by Life magazine of the 1955 football game between The Citadel and Presbyterian (which was homecoming that year), a contest won by the Bulldogs 14-13.  This was apparently part of a feature on Mark Clark, who appears in most of the non-football photos (and several of the football ones, too), giving off a “John Wayne” vibe in each and every picture.  Google has archived thousands of the old Life photos; these pictures are part of that collection.  I’ll link a few of them, but with a couple of notes.

Check out the colors of the uniforms worn by the Bulldogs in these pictures:  this one, and this one.  Note the red stripes on the helmets (and jersey sleeves) and the darker blue of the jerseys!  At first I thought that perhaps the photo had been mislabeled, and that it was in fact PC’s players running onto the field.  Then again, why would our coaches and bagpipers be lined up watching them?  The following black-and-white shots indicate that they are definitely the Bulldogs, however:  here (photo op for the general), here (nice bow tie), here, and here.

I’m still a little confused by some of these photos.  In the preceding paragraph, take a look at the first two pictures that are linked, and compare them to the third one.  Do you suppose they made them run out on the field twice for the photographer or something?  Or was one of them before the game, and the other at halftime?  Then there is this picture.  It’s black-and-white, but compared to the other B&W shots, don’t the uniforms look darker?  (You have to love that scoreboard, though.)

[Edit: a few of the Life photos have been disabled.]

It could be that some of these are practice (or pre-game) pictures and the others are game photos; in fact, it’s likely, given the wardrobe change for John Sauer.  Regardless, they’re fascinating photographs.

Anyway, that’s enough on uniforms for one post.  To sum up:  simple is best, get the name of the school right, and don’t screw up the colors.  That’s all.

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Seeing both sides of a mismatch on the same day

Posted on November 23, 2008 by Sandlapper Spike

The bad side

Well, the football game went about as expected.  I was hoping that Florida wouldn’t get to 70, but The Citadel really didn’t make that much of an effort to shorten the game (in terms of play calling).  On the other hand, scoring three touchdowns was a pleasant surprise.  Unfortunately, the Bulldogs went 1-for-3 on extra points.  Kevin Higgins is going to have to do something about the placekicking before next season.

The placekicking was the only negative from the special teams, which were otherwise solid across the board yesterday.  The defense was completely overmatched, but the offense didn’t do all that badly.  While there were three turnovers, at least none of them were converted by Florida’s defense into touchdowns.  In that respect The Citadel fared much better than South Carolina did the previous week against Florida.  It’s also worth noting that due to injury, The Citadel actually inserted its backup quarterback, Cam Turner, into the game before Florida replaced Tim Tebow.

From the strange-but-true department (I guess I’m channeling Jayson Stark here):  South Carolina QBs Stephen Garcia and Chris Smelley both failed to throw a touchdown pass against the Gators.  The same was true for highly-touted Georgia QB Matthew Stafford.  Wide receiver and former walk-on Scott Flanagan of The Citadel, however, threw a TD pass against Florida on only one attempt.

Also, I would say that losing 70-19 is better than losing 56-6.  My reasoning is as follows:  Florida outscored South Carolina by more than an 9-1 ratio, but only outscored The Citadel by a little more than a 3.6-1 ratio.  Advantage, Bulldogs.

The good side

The basketball game also went about as expected, and this was a good thing.  The Citadel was never threatened by Cincinnati Christian and pulled away down the stretch for a convincing victory.  CCU had no answer for Cameron Wells, who had a good game not only on the stat sheet, but in terms of letting the game come to him.  Zach Urbanus had a strong first half and a solid overall game.  The Bulldogs did a good job in this game of getting to the foul line and converting.  Getting their fair share of free throw attempts has to be a priority for the Bulldogs, especially when shooting foul shots is one of The Citadel’s strengths.

Speaking of that, Phillip Pandak got into the game late, and was almost immediately fouled.  I was rooting for him to make both foul shots, and he did.  By doing so he equaled his number of made free throws from all of last season.  He only had four attempts at the line last year, which was amazing, because he attempted 101 field goals during the course of the season.  Now this year in two games he has one field goal attempt and two made free throws…

The Citadel took care of the ball in this game, a welcome change from the previous three games, and the pace of the game was in line with where the Bulldogs want to be.  The Citadel allowed CCU to grab a few more rebounds than I would have liked, and didn’t defend the three-point shot in the first half as well as it should have (the defense on the perimeter noticeably improved in the second half).

It was the second, and final, game of the season against a non-Division I opponent.  Now it’s time to try to win a game against a D-1 foe.  The Citadel’s first opportunity to do so will come on Tuesday night at the North Charleston Coliseum against Charleston Southern, one of two Division I teams the Bulldogs actually beat last season.

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Avoiding trombone music

Posted on November 21, 2008 by Sandlapper Spike

The Citadel is playing Florida this week.  In football.  This could be a tough game.  My understanding is that the Gators are pretty good.  This Tebow guy, he’s received some press.

The worst loss in football for The Citadel occurred in 1958, when Georgia and quarterback Fran Tarkenton defeated the Bulldogs in Athens, 76-0.  After the last touchdown, the UGA band played “76 Trombones” from The Music Man.  I am hoping that on Saturday, Florida’s band doesn’t have a reason to start playing Nena’s biggest hit…

Also to be avoided:  possible references to country music singer Larry Gatlin (who scored a touchdown in Houston’s 100-6 victory over Tulsa in 1968), Neil Lomax (quarterback for Portland State the night the Vikings beat Delaware State 105-0), and Cumberland College (222-0 ring a bell?).

Ideally, The Citadel will score, not suffer any catastrophic injuries, and keep the game within 50 (which would better South Carolina’s effort from last week).  I would settle for holding the Gators under 70 points, though, to be perfectly honest.

There is no reason to preview Florida, because everyone already knows everything that is necessary to know about the Gators.  Tim Tebow can cure cancer, Percy Harvin is faster than Mercury, and Urban Meyer is an outstanding coach, if seemingly a bit humorless, possibly because his parents named him Urban.

There is this guy named “Mr. Two-Bits” who does some little number that all the Gator fans like.  He’s been doing it for 60 years, and he’s doing it for the last time at this game.  He actually went to The Citadel for a couple of years, but he’s going to be all-out rooting for Florida anyway, so you will excuse me if I don’t lionize him.

In the event Florida’s team oversleeps en masse and forfeits the game to The Citadel, it would be the first victory for the Bulldogs over an SEC team since that famous (or infamous, if you’re into pig calls) 10-3 victory over Arkansas in 1992.  Jack Crowe, of course, was fired after that game as head coach of the Razorbacks.  It’s not every day a coach is fired after the season opener.

I will say this:  the players and coaches for The Citadel will take this game very seriously, and won’t like some of the snide remarks that have been made about it.  I doubt my saying that I hope the game stays within 70 would go over well with some of them, either.  They are headed to Gainesville to compete, and measure themselves against some of the best players in the country.  I just don’t want them to get embarrassed, but they obviously can’t and won’t think that way – and that’s a good thing.

One final thing…I’m not a huge fan of every article about The Citadel, even ones that are positive, but I thought this article by David Jones was excellent, so if you haven’t read it already, you might give it a look.

(Kenny, I flinch too.)

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The weekend split

Posted on November 17, 2008 by Sandlapper Spike

There isn’t a whole lot to say about either the football win over UT-Chattanooga or the hoops loss to Virginia Commonwealth, but I’ll say something anyway:

Escaping Chattanooga

Okay, that was a little closer than I would have liked.   Make that a LOT closer than I would have liked.  Quite frankly, The Citadel should have beaten the Mocs easily, but the TD off the blocked field goal seemed to completely change the tenor of the game.   The woeful Mocs seemed to suddenly realize that instead of being whipped like they had been in their previous eight games, they had a chance to actually win, and they played that way.  Conversely, The Citadel played like a team that didn’t know how to win.  Fumbling inside the five-yard line, throwing a pick in the end zone (immediately following a Chattanooga turnover) – it was looking like one of the more demoralizing Homecoming losses ever.

Thankfully, Andre Roberts wouldn’t let that happen.  The best player The Citadel has had in the last 15 years (if not longer) returned a punt for a TD with less than 2 minutes to play, and the Bulldogs hung on for a much-needed victory.

At least The Citadel won’t be overconfident when it plays Florida this Saturday…

VCU is good

Losing 82-59 was about what I expected.  Thirteen Bulldogs saw action in this game, with ten of them playing for at least eight minutes, and six getting seventeen minutes or more.  Last season the Rams were the best team in the country defending the three, and thus it’s not surprising they managed to hold The Citadel to 29% shooting behind the arc.  The Citadel committed an unacceptable 21 turnovers (in a higher than normal 72 possessions).  VCU had 12 steals in the game and blocked 5 shots.  The Bulldogs’ defense was lacking again, as VCU shot 53% from the field, including 47% from 3-land.  The Rams scored 82 points on 71 possessions and had four players score in double figures.

Positives:  The Citadel was outrebounded by six, which wasn’t that bad (although VCU had 11 offensive boards).  The Citadel also had a good night from the foul line, both in terms of shooting percentage (87%) and getting to the line in the first place (a FTM/FGA of 25%). 

John Brown didn’t play, which I thought was curious, considering he started against Grace Bible College. 

Next up:  a home game against Iowa.

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Chattanooga has become a homecoming opponent

Posted on November 14, 2008 by Sandlapper Spike

I remember when UT-Chattanooga was good…

UTC joined the SoCon in time for the 1977 football season.  In that first year, under Joe Morrison, the Mocs won the league.  In fact, UTC won or tied for the title the first three years it competed in the conference.

Morrison moved on to New Mexico and UTC brought in Bill “Brother” Oliver to coach.  Oliver was there four years.  He never won the league championship, but his teams were good – he won at least 7 games in each of those years.

Oliver left, to be replaced by Buddy Nix.  Nix was at UTC for nine seasons, and in his first year, the Mocs won the conference title again, albeit with a 6-5 overall record.  Nix went 6-5 in four of his nine years, and 7-4 in another, but wasn’t able to maintain the 7-8 win standard established by Morrison and Oliver.  Three of his final five seasons were losing campaigns, and the bottom dropped out in 1992, when the Mocs were 2-9 overall and winless in SoCon play.

Old-timers who remember UTC coming into the league and consistently challenging for the conference title might be surprised to know that the Mocs haven’t had a winning record in SoCon play since 1991 and in that same time period have only managed two winning seasons overall.  The coaches who have tried to restore the program to its former glory since the departure of Nix:  Tommy West (4-7 in one season before taking the head coaching position at Clemson), Buddy Green (one winning campaign in six seasons), Donnie Kirkpatrick (three seasons in which he won fewer games each year), and Rodney Allison (one winning season in six years).

Allison is the current coach, although he is playing out the string, as UTC has already announced he won’t be back next year.  UTC is 1-9 this season, with the only win over Cumberland (yes, the same school that lost 222-0 to Georgia Tech in 1916).

Chattanooga’s opponents are averaging over 40 points per game against the Mocs.  UTC is only scoring 12 points per game.  In other words, it’s not one of those “close but no cigar” seasons.  The nine losses are all by at least 20 points.  UTC quarterbacks have thrown 16 interceptions in 10 games while maintaining a completion percentage of 46%.  (It’s possible that Allison’s son, Sloan, may start at QB against The Citadel.  He has been a backup most of the season but has seen time in most of the Mocs’ games.)   UTC is averaging only 2.3 yards per rush.  Its opponents are averaging 6.2 yards per rush.

You know it’s been a bad season when the beat writer for the local paper notes that “punter Jeff Lloyd, who lost his starting job for three games, may be the Mocs’ most productive player.”

Later in the column he writes that Lloyd has been effective “when he has been able to get a punt off.”

UTC’s struggles have presented an opportunity for assorted anti-football advocates to step forward and call for the program’s elimination.  The loudest of these voices is a computer science professor at UTC named Joe Dumas.  From the link:

“This is a perfect time for UTC to get out of the football business for good and concentrate on academics while maintaining successful athletic programs like basketball, golf, tennis, etc.”

I’m not sure the professor has considered the possibility that those other “successful athletic programs” might have a harder time staying successful after the Southern Conference boots UTC out of the league, which it almost certainly would do if the school dropped football.

Allison also has claimed that the publicity surrounding Dumas and company’s efforts have hurt the program, making it harder to recruit, etc. – in other words, a self-fulfilling prophecy.  I don’t know if I buy that.  At almost every school there are always a few spoilsports and malcontents who want to drop all sports (except for the ones they like, naturally).  UTC’s problems in football started long before the get-rid-of-pigskin bandwagon built its first wheel.

—

As far as Saturday is concerned, it’s Homecoming and The Citadel’s opponent has already mailed in the season.  The Bulldogs’ next opponent is Florida.

The Citadel better win this game.

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