Complaint to ESPN, c/o The Sports Arsenal

From time to time I get e-mail responses to things I’ve written on the blog.  They tend to run the gamut, from words of encouragement to criticism to spam (plenty of spam).  However, I got an e-mail on Saturday that I think is worth sharing.  I won’t include the name of the lady who wrote it, because I don’t think that would be fair.  

First, some background.  On Saturday afternoon Michigan played Indiana in a game televised on ESPNU.  The announcers for the game were Pam Ward (play-by-play) and Danny Kanell (analyst).  I didn’t see it, as I was at Johnson Hagood Stadium watching The Citadel’s game, but apparently the matchup in Bloomington was an exciting contest that featured very little defense.  The Wolverines prevailed, 42-35.  Shortly after the game ended, the following e-mail was sent to me:

If Pam Ward was the announcer for the U of M game today (Saturday, 10/2/2010) at 3:30 p.m., you should be ashamed of yourselves.  Aside from the mispronounciation of Denard “Dernard???!!!” Robinson’s name, could you please find an announcer who’s excited about the game?  She’s boring and uninformed, maybe why she falls back on the criticism she’s ridiculed everywhere for?  There are so many awesome sports broadcasters in the industry – please get creative!  We hate every game she announces and we’re sick of being forced to listen.  Not as agonizing as watching the Lions play every Thanksgiving… BUT CLOSE.  Thanks!

This is, obviously, a fantastic e-mail.  That last line about Pam Ward as an announcer not being as agonizing as watching the Lions play on Thanksgiving puts it over the top.

Some points:

— While she criticizes Ward, the e-mailer doesn’t seem entirely certain it was actually Ward doing the announcing (“If Pam Ward was the announcer…”).  However, that doesn’t stop her from blasting Ward anyway.

— More importantly, to me anyway, is the notion that I might somehow be affiliated with ESPN (“you should be ashamed of yourselves”, “could you please find an announcer who’s excited about the game?”).  I am guessing that the e-mailer googled Pam Ward’s name and found this post I wrote about ESPN’s announcers for 2010, and assumed I was a publicist for the network or something.

I found this amusing, because while I do write about things that involve ESPN on occasion, so would anyone who writes about sports in this country, given the pervasive nature of the network.  I haven’t always written favorably about ESPN, either (see this post or this post, just for a couple of examples).

— The e-mailer is apparently a Michigan fan.  She is sick of “being forced to listen” to Ward, but to be honest I don’t think Ward has done a whole lot of games featuring the Wolverines.  When she was calling the noon game on ESPN2 the past few years, she usually called Big 10 games  — but the two schools I always associate with a Ward call are Michigan State and Northwestern.  Michigan usually was televised on ESPN (or the Big Ten Network) if it drew the noon slot.  At least, that’s how I remember it.  I could be wrong about that.

Incidentally, Ward now wants to call NFL games.

— I couldn’t agree more with the e-mailer about the Lions, though.  Why should the entire country be subjected to that franchise every Thanksgiving?  Can’t they rotate host teams?  I’m tired of the Cowboys too, but at least Dallas usually has a good team.  The Lions are almost always bad and boring.  This year, turkey day at Ford Field will include the visiting New England Patriots, so at least one of the teams involved should be good.  Of course, that means the score will probably be something like 47-10 or 34-12 (the score of the last two games played on Thanksgiving in Detroit, both losses by the Lions). 

That game will be on CBS.  I suppose Phil Simms will give away a silver iron again.  It’s a lame gimmick, but not as lame as the thing Fox hands out to its game MVP.

To sum up, I’m sorry I can’t do anything about Pam Ward (or any other ESPN announcer) calling your team’s game(s), but I’m not affiliated with the four-letter.  If I’m going to field complaints about ESPN, though, the least the folks in Bristol could do is send me some free stuff. 

I’m not asking for an ESPY gift pack or anything; I would settle for a College Gameday t-shirt (size XXL – I’m fairly tall).  I would ask for a hat, but I doubt ESPN carries a lot of promotional caps in size 7 ¾.  If they did, Mark Schlereth would probably grab all of them anyway.  He looks like he’s got a large noggin.

As always, thanks to the e-mailers (and commenters) for all their feedback.

Football, Game 3: The Citadel vs. Presbyterian

Gametime:  7 pm ET, at Johnson Hagood Stadium

TV:  Uh, that would be a no.

The final non-conference game of the season for The Citadel is a matchup with in-state foe Presbyterian, a traditional opponent from days gone by, but now back on the schedule for a second consecutive year after an absence of almost two decades.  I wrote about the series history in my preview for last year’s contest, for anyone interested.

With the Bulldogs’ 46-21 victory in 2009, The Citadel now holds a commanding 49-11-1 lead in the series, including a 27-3 mark at Johnson Hagood Stadium, which has been the site for every game between The Citadel and PC since 1950 save one (a 1963 contest played in Savannah; I’m not sure why).  The Blue Hose last defeated the Bulldogs in 1979; since then, The Citadel has won eleven straight games in the series.

Tangent:  Last year’s preview includes links to some photos taken by Life magazine in 1955; a reporter for the weekly was on campus to write a story about Mark Clark’s new job as president of the school.  He was joined by a staff photographer, who took a lot of photos of cadet life, including a series of shots of the Homecoming football game against PC (none of which were used in the article).

I don’t have a copy of the issue (it’s from November 28 of that year), but from what I can tell, the actual feature on Clark is only about two pages in length.  I’m amazed at how many photographs were taken for such a short piece.  I’m glad they were taken, though; as a whole, they’re fascinating.   If you want to surf Google’s archive for the 1955 Clark/The Citadel Life photos (albeit while wading through some pictures not related to the military college), go here.

The road to FCS status has not been an easy one for the Blue Hose.  As recently as 2005, Presbyterian won the (Division II) South Atlantic Conference with a 10-2 overall record, the first conference title for PC since winning the SAC in 1979 (coincidentally, the last time the Blue Hose beat the Bulldogs).  However, as Presbyterian has made the transition from D-2 to FCS, the win-loss record has naturally declined, leading to last season’s 0-11 record.

Those eleven losses included only one game in which PC lost by less than seven points, a 41-37 setback against Coastal Carolina in Conway, which is also the team/locale of the Blue Hose’s last road victory (in October of 2007).  Presbyterian has lost 16 straight games overall, and has also lost 16 consecutive road games.  PC opened the 2010 campaign with two “automatic” losses, to Wake Forest and Clemson, by a combined score of 111-34.

Having noted all that recent gridiron misery for the Blue Hose, it would not be a shock if Presbyterian defeats The Citadel on Saturday.  Disappointing, yes, and perhaps a bit surprising, but not a shock.

Presbyterian hung around in last season’s game against the Bulldogs for the better part of three quarters, and now The Citadel will have to compete while continuing to work the kinks out of a brand-new offense that struggled at times against Chowan, to say nothing of Arizona.  It’s exactly the kind of situation that would give a team like Presbyterian hope.

After all, PC moved the ball on The Citadel’s defense last year, including 204 yards rushing.  Trandon Dendy was responsible for 147 of those rushing yards, and he’s back this year.  Joining him on the Blue Hose offense is Michael Ruff, who caught two touchdown passes last week against Clemson, and who also caught a TD pass on this much-seen trick play against Wake Forest.

PC won’t be afraid to throw some more “trickeration” The Citadel’s way, so the Bulldog defense needs to be prepared.  I do wonder if the Blue Hose might have been better off saving some of their best stuff for a more competitive game.  The fake against Wake was a great play, but even with it PC still lost by 40.  On the other hand, you’re probably not going to make SportsCenter if you run the play in an untelevised game.

Last year I wrote that against Presbyterian, the defensive line was occasionally  “pushed around by an offensive line that included a 258-lb. left tackle and a 240-lb. center.”  That won’t happen this year…because PC’s offensive line is much heavier. The starting center for the Blue Hose weighs 260 lbs., and the left side of the o-line averages 297 lbs.  So far, this year’s edition of The Citadel’s defensive front has shown a lot of potential.  It better show more than potential this Saturday.

The challenge for the Bulldog offense is to have the same type of production against PC it had last season, but without Andre Roberts.  The Blue Hose had no answer for Roberts, who caught 12 passes for 184 yards and 4 TDs against Presbyterian.  Andre won’t be in Charleston on Saturday; he’ll be in Atlanta, preparing to (hopefully) make his NFL debut with the Arizona Cardinals the next day.

Which player will (or should) be running Saturday’s offensive attack has been a subject of interest.  Kevin Higgins has announced that Matt Thompson will again get the call as the starter at QB, which I think is fine.  Thompson did struggle against Arizona, but that was Arizona — he’s not the only guy who struggled.  Sam Martin did do a fine job running the triple option when he entered the game in the third quarter, and should see his share of time too.

Really, at this point it doesn’t matter much who starts.  Both should play, both will probably get plenty of work, and in this transition season, anointing a permanent starting quarterback strikes me as probably a waste of time and possibly counter-productive.  I was a little surprised that Game 1 starter Ben Dupree was so quickly moved to slotback, but I gather that the coaching staff wants him on the field, regardless of position.  I also wouldn’t be all that surprised if Dupree is still in the mix at QB, even with the switch.

Things on offense that must continue to improve include the perimeter blocking, the center-QB exchange (something that affected both Thompson and Martin, despite Martin not actually losing a fumble), the pitch plays (both QBs threw some scary pitches, especially Thompson, with one of his resulting in a lost fumble), and the pass catching.  In this offense, you really can’t afford to drop passes, because there aren’t many reception opportunities as it is, and they tend to be big plays when successfully completed.

I would like to see more “playmaking” from the back seven, particularly the linebackers.  Other things that need to improve on defense include the tackling, which was better against Arizona but still not optimal (the Wildcats’ first TD came after Juron Criner gained an additional 20 yards following a missed tackle), and assignment pickups (with the DBs missing some reads against Chowan).

A few other random observations not related to the actual play on the field:

– I noticed during the Arizona game that the coach who sends in the offensive signals on the sideline wears a red shirt, presumably to make him easier for the QBs to see. He was wearing a plain Nike shirt; given that The Citadel is trying to push “Big Red” apparel, maybe the coach could wear a Big Red polo shirt instead.  Just a thought.

– Speaking of Big Red, The Citadel is going to have a “red out” at Homecoming.  Now, Arizona is having a “red out” against Iowa this Saturday, which should go well, since red is one of Arizona’s colors and Iowa wears black and gold.  I’m not necessarily criticizing The Citadel’s administration for the basic idea behind the “red out”, given the aforementioned push for Big Red, but as it happens the Bulldogs’ opponent for Homecoming is Elon.  The primary school color for the Phoenix is…red.

I don’t believe enough thought was put into that decision.

– Against Chowan, The Citadel introduced a new cartoon mascot, apparently to replace the shako-wearing Spike.  Here is a photo of the “new” Spike (if he is actually being called Spike; I’m not sure about that):  Link

There have already been complaints about the “look” of the new mascot, which has floppier ears than the old one, and of course does not wear the shako.  I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the shako may have been a bit problematic when it came to wear and tear.

I don’t think the new mascot really looks like a rabbit, as was suggested in that thread I linked above, but I do think that if that’s going to be the new cartoon image, then The Citadel probably needs to adjust its mascot “mark” accordingly.  It should be consistent.  Of course, consistency has never been a hallmark of The Citadel’s logos/marks/branding history; it’s almost as bad as the school’s lack of stability in its football uniform history.

Ultimately, of course, my opinion about the new mascot doesn’t matter, and the same is true for any other alumnus.  That’s because the cartoon mascot isn’t intended to entertain the alums; it’s there for their kids.  If your typical five-year-old likes the mascot, then it’s good enough for The Citadel.  Adults are supposed to be entertained by good cut-block technique and superior tailgating.

Presbyterian will certainly be up for this game, as it represents a very real chance to break its long losing skid.  If the Bulldogs were to lose to PC, it would be the beginning of a very long season.  However, I am hopeful that the offense can generate enough points to avoid the upset, and I suspect the defense will be more than ready to assert itself.

I’ll be very curious about the attendance, what with Clemson (on TV) and South Carolina (at home) playing at the same time as The Citadel.  The weather should be more conducive to watching football than it was for Chowan, at least (please, no more 1 pm starts in early September).

Go Dogs!

Expanding on Bud Selig’s global championship proposal

Bud Selig and his Japanese counterpart, Ryozo Kato, apparently met in Milwaukee recently to discuss a proposal for an annual global championship between the U.S. World Series winner and the Japan Series titlist (skimpy details in this column and the AP article linked within it).  Personally, I think Selig needs to expand on this idea.  Here is a suggestion for a format that would truly determine the “world champion” of baseball:

First, there needs to be a poll system of some kind.  There would be two main polls.  In one of them, writers, presumably from around the world, would vote on which champions of each world league were worthy of playing in the title series.  In the other “human” poll, managers from some of the elite clubs (and even a few from the less-elite ranks) would vote.  Computer polls could also be used, in case further obfuscation was required.

The champions that finished 1st and 2nd in the poll system would qualify to play in the global championship.  In addition, the weeks leading up to the global series would be filled with series between other continental champions.  I would call these various series the “Baseball Championship Series”, just so everyone could grasp their tremendous importance.  The 1 vs. 2 matchup would be known as the Baseball Championship Series Global Championship.

You could have automatic qualifiers from North America, the Caribbean, Asia, South America, Australia, and Europe.  Another couple of slots would be filled by at-large selections; for example, an extra European club would presumably get to play in the Baseball Championship Series almost every year, because of the political importance of that continent.

I suppose it is possible that every now and then a lesser continent would produce a team worthy of competing in the Baseball Championship Series.  It is unlikely such a club would really be at the same level as those continental champions already guaranteed berths, of course, and certainly a place in the title series would be completely out of the question.

However, to satisfy potential rabble-rousers (all great things attract critics), a set of conditions could be met by a prospective qualifier to allow a team from a smaller continent (like, for example, Africa) to compete in the Baseball Championship Series.  It must be emphasized that such a club would never be in a position to qualify for the Global Championship, because it would obviously not be deserving.  The system would be designed to ensure such an injustice never happened.

There is no doubt in my mind that the system described above would be a major success for all significant parties.  There would almost never be a situation where more than two clubs would be in line for play in the global championship, and the other qualifying clubs would get to bask in the glow of the championship event by playing in much-anticipated series leading up to the final.

It’s a wonder such a setup hasn’t been tried for other sporting events, particularly the NFL playoffs and the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament, each of which desperately needs a substantial change in the way it determines its respective champions.

All in all, it’s a fantastic idea.

Football, week 1: The Citadel vs. North Carolina

There will be a lot of blue on display in this game.  If Kenan Stadium could sing a song on Saturday, it might sound like this:

I’m blue da ba dee da ba di da ba dee da ba di da ba dee da ba di…

That’s right, an Eiffel 65 reference.  What other game preview gives you that?

The Citadel begins another football season this Saturday.  Doesn’t it seem like the anticipation increases every year?  Of course, this year part of the reason Bulldog fans want the season to hurry up and get here is so the team doesn’t lose any more running backs before the first game.

Some fast facts:

–Series:  UNC leads 3-0 (all three games played in Chapel Hill)
–Scores:  14-7 UNC (1915), 50-0 UNC (1939), 45-14 UNC (1986)
–The Citadel alltime against current ACC schools:  6-63-2
–The Citadel alltime against ACC schools (when those schools were actually members of the ACC):  0-24

The last time the Bulldogs beat a current ACC school was in 1931, when The Citadel edged Clemson, 6-0 (in a game played in Florence, of all places).  The Citadel also tied Florida State in 1960, 0-0.  The Bulldogs haven’t seriously threatened an ACC opponent on the gridiron since 1976, when Clemson slipped past a solid Bobby Ross squad, 10-7.

The 1939 UNC team that thrashed the Bulldogs 50-0 was pretty good, going 8-1-1 that season.  Alas, the loss was to Duke.  The coach of the Tar Heels at the time was Raymond “Bear” Wolf.  Yes, “Bear” Wolf.  Years before, Wolf had been a baseball player; he played in one game in the majors, for Cincinnati, getting one more at bat than Moonlight Graham did (speaking of UNC alums).  Wolf had a good run in Chapel Hill until 1941, when he went 3-7.

The new coach was Jim Tatum, who is in the College Football Hall of Fame, but mostly for his work at Maryland.  Tatum only coached at UNC (his alma mater) for one year before enlisting in the Navy; he would later have enormous success in College Park, winning a national title with the Terrapins in 1953, before returning to North Carolina in 1956.  Tatum coached three more seasons in Chapel Hill before dying suddenly of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever in 1959.  He was only 46.

While Tatum was building a championship team at Maryland (he also coached Oklahoma for one season), UNC was having a very good run of its own, thanks in large part to the exploits of the great Charlie “Choo Choo” Justice.  Justice is surely one of the best college football players not to win the Heisman Trophy (he was the runner-up twice).  North Carolina played in three major bowl games during this period, the only three times the Heels have ever played in a major bowl.  UNC lost all three games.

After some good (and bad) seasons through the 1960s, UNC would have another outstanding streak of success in the early 1970s under Bill Dooley, including an 11-1 season in 1972, marred only by a loss to Ohio State.  Interestingly, North Carolina did not finish the year in the top 10 of either poll.  Dooley would move on to Virginia Tech (and later Wake Forest).

Dick Crum took over the program from Dooley, and had some excellent seasons of his own, including 1980, when the Tar Heels (featuring Lawrence Taylor) would again go 11-1, again go undefeated in ACC play — and again struggle against a big-name non-conference opponent, this time Oklahoma (losing 41-7).  That 1980 season marks the last time UNC won the ACC title.

The next year could arguably serve as a microcosm of North Carolina’s football history.  UNC, led by tailback Kelvin Bryant, scored 161 points in its first three games in 1981.  Bryant scored an amazing 15 touchdowns in those three matchups.  Then, against Georgia Tech, Bryant injured his knee.  He would miss the next four games.  UNC hung on for two games, but after improving its record to 6-0, the Tar Heels were soundly beaten at home by a mediocre South Carolina team, 31-13.

North Carolina rebounded to beat Maryland, and then played Clemson in a game that was essentially for the ACC title.  The Heels had won 11 straight ACC contests, and the Tigers were undefeated (and had beaten Herschel Walker and Georgia).  It was the first time two ACC schools had met in football when both were ranked in the AP top 10, and it would be a memorable encounter.  Clemson prevailed, 10-8, in a game where the intensity was palpable, even to TV viewers.

North Carolina would not lose again that season, buoyed to an extent by the return of Bryant for the final two regular-season games and the Gator Bowl (where the Tar Heels would defeat Arkansas).  There was, however, one final twist of the knife.  From the “Scorecard” section of Sports Illustrated (January 11, 1982):

They say you can prove anything with statistics, and in the case of North Carolina running back Kelvin Bryant, official NCAA figures would appear to show that he didn’t exist in 1981. NCAA rules specify that to qualify as a season statistical leader a football player must appear in at least 75% of his team’s regular-season games; for the Tar Heels, who played an 11-game schedule, that meant a minimum of eight games. Because of knee surgery, Bryant played in only seven games, but he made the most of his limited participation, to put it mildly, scoring 108 points. The NCAA determines scoring leaders on a per-game basis, and it awarded the scoring title to USC’s Marcus Allen, who averaged 12.5 points a game. Because he played too few games, Bryant, with a 15.4 average, didn’t qualify to be the scoring champion, which may be fair enough. But Bryant also was excluded from the list of 25 top scorers even though—surely there’s an injustice here—he ranked fifth in total points behind Allen (138 points), Georgia’s Herschel Walker (120), SMU’s Eric Dickerson (114) and McNeese State’s Buford Johnson (l10). Absurdly, Iowa State’s Dwayne Crutchfield, who scored just 104 points, is listed in fifth place, while Bryant and his 108 points are nowhere to be seen.

This little blurb came in the same edition of the magazine  that featured Clemson wide receiver Perry Tuttle on the cover, as the Tigers had just won the national championship by defeating Nebraska in the Orange Bowl.  Talk about a double whammy of what might have beens…

Crum never had a team that good again, and by the late 1980s the program was beginning to fade.  Mack Brown then arrived and basically decided to start over.  After consecutive 1-10 seasons, that may have looked like a mistake, but Brown gradually built things back up, and in his last two seasons in Chapel Hill the team went 10-2 and 11-1 .  He couldn’t quite get that one big win to push the program to the next level, though, as the Heels could not beat Florida State.  After that 11-1 season (in 1997), Brown left for a program that he felt he could push over the top — Texas.

As the above paragraphs illustrate, UNC has had an occasionally-close-but-no-cigar kind of history in football — sometimes good, sometimes very good, but never quite getting over the hump (at least nationally) for various reasons, and thus always remaining in the large shadow cast by the school’s basketball program.  As the years have gone by, the degree of difficulty in trying to escape that shadow seems to have increased.

After ten seasons of around .500 ball under two coaches, the folks at UNC decided to shake things up and bring in Butch Davis, who is known as somebody who can really recruit (proof:  the 2001 Miami Hurricanes, which had 16 future NFL first-round draft picks on its roster).  Whether Davis can put it all together at North Carolina is the big question.  There are high hopes in Chapel Hill this season, however, as he returns 38 lettermen (including 15 starters) from a team that won eight games last season and is ranked #20 in the USA Today Coaches’ Poll.

One of those returning starters is quarterback T.J. Yates, who presumably will have fully recovered from an injury suffered this past spring while playing Ultimate Frisbee.  I’m guessing that summer activities for the Tar Heels were restricted to checkers and backgammon in an attempt to keep everyone healthy.

Speaking of UNC quarterbacks, one of the curious things about the Heels’ football history is the lack of success of any North Carolina quarterback in the NFL (at least as a QB).  There have been 182 UNC football players who went on to the NFL (as of the conclusion of the 2008-09 season), but only two of them have been quarterbacks — and one of them, Jim Camp, never threw a pass in the league.  The other, Scott Stankavich, played in only four career games (no starts); two of those games came as a “replacement player” during the 1987 players’ strike.

Ronald Curry has had a decent career in the NFL, but as a wide receiver.  Curry has attempted four passes in the league, completing none of them.  There have actually been fifteen former Tar Heels who have attempted at least one NFL pass.  Only six of them, however, have actually completed one.  Stankavage is one of those six, but the Heel with the most yards passing in the NFL is halfback Ed Sutton, who threw for 146 yards in his career, with one TD.  Don McCauley is the only other UNC player to throw a TD pass in the NFL.

I totalled all the NFL passing statistics for former UNC players.  I also totalled the passing statistics for The Citadel’s Stump Mitchell (who threw nine passes during his career, including a TD toss to Roy Green) and Paul Maguire (who threw one pass during his career, completing it for 19 yards).  Check out the cumulative stats comparison:

UNC:  19-70, 315 yards, 2 TDs, 6 INTs, QB rating of 19.6
The Citadel:  5-10, 102 yards, 1 TD, 0 INTs, QB rating of 119.6

A 100-point difference in QB rating?!  Advantage, Bulldogs.  Of course, that won’t mean anything on Saturday.

Last season, the Bulldogs were 4-8.  This followed a 7-4 campaign in 2007 that had fans thinking a return to the FCS playoffs was not far away.  Instead, the Bulldogs lost six straight games during the course of the 2008 season, narrowly avoided a seventh straight defeat to a poor UT-Chattanooga squad, and then got pummeled by Tim Tebow and eventual BCS champion Florida in the season finale.

Some of those games were close (The Citadel lost three Southern Conference games by a total of 12 points), but on the whole the 4-8 record was a fair reflection of the Bulldogs’ play.  Comparing some league-only statistics from the 2007 and 2008 seasons is illuminating.  Ignoring the raw totals, which are a touch misleading (scoring was down in the SoCon last season as compared to 2007), and looking at league rankings:

-Scoring defense:  4th (2007), 8th (2008)
-Pass efficiency defense:  3rd (2007), 9th (2008)
-Red Zone defense:  2nd (2007), 9th (2008)
-Turnover margin:  2nd (2007), 5th (2008)
-3rd down conversion offense:  2nd (2007), 5th (2008)
-3rd down conversion defense:  2nd (2007, 5th (2008)

That’s basically the story of the 2008 season right there.  The defense had trouble getting off the field (SoCon opponents completed over 64% of their passes against The Citadel, and the Bulldogs only intercepted two passes all season in league play).  Inside the 20, The Citadel’s defense had no answers (allowing 23 touchdowns in 31 red zone situations).

Offensively, the running game struggled, as rushing yardage per game dropped by one-third.  Perhaps more ominously, the number of third downs converted via the rush fell substantially.  This also affected the offense’s red zone success rate, as the team scored only 18 touchdowns in 34 opportunities inside the 20 (the worst ratio in the league), and led to over-reliance on an erratic (I’m being kind here) placekicking game.  The Bulldogs only made 7 of 12 field goals attempted in red zone possessions.  No other conference team missed more than one such attempt all season.

After a season like that, it’s not surprising changes were made.  The Bulldogs are going to return to a 4-3 defense after last year’s attempt at a 3-4 resulted in the D getting pushed all over the gridiron.  That rather obvious lack of physicality was also addressed by an aggressive offseason conditioning program.  There are a couple of new defensive coaches, too.

There has been a good pre-season buzz about the defensive line, which is nice, but there also needs to be more playmaking from the linebackers and secondary.  In other words:  get stops and force turnovers.  The key is to corral more interceptions (fumble recoveries tend to be somewhat random).  Scoring touchdowns on defense would be a plus, too, but you have to get the turnovers first before you can think six.  The Bulldogs have recorded 13 sacks in conference play each of the last two seasons; a few more this year certainly couldn’t hurt.

The offensive line should be strong, although illness has been a problem in fall practice, what with one lineman suffering from an acid-reflux problem and another battling mononucleosis.  That’s still much better than the Bulldogs’ running back situation.  The starter for UNC may be walk-on freshman Bucky Kennedy, walk-on freshman Remi Biakabutuka, or one of the backup bagpipers.  Biakabutuka would definitely be the choice if the opening-game opponent were Ohio State rather than North Carolina, as just the name “Biakabutuka” on his jersey would be enough to unnerve the Buckeyes, thanks to his older brother Tim.

Another potential threat as a runner is backup quarterback Miguel Starks, who last year impressed many observers just by standing on the sideline during games.  However, he’s never played a down of college football.  It will be interesting to see what he can do once he gets on the field.

I’m of the opinion that the incumbent starting quarterback, Bart Blanchard, didn’t have that bad a season last year, as I don’t think he got much help from the rest of the backfield (and the offensive line seemed to lack consistency).  He is a bit limited as a runner, which is not ideal in Kevin Higgins’ offense, but that was true the year before as well and the Bulldogs managed just fine when he stepped in for Duran Lawson.  Higgins wants him to have a better completion percentage, but part of the problem Blanchard had last season trying to avoid incompletions was a limited number of passing targets — basically, his options were the tight ends and Andre Roberts.

Of course, Roberts is a nice target to have.  It would really help Roberts (and Blanchard) if a second receiver emerged this season (Kevin Hardy?), which never happened last year.  If another Bulldog wideout does develop into a threat, Roberts could wind up with fewer catches but more yards per reception.  Roberts in space is a big play waiting to happen, as anyone who has watched him return punts can attest.  I’m glad he’s not going to be returning kickoffs this year, though.  I worry about him wearing down over the course of the season.

The placekicking needs to be much improved.  Last year was just not acceptable.  The Bulldogs also must replace Mark Kasper, who was a solid punter for four seasons (second in the league in net punting last year).  The Citadel needs to improve its kickoff coverage (next-to-last in the conference in 2008).  Basically, the special teams must get better across the board (with the exception of the punt return team, which thanks to Roberts was the nation’s best unit).

As for Saturday’s game, a lot depends on whether Blanchard and Roberts have fully recovered from sprained ankles each suffered during fall practice.  If they are both good to go, I would expect the Bulldogs to be reasonably competitive against North Carolina.

While the Heels return 15 starters, they must replace some excellent wide receivers (including Hakeem Nicks) and two starters on their offensive line.  UNC’s o-line has taken a bit of a hit in the pre-season with some injuries and attrition (nothing like The Citadel’s running back situation, though).  The starting group should still be solid, however.

T.J. Yates should be okay after his frisbee ordeal.  This will be his third year starting games at QB for UNC.  Yates is good at taking care of the ball (only four interceptions last season).  UNC has a nice corps of running backs, led by Shaun Draughn, who rushed for 866 yards in 2008.  The Tar Heels will definitely need to find some new wideouts, as no returning receiver caught more than 11 passes last year.

UNC rotates a number of defensive linemen, and almost all of them are very good athletes (and most of them are huge).  Marvin Austin has first-round pick potential, Cam Thomas has all the makings of a future NFL nosetackle, and Ladson native Robert Quinn won the ACC’s Piccolo Award after recovering from a brain tumor to have an outstanding freshman campaign.

Despite this embarrassment of riches, the Tar Heels didn’t do a particularly good job creating sacks last season (only 22 all season; the d-line only had 5.5 of those).  Still, this group will be a formidable challenge for The Citadel’s offensive line.

North Carolina has a really good trio of starting linebackers, led by Bruce Carter, who doubles as a great kick-blocker (five last year).  The defensive backfield should be excellent, with several ball hawks ready to repeat last year’s success in intercepting passes (the Heels had 20 picks).

UNC did struggle defensively on third down conversions, ranking last in the ACC in that category.

North Carolina’s special teams were okay last year, although its net punting was mediocre.  The Heels will be breaking in a new punter this season, which might be good news for Andre Roberts (and Mel Capers), although first The Citadel’s defense has to actually force a punt.

Last season UNC opened with McNeese State, and struggled before finally winning the game 35-27.  It should be pointed out that the Cowboys were a solid FCS club (finishing 7-4, and featuring a quality offense), and that the game was affected by a lightning delay.  If anything, that relatively close call may make the North Carolina players more wary of FCS opposition.

The goals for this game, from The Citadel’s point of view, are for the team to be as competitive as possible, and to avoid major injuries.  It isn’t realistic to expect a victory, particularly against a pre-season Top 20 team.  The Bulldogs just want to make UNC work for a win.

To do that, avoiding turnovers on offense is a must.  I suspect that The Citadel is not going to have much of a rushing attack in this game, which is going to be a problem.  It’s also going to be a tough game to break in a new punter.  I think the Bulldog defense has a chance to establish itself to a certain extent.  However, the UNC offense is not turnover-prone and is more than capable of grinding out drives (although this may not be a bad thing for The Citadel; the fewer big plays, the better).

Obviously, the players won’t be thinking the way I’m thinking.  They’re traveling to Chapel Hill looking for a victory, which is a good thing.  That’s how they should approach this game.  Besides, you never know what might happen.  After all, my fantasy football team is called The Jack Crowes.

I’m just ready for kickoff.

Thinking big can be small-minded

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.

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?

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.

— 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.

Kurt Warner and the Curse of the Cardinals (Part 2)

The Cardinals are the oldest NFL franchise, as the club’s origins can be traced back to 1898 and the Morgan Athletic Club of Chicago. The franchise nickname came about when founder Chris O’Brien bought used jerseys for his team from the University of Chicago. The jerseys, a maroon color when new, were faded to what O’Brien called “Cardinal red”. In 1906, the club disbanded; it would re-form in 1913. It would briefly suspend operations due to World War I (and the great flu epidemic of 1918), but by 1919 it was back and in 1920, O’Brien paid the $100 entrance fee to join what would eventually become the National Football League. Initially, the team was known as the Racine Cardinals, after the street where the club was based, Racine Avenue (the club had also been known as the Normals, for Normal Park in Chicago). However, a franchise in Racine, Wisconsin, joined the NFL as well, so the team became the Chicago Cardinals. The Cardinals and the Chicago Bears are the NFL’s two “original” franchises (the Green Bay Packers joined the league in 1921).

In 1921, O’Brien signed the great John “Paddy” Driscoll to the team for $300 per game, three times what he paid to enter the league. Driscoll was a do-everything sort of player (who also coached the team). The club played its home games at Comiskey Park throughout its time in Chicago, except for a brief three-year period in the mid-1920s.

In 1925, the Cardinals were fighting for the NFL championship. At that time, there was no playoff; the team with the best record in the regular season was acknowledged as the champion. The Cardinals were 9-1-1 when they played the Pottsville Maroons on December 6. The Maroons were 8-2 and the game would almost certainly decide the champion. Pottsville upset the Cardinals at Comiskey, 21-7.

The Cardinals had completed their regularly scheduled games, but in those days schedules were, shall we say, flexible, and the team quickly scheduled two extra games. The Cardinals weren’t as much interested in winning the league just for its own sake as they were getting a guaranteed game against Red Grange and the Chicago Bears (which would have been an option for them based on existing contracts and would have been a financial bonanza). O’Brien had trouble finding teams that had not already disbanded for the season, but he managed to get a game with the Hammond Pros, which fielded a decent team, losing to the Cardinals 13-0.

It would be the game against the Milwaukee Badgers that would cause the Cardinals no end of grief. Milwaukee didn’t have nearly enough players available to field a team, so one of the Cardinal players, Art Folz, recruited some kids from a local Chicago high school to join the Badgers for the game, telling them it was a ‘practice game’ and wouldn’t affect their amateur status. The Cardinals won 59-0 in a game so farcical that O’Brien decided not to charge admission. According to a local newspaper, “Touch football would have seemed rough compared to the exhibition staged.”

NFL president Joe Carr would force the Badgers out of the league and also fined the Cardinals $1000, putting O’Brien on probation for a year. He ordered the game stricken from league records, and Folz was banned for life from the league.

Meanwhile, Pottsville had taken advantage of consecutive wins over the Frankford Yellowjackets and Cardinals to lay claim to the NFL title, setting up a big-money game at Shibe Park in Philadelphia with a team of Notre Dame All-Stars. This was a game originally set up by the Frankford owner, who at the time had anticipated his own squad playing in the game. In an effort to stop Pottsville from playing in the game, he asserted that territorial rights gave his club and only his club the right to play at Shibe. Pottsville played the game anyway (winning 9-7), noting that the territorial rights were not in writing. It didn’t matter. Carr suspended Pottsville, voiding its title. However, O’Brien apparently agreed not to claim the championship for his own club, based on its own irregularities, and in return for this the Cardinals did not have to pay the $1000 fine handed down by Carr. Basically, there was no 1925 NFL champion. If there had been, it realistically would have had to have been Pottsville, which won fair and square on the field.

O’Brien would sell the team in 1929 to a doctor named David Jones. In 1932, Jones sold the team to Charles Bidwill Sr., for $50,000, and the franchise has been in the Bidwill family ever since.

Charles Bidwill was, according to author Dan Moldea, “a bootlegger, gambler, racetrack owner, and associate of the Capone mob.” Nice. Of course, lots of NFL owners back then had connections to gambling, including Tim Mara, Art Rooney Sr., and Bert Bell (who was also an NFL commissioner). The Rooney family still does (as do the Bidwills). Bidwill had been a minority owner of the Bears before buying the Cardinals. He owned the team for 15 years, until his death in 1947, and the team was, for almost all of those years, terrible, with records of 2-6-2, 1-9-1, 5-6, 6-4-2, 3-8-1, 5-5-1, 2-9, 1-10, 2-7-2, 3-7-1, 3-8, 0-10, 0-10, 1-9, and 6-5.

(That second 0-10 season actually came as part of a ‘combo’ team, as the Steelers and Cardinals played as one team that year due to travel restrictions brought about by World War II. It was called Card-Pitt — or, more sarcastically, “Car-Pet”.)

Just before he died, though, Bidwill had signed collegiate star Charley Trippi for $100,000. Led by Trippi, the Cardinals would go 9-3 during the 1947 regular season and then beat the Philadelphia Eagles, 28-21, at Comiskey Park to win the NFL championship. That game is the only home postseason contest in Cardinals history. The Cardinals would lose to the Eagles the following season in a title-game rematch. The franchise has not managed to reach even a conference championship final since. Following those great years, however, the Cardinals would soon resume their losing ways, all under Charles Bidwill’s widow, Violet, having losing records in nine of ten seasons before eventually relocating.

Violet Bidwill Wolfner (she had remarried) moved the Cardinals to St. Louis in time for the 1960 season. Even though there was already a baseball team in St. Louis called the Cardinals, the NFL Cardinals elected to retain the franchise nickname, thus leading to the team being known as the “Football Cardinals” around town. (That’s also how receptionists for the NFL club answered the telephone.) After the 1961 season, Mrs. Wolfner died, and the club was left to Charles “Stormy” Bidwill Jr. and William “Bill” Bidwill. I have not been able to get confirmation, but apparently her will was contested by her second husband. During the fight over the family fortune, the Bidwill brothers found out for the first time that they had been adopted.

The Cardinals actually were competitive for a few years in the 1960s, just missing out of the playoffs on a couple of occasions. During this time, however, the two brothers could not agree on how to divide authority. Stormy Bidwill elected to take control of the family’s gambling interests, and ceded control of the Cardinals to his brother Bill. Some observers have suggested that the wrong brother wound up with the Cardinals.

The Cardinals have been almost uniformly bad ever since Bill Bidwill ascended to the top, other than a period in the mid-1970s when Don Coryell coached the team. Even then, the Cardinals were unable to win a playoff game in two postseason appearances. In 1982 the Cardinals made a 16-team playoff “tournament” following a players’ strike that reduced the regular season to nine games, but lost in the first round. In 1984 the Cardinals had one of the all-time great offenses, featuring Neil Lomax, Ottis Anderson, Roy Green, and Stump Mitchell, but somehow managed to miss the playoffs, going 9-7 and losing the last game of the season to the Redskins when a last-second field goal attempt went awry. The Cardinals would finally make the playoffs again in 1998, actually winning a game at Dallas, before losing to Minnesota. Since then the Cardinals have not had a winning season. In fact, that 1998 season (in which the Cardinals were 9-7) is the only winning season the franchise has had since 1984.

Oh yes, about the curse: remember all the controversy and goings-on in 1925? Well, soon after Charles Bidwill Sr. bought the club, the Cardinals began claiming that NFL title for that year as their own (although the official NFL record book would state the Cardinals had been “proclaimed” the ’25 champs until the 1985 edition, when it began listing them as official champions). Pottsville and its supporters have fought for their claim to the crown for decades, but the NFL owners have twice by vote refused to acknowledge the merits of their claim, first in 1963 and again in 2003. This was due to the influence of Bill Bidwill, who has zealously guarded the title designation for his club, basically because other than 1947, it’s all the Cardinals have – and, say those who believe in the curse, it’s all the Cardinals will ever have. It’s not like the Cardinals have come close since winning the ’47 title, either, with only five playoff appearances in the last 60 years, and that one solitary playoff victory.

Myself, I doubt the Cardinals are cursed. I think it’s more a case of the Bidwills being cheap (as opposed to thrifty) and not really caring much about winning, not as long as the cash cow known as the NFL keeps pumping out milk.

That’s the franchise for which Kurt Warner plays. It’s a tough burden. The Cardinals’ entire history is rotten, but one winning season in the last 23 years? It’s not impossible to lead the Cardinals to the playoffs – after all, Jake Plummer did it – but it’s not quite the same thing as stepping behind center for the Cowboys, either. Not by a long shot.

I think having success with the Cardinals could push Kurt Warner’s Hall of Fame candidacy over the top, even with his relatively short run of greatness, because it would be an almost unique chip to have. He would be a Super Bowl MVP and a two-time league MVP with a great story (from the Arena Football League to the National Football League, from stockboy to Super Bowl champ) AND he would have topped it off by leading the hapless Cardinals to glory.

Since it’s the Cardinals, though, good chance it never happens…

A good portion of the information about the 1925 NFL season comes from David Fleming’s book about the Pottsville Maroons, Breaker Boys.

Kurt Warner and the Curse of the Cardinals (Part 1)

The next month is going to be a big one for the Arizona Cardinals.  At 4-2, and playing in the pathetic NFC West, the Cardinals will have an opportunity to all but lock up a playoff spot, with three of the games against its lackluster division opponents.  However, we’re talking about the NFL’s most historically inept franchise, so it would probably surprise no one if the Cards managed to lose at least three of those games.

The next month is also an important one for Kurt Warner, in my opinion, because I think he has a chance to greatly enhance his candidacy for the Pro Football Hall of Fame if he can lead the Cardinals to the playoffs (especially if the Cardinals were to win a game or two once they got there).   Here are some relevant numbers for Warner:

2 MVP awards

Super Bowl MVP award

3 Pro Bowls

52-39 record as a starting QB

164 TDs, 105 INTs

93.8 career passing rating

I’m not sure any quarterback has ever had a career like Warner’s.   He basically came out of nowhere at age 27 to put up three brilliant seasons in a row, winning 35 games and a Super Bowl as a starter in those three years.  However, other than that he’s really only had two other seasons as a starting quarterback in the NFL (21 combined starts in those two years), with one of those being last year, at age 36.  Generally Hall of Fame quarterbacks don’t start so late and don’t spend a significant part of their careers as backups.  52 wins as a starter doesn’t compare to most of the guys with busts in Canton, even those with delayed or interrupted careers; for example, Roger Staubach won 85 games as a starter, Steve Young 94, and Warren Moon 102.  Of the “modern era” QBs in the Hall, I think the one with the fewest starter wins is Joe Namath, with 63.

There are many fine non-Hall quarterbacks with lots of starter wins and a healthy winning percentage, like Phil Simms (95 wins), Ken Stabler (96), and Joe Theismann (77).

Among current quarterbacks with solid winning records, there are Hall of Fame locks like Brett Favre (163 career starter wins), Peyton Manning (108) and Tom Brady (86).  Donovan McNabb is plugging away with 76 career wins, and Brad Johnson (if you still count him as current, after that game against the Rams) has 71.  Matt Hasselbeck has 58.  Then there is Ben Roethlisberger, who already has 44 at age 26!  He’s younger than Warner was when Warner debuted in the league.

What I’m trying to say is that to this point Kurt Warner doesn’t have a lot to offer as part of a Hall of Fame resume other than that one three-year stretch – but that was one incredible stretch.  He’s kind of the Terrell Davis of quarterbacks.

As of right now, I don’t see him getting in the Hall.  However, a season of success with the Cardinals could change that.  Because, you see, it’s not like he would be making a run with a franchise that you might expect to win every now and then.  He would be making it with the Cardinals.

I want to delve a little deeper into Cardinals history (curses included), which I think is rather interesting, much like a train wreck can be interesting, but that would make for a very long post.   What I’m going to do is break this up into two parts, and the Cardinals history (along with some concluding thoughts about Warner) will be in Part 2.  I’ll post that either later tonight or sometime tomorrow.