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Post by realism on Aug 31, 2019 21:27:15 GMT -5
It's reached a critical mass imo....I'm really appreciative that we have a fan-base than can discuss this thoughtfully. The league shouldn't be this bad in football...the members of this league have deep," deep historical roots in college football"...the sport shouldn't be getting the short shrift it has by whomever is in charge....disgraceful. HC carries little weight with the other PL insrttutions who have " deep historical roots in college football"..and influence currently on the national scene in other M's and W's sports. The "business model is different than your fantasies .You personally are an embarrassment. You don't fit and you're intent on bullying the League with a limited understanding of what's going on. Find or create another League with other malcontents that like to hear themselves talk over and over.
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Post by hc87 on Aug 31, 2019 21:32:13 GMT -5
Like Groucho...I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a membah. I'm actually being pro-PL here...we shouldn't be this bad in football in toto....something is rotten in Pennsylvania
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Post by realism on Aug 31, 2019 21:38:46 GMT -5
Like Groucho...I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a membah. I'm actually being pro-PL here...we shouldn't be this bad in football in toto....something is rotten in Pennsylvania HC diesn't belong in the PL.
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Post by hc87 on Aug 31, 2019 21:44:49 GMT -5
Like Groucho...I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a membah. I'm actually being pro-PL here...we shouldn't be this bad in football in toto....something is rotten in Pennsylvania HC diesn't belong in the PL. No, it really doesn't but we had a President who had a blind eye unfortunately to college athletics despite being a very solid President in general. Holy Cross should be like Villanova athletically....CAA in football and Big East in basketball..but here we are.
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Post by longsuffering on Aug 31, 2019 22:45:57 GMT -5
HC diesn't belong in the PL. No, it really doesn't but we had a President who had a blind eye unfortunately to college athletics despite being a very solid President in general. Holy Cross should be like Villanova athletically....CAA in football and Big East in basketball..but here we are. Good point '87. Villanova is in two leagues that legitimately can send teams to the NCAA tournament to challenge for a national championship in BB and FB. If utilized correctly the 1-AA/FCS subdivision creation was a gift to schools like HC, Villanova, Fordham, etc. that had proud histories (ie: The Seven Blocks of Granite at FU, HC's unbeaten teams under Dr. Eddie Anderson) but were no longer in any position to compete for a national championship in a unified D-1. Villanova used the gift wisely like they did the gift of the Big East. By not being afraid to have high level athletics coexist with academics, Villanova like BC and PC has seen it's attractiveness to applicants grow. In comparison perhaps HC looked both gift horses in the mouth, or maybe Villanova's larger size make the BE and CAA a better fit. I think the former is closer to the truth because we are fielding BB and FB teams the same size as Villanova is, just not as successfully recently.
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Post by DFW HOYA on Sept 1, 2019 0:08:29 GMT -5
How will offering 3 more scholarships per team (to the FCS limit of 63) affect the schools? Three scholarships would be huge at Georgetown.
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Post by hc87 on Sept 1, 2019 0:34:56 GMT -5
Seriously, you can't beat Davidson? They backed out of the then Colonial League in the late 80s....we are so screwed as a league....depressing
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Post by KY Crusader 75 on Sept 1, 2019 8:56:27 GMT -5
Here's something to monitor this year as we debate the relative strength/weakness of the PL: the record versus Ivy League opponents. Here's the PL's composite record for the last half-dozen years
2013= 7-8 2014= 7-7 2015=6-9 2016= 8-6
2017= 2-10 2018= 2-8
Of course, "PL vs Ivy" has a full range of possible games , from Colgate at home versus Brown to Bucknell at Harvard at the other end of the spectrum, from a 90% chance of winning to a 95% chance of losing. Still, whatever the lineup of games was, the last two years have been a disaster for the league. Lots of factors have come into play:
Columbia is no longer a joke of a program Dartmouth is greatly improved after a down period Princeton has made great strides forward Lafayette, Lehigh, and Fordham have really declined as programs
With all this in mind, here's who PL teams are playing in the Ivies this season
Holy Cross plays @ Yale, @ Brown, and vs Harvard at Fitton Georgetown plays @ Columbia and @ Cornell Lafayette is at home versus Penn and on the road @ Princeton Bucknell plays at home versus Princeton Colgate plays @ Dartmouth and @ Cornell Fordham plays @ Yale
So, the PL has 3 home games and 8 road games versus Ivy League opponents.
I'll set the Over/Under at 3.5 wins for the Patriot League
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Post by hcpride on Sept 1, 2019 9:16:38 GMT -5
/\ At this point I don't think we (The Patriot League) match up very well v NEC, Ivy, or CAA.
Sacred Heart is playing Bucknell, Lafayette, and Lehigh in upcoming weeks and I'd like to see the PL bounce back with three wins (this year we are 0-2 v the NEC)...but I just don't see that happening.
Within the PL there will be several competitive games this year and for some folks that is sufficient to say the PL is a football 'success'.
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Post by bigfan on Sept 1, 2019 10:00:31 GMT -5
The main problem is that many people think that the PL is good, maybe for minor sports but not for football and basketball. The type of athletes we need for football and basketball are not interested in the PL.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Sept 1, 2019 10:09:21 GMT -5
Here's something to monitor this year as we debate the relative strength/weakness of the PL: the record versus Ivy League opponents. Here's the PL's composite record for the last half-dozen years 2013= 7-8 2014= 7-7 2015=6-9 2016= 8-6 2017= 2-10 2018= 2-8 Of course, "PL vs Ivy" has a full range of possible games , from Colgate at home versus Brown to Bucknell at Harvard at the other end of the spectrum, from a 90% chance of winning to a 95% chance of losing. Still, whatever the lineup of games was, the last two years have been a disaster for the league. Lots of factors have come into play: Columbia is no longer a joke of a program Dartmouth is greatly improved after a down period Princeton has made great strides forward Lafayette, Lehigh, and Fordham have really declined as programs With all this in mind, here's who PL teams are playing in the Ivies this season Holy Cross plays @ Yale, @ Brown, and vs Harvard at Fitton Georgetown plays @ Columbia and @ Cornell Lafayette is at home versus Penn and on the road @ Princeton Bucknell plays at home versus Princeton Colgate plays @ Dartmouth and @ Cornell Fordham plays @ Yale So, the PL has 3 home games and 8 road games versus Ivy League opponents. I'll set the Over/Under at 3.5 wins for the Patriot League If you're a high school kid and only had scholarships from the Ivy League and Patriot League, what would you choose? Answer: Ivy League The Patriot League is a second rate, Ivy League wannabe with no long term vision. HC has a great history in football, but is it promoted in any aspect of the 32 million renovation? No, because it doesn't fit into society's narrative trends.. The school has no identity, no vision, and simply wants to try to copy everything the Ivy League does without being an Ivy League school. There is no future in the direction we are going. We either elevate into a CAA caliber school or we will be forced to continue talking about our rankings in community service.
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Post by joe on Sept 1, 2019 10:23:20 GMT -5
But HC will continue to hire one coach after another in the two major sports thinking he will somehow do the impossible and coach through all of these obstacles, then hang full blame on his head when the impossible doesn’t happen. Vaas, Allen, Gilmore, and now Chesney. All good hires, none fully supported.
PL rules, admission red tape, and poor salaries effectively set a bar above which Bill Parcells could not rise, except every so often when a fluke wunderkind shows up on campus.
We should have followed the lead of Villanova not Harvard. HC is more akin to Villanova and BC than Harvard and Yale. Therein was the error for which we’ve been punished for decades.
How’s the new AD doing by the way? And have we landed any good hoops recruits?
On to a fully funded, supported, redshirted, and admitted UNH!
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Post by Pakachoag Phreek on Sept 1, 2019 11:21:15 GMT -5
The league has to change some of its policies...redshirting, # of scholarships, roster size etc We are losing to non and limited # scholarship programs now....we lost to Davidson and St Francis today...let that sink in. The FBS games were complete blow-outs....though somewhat to be expected, there were many examples of FCS schools playing FBS teams competitively this weekend. It's getting bad and apparently not getting better. Thus begins the annual procession of the flagellants. I hope all the pain and anguish is being offered for a good cause. _______________ There are three private universities in the CAA's football conference. I underline universities because these are not liberal arts colleges. Richmond is the only CAA school with an enrollment of similar size to HC. Richmond has a significantly higher endowment, yet is so financially strapped that its men's sports are football, baseball, basketball, and lacrosse, plus three 'cheap' sports: golf, tennis, cross country.
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Post by timholycross on Sept 1, 2019 11:30:14 GMT -5
PP: Have you copyrighted "Annual Procession of the Flagellants"? Right up there with Slick Rick's "Fellowship of the Miserable"!
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Post by Pakachoag Phreek on Sept 1, 2019 12:21:03 GMT -5
PP: Have you copyrighted "Annual Procession of the Flagellants"? Right up there with Slick Rick's "Fellowship of the Miserable"! I may! I thought of a new avatar during the procession weeks, but pitifully few woodcuts of the flagellants have survived. _____________________ For those complaining about the AI, from Navy's numerical roster, the majors of those players up to #33 and having won at least two letters. math engineering quantitative econ (Perry) english pol science robotics and control engineering engineering
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Post by richh on Sept 1, 2019 13:35:02 GMT -5
Jennifer Heppel is the do-nothing commissioner. She should be fired and replaced with someone who gives a damn. Wrong target. She has no power to change PL bylaws. Counsel of Presidents only. Right now PL is in a self created box of restrictions. Most of us are not competitive with our usual conference opponents. CAA Ivies and NEC. Part of that is most of us are rebuilding. Discounting FBS games, we are not looking at many OOC wins this year. NEC has only 45 schollies but allows need up to 63 plus they have redshirts and no AI. I noticed that SFU was loaded with redshirts. Two rule changes must be made sooner rather than later. Scrap the roster cap and permit at least a limited number of redshirts per year with perhaps a 4 yr cap of 20.Our Admission standards arent going to go down or our tuitions.
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Post by joe on Sept 1, 2019 16:42:20 GMT -5
[/quote]Vaas, a good hire? Puleeze![/quote]
I lived through that era and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize Vaas walked into a buzz saw at Holy Cross. In a lot of ways he didn’t do himself any favors, but he never really had a snowball’s chance in hell anyway. The elephant in the room back then was the switch from schollies to need-based aid which evened the playing field for HC football. People turned a deaf ear to this and still expected HC to beat up on its opponents like we did when we had schollies and no one else did. How would we do this? No one had an answer. Just let the coach figure it out. Now here we are in the same boat almost 30 years later still refusing to talk openly and put HC football into this context, still having the same BS politically correct conversations.
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Post by efg72 on Sept 1, 2019 17:02:05 GMT -5
Peter had a very bad deal. It wasn't until EBW dove in and took over that things changed.
There was real positive support for athletics on his part and I think it is more than fair to say Father JEB deferred to him for sports, except for an effort to join the established Big East. Imho he was most unhappy with JEB afterwards
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Post by cmo on Sept 1, 2019 21:02:23 GMT -5
The main problem is that many people think that the PL is good, maybe for minor sports but not for football and basketball. The type of athletes we need for football and basketball are not interested in the PL. Terrible for minor sports as well. Field hockey driving 6 hours to play at Bucknell on a Wednesday.
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Post by Crucis#1 on Sept 1, 2019 22:07:38 GMT -5
Driving 6 hours plus for conference play for Olympic sports is not unique to the Patriot League. Should not be used as an excuse, seriously. This is the current NCAA conference landscape. Unfortunately, regional conference within a relatively small geographic footprint ceased in the 20th Century.
Have you looked at the travel requirements for some of the other conferences? Big East from Providence or Storrs to play in Milwaukee, Chicago, Omaha, Cincinnati, etc. West Coast Conference from Portland OR to the Bay Area for Portland to play USF, Santa Clara, St. Mary’s or to Los Angeles to play LMU or Pepperdine and on to San Diego to play USD. Atlantic 10, for example, Amherst MA to St. Louis, MO, Richmond VA, Pittsburg, PA. Western Athletic Conference, For example, Seattle University to UT Rio Grande Valley or to Chicago State.
Conferences require extensive travel for their Olympic sports.
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Post by longsuffering on Sept 1, 2019 22:31:35 GMT -5
Peter had a very bad deal. It wasn't until EBW dove in and took over that things changed. There was real positive support for athletics on his part and I think it is more than fair to say Father JEB deferred to him for sports, except for an effort to join the established Big East. Imho he was most unhappy with JEB afterwards I remember Peter's first game against UMass. It went down to the wire. I kept thinking to myself it was a test between UMass scholarship players and HC non-scholarship players who had been recruited to play for the best FCS program around by the best Coach around. I thought if they could get by UMass they could keep the magic going. They lost at the end and the era was over. Maybe somebody remembers better. I am picturing Peter's first game as vs UMass at Fitton Field. Vaas was a qualified coach, but what an act to follow he had and the cupboard wasn't well stocked either. I do remember hearing some players weren't happy which is understandable.
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Post by timholycross on Sept 2, 2019 8:44:47 GMT -5
EBW died in 1988, Vaas was hired in 1992. Father Brooks was running the show w/o his wise counsel at that point, and he certainly wasn't listening to RP either. Vaas inherited, for one season, a veteran and talented defense and got a 6-5 year out of it. He wanted to emulate Notre Dames power option attack which burned a lot of Bridges with the fans and holdover players (the thought of the likes of Shawn Sierra and little Randy Trivers lining up at tailback in the old Power I makes me cringe to this day). Then he picked a freshman as QB whose knees couldn't hold up to college ball.
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Post by jkh67 on Sept 2, 2019 16:58:56 GMT -5
I don't see anything on the horizon that persuades me that PL football will improve substantially any time soon...if ever. It's become a "chicken or egg" sort of thing. The conference doesn't do well enough on the gridiron in terms of wins and losses, attendance at games, etc. to attract many quality players and coaches. The conference is awful because it can't attract enough quality players and coaches. The tendency toward a pronounced downward spiral is obvious. And judging by the abysmal OOC results in the last two seasons, as well as the start of this one, the PL is well into that downward spiral.
Three realistic options for HC in my view:
-- Upgrade to the CAA. That could be a difficult thing for a small college to do successfully. Also, it's not at all clear to me that the CAA would find us an attractive add at this point. Finally, and most importantly, I see absolutely no sign that HC has any interest in doing that.
-- Stay in the PL. We all know the downsides, but maybe all we can do is work as hard as we can to do the best that we can where we are and accept that that will be quite a bit less than what we would like to see. I think this is where the College administration is and that's the end of it as a practical matter.
-- Drop football. A sacrilegious thought, I know. But, if playing in the PL long-term is a prescription for mediocrity and there ain't anywhere else to go, realistically speaking, maybe spending $4 million per year on the program is not the best use of always limited funds. Especially, given that current students and alums from the last few decades don't seem to care very much about football...or basketball for that matter.
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Post by Xmassader on Sept 2, 2019 17:10:20 GMT -5
I may have posted this before but the day that HC announced Vaas’ hiring I told one of our current posters that we would know how he would fare based on his comments at the introductory press conference. I said that if he indicated that, despite a lack of familiarity with the run and shoot, it would be easier to teach 10-12 coaches a new system than 90-100 players a new system, he’d have some shot at success but if he said he was going to come in and run the Power-I or some other “munch and crunch” offense, he would struggle-perhaps mightily. All of you know what he said and, predictably, what happened—dissension in the ranks regarding the change in systems, 6-5 record on the heels of 11-0 and 60-5-1, three dismal seasons in ‘93-‘95 and his departure after the ‘95 season.
Basically his “mistaken” hire was a precursor to the FHCSK system change and dismal results on the hoops side.
Lesson: If you are following a very successful head coach, you change systems at your peril. You must win immediately with the new system (e.g. Huggins following Beilein at WV) or you will have difficulty getting the “buy-in” that you need, particularly with 3-4 classes of players who were recruited for and/or are familiar with the “old” system.
I heard that Vaas felt that he had been treated unfairly by HC with respect to his tenure and termination. I would suggest otherwise.
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Post by nycrusader2010 on Sept 2, 2019 18:09:59 GMT -5
Driving 6 hours plus for conference play for Olympic sports is not unique to the Patriot League. Should not be used as an excuse, seriously. This is the current NCAA conference landscape. Unfortunately, regional conference within a relatively small geographic footprint ceased in the 20th Century. Have you looked at the travel requirements for some of the other conferences? Big East from Providence or Storrs to play in Milwaukee, Chicago, Omaha, Cincinnati, etc. West Coast Conference from Portland OR to the Bay Area for Portland to play USF, Santa Clara, St. Mary’s or to Los Angeles to play LMU or Pepperdine and on to San Diego to play USD. Atlantic 10, for example, Amherst MA to St. Louis, MO, Richmond VA, Pittsburg, PA. Western Athletic Conference, For example, Seattle University to UT Rio Grande Valley or to Chicago State. Conferences require extensive travel for their Olympic sports. CAA - Boston, MA to Charleston, SC MAAC - Jersey Shore to Buffalo A-EAST - Orono to ANYWHERE (furthest Baltimore) NEC - Merrimack to Pittsburgh The list goes on. Division I athletics requires some travel. That's a fact. The PL isn't bad at all in that dept.
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