Texas Tech coach Mike Leach probably could use some advice from Eric Taylor right about now.
The crack Friday Night Lights staff would be hard-pressed to dream up such a predicament.
The facts are not all out about the case between Leach and a Texas Tech inside receiver named Adam James. The story has legs since James' daddy, Craig James, works for ESPN and if ESPN wants something to be a story, it will stay in the news (how was it that James Sr. was initially assigned to commentate a bowl game involving his son's team before all this blew up?).
The stunning part, from a Canadian point of view, is how much say some NCAA coaches have in the treatment of injured players (right or wrong). Talk about a liability nightmare. You would think that would be trusted to health professionals, the doctors and athletic therapists. Coaches should not stick their finger in the potential malpractice pie.
Coming of age in a Canadian border town, and being a fan for all seasons, nurtured a deep and abiding reverence for U.S. college football's old Eastern powerhouses.
These days, it takes the form of:
Being a Michigan and Syracuse sympathizer, which should not be confused for "supporter."
Never passing up a chance to make sport of that team with gold helmets in South Bend, Indiana.
Wondering how long Penn State will have to wait to join the 21st century. Joe Paterno just might coach until he's 130 years old.
In the spirit of that, the past 24 hours would have to rate as particularly outstanding. There's a story in The New York Times that the Notre Dame Fighting Irish want to play a game against Army at the new Yankee Stadium, just like they did in the days when wide receivers were called "offensive ends" and those offensive ends were usually all white guys. Far be it to point out appealing to nostalgia can sometimes be the worst kind of cynicism, since the past is a place where, hey-hey, things cannot get any worse after going 10-15 the past two seasons under Charlie Weis.
You can respect what happened in the past and realize it was past. It's odd and off-putting to want to harken back to a thankfully bygone era that predates good things in college football, like integration, the two-platoon system and New York City being less important to the grand scheme of things than places Sinatra never sung about, like Lubbock, Texas and and Gainesville, Florida.
One impulse is to let the blue-and-gold babies have their bottle. Notre Dame wanting to play Army at the Yankees' monument to malfeasance isn't about honouring the Four Horsemen or Johnny Lujack.
Notre Dame is simply trying to ensure it never has to play more thanfour games a season (out of 12) in an opposing team's stadium. Their tentative schedule through 2014 is loaded with neutral site games:
vs. Washington State in San Antonio this season;
vs. Army at Chicago;
vs. Navy in Dublin, Ireland;
vs. Arizona State at Arlington, Texas;
A modest suggestion is Notre Dame should schedule a game against Turner Gill's Buffalo Bulls at Rogers Centre in Toronto. Of course, they'd probably lose.
"Great news! The most obnoxiously self-indulgent team in college football wants to join forces with the most obnoxiously self-indulgent team in baseball. Yes, folks: Notre Dame wants to play football in shiny new Yankee Stadium.
"The guy goes on to yammer incontinently about the "great historical significance" of a mediocre college football program playing tackle football in a brand new, boondoggling slot machine of a ballpark — excuse me, stadium. I'll grant him that such an event would be "historically significant," but only to the extent that it would very likely create a vast sucking vortex of televised insufferability such as the world has never known. At least, not since the last time Michael Kay called a baseball game.
Meantime, as for Syracuse, The Times' college football countdown has ranked Kinger's new favourite team No. 103 in the country. That's kind of bad for a school which has had so many great football players that Marvin Harrison isn't even included in the old grey lady's top five (Harrison is the fourth-leading receiver in NFL history).
There is the residual hope that comes with a coaching change. The new head football coach, Doug Marrone, was successful in the NFL with the New Orleans Saints and he played for the 'Cuse. At the same time, when someone is saying a home game against the University of Maine (a lower-division team) is a must-win, there's a long way to go.
Granted, there is some appeal to becoming an Orange fan for sports other than basketball just for the jokes, but what would that make me?*
There's a great scene in North Dallas Forty (well, there really isn't a bad scene in it) where Phil Elliott says apologetically, "I learned all my social graces from football coaches."
Things have changed, but Jeff Pearlman had an amusing post about a Division III coach in the NCAA who vowed to bar the student paper from talking to his players. He recanted within the course of a day, but the point was, he still went on his power trip, and Pearlman got off on a pretty good rant.
"So this morning I read about Lance Leipold, the head football coach at the University of Wisconsin—Whitewater, who has banned the student media from covering his team next season. Leipold was angry about an editorial in the college newspaper that accused three football players of acting arrogantly. (College football players … arrogance … noooooooo!)
"I' ve had myriad chats with my wife about why I never, ever want my kids to play organized football. It has nothing to do with injury/bodily harm, and everything — absolutely everything – to do with men like Leipold. Put simply, I hate football coaches. Not all of them obviously. In fact, not most of them. But there’s a certain breed that, well, just irks the hell out of me. They bark out inanities like, 'Real men eat steel!' and 'Be the ball!'; call their teams 'programs'; think sensitivity is for wimps. They lack any sort of world view, seeing only the green grass (or turf) that covers 100 yards of glory."
It is not unheard of and you can see where a coach is coming from: He's sticking up for his guys, pure and simple. Still, he's a university employee and his team represents the university, so he can't stiff the campus paper.
This is as good a time as any to advance a personal theory that the football coach stereotype Pearlman was touching on seems less prevalent in Canada. There are yellers and screamers, the same as there are with any team in any sport, but it's a little different in Canada. The personality type up here, seems tilted more toward someone who's a teacher, patient and stern, trying to help guys learn a very complex game. Who knows why, maybe it's because coaches in Canada don't take mass participation for granted, so they have to be sensitive while working with who they do have. Meantime, the stereotypical coach down in the States can't understand why the kids are down at the skatepark instead of putting on the pads, like a man.
Texas Tech's Mike Leach is obviously crazy for thinking NFL coaches should be expected to do some coaching:
"Leach, who scoffs at the system quarterback label, just about blew a gasket when I asked about the concern regarding Harrell's ability to work from under center and drop back to pass.
" 'You bring up easily the most pitiful NFL cop-out of all!' he hollered. 'And you can send that message to the whole NFL. Any coach who has ever said or uttered those words or considers that a concern, here's my message for them: How could you possibly look yourself in the mirror and consider yourself an NFL coach and not be able to teach a guy to run back three steps, five steps and seven steps? I can teach a child that!
" 'Any coach in the NFL who can't do that ought to be fired!' "
Leach adds that he would charge $10,000 to teach a quarterback how to do a proper three-, five- or seven-step drop, but he'll settle for 50 bucks.
Hmmm. It's almost life Leach is a little chapped that the NFL isn't busting down the maverick coach's door.
There's an under-the-radar quality to Brander Craighead, subject of a feature on tomorrow's Ottawa Sun Schools sports page.
The media hysteria over national signing day in NCAA football, the first Wednesday in February, is not completely lost on Canadians. There are football families up here, and the Craighead clan, of Barrhaven just south of Ottawa, got to experience it yesterday when Brander, an offensive tackle, signed his letter of intent with the University of Texas-El Paso, becoming a member of the Miners' recruiting class. (Mike Price, UTEP's coach, apparently said in his prepared remarks that Craighead was "quite a character.")
As if to add to the under-the-radar quality, Craighead's name was not among a list of Canadian signees listed at Posted Sports. In fairness, that is probably due to the fact he spent this fall at a prep school, Fork Union (Va.) Military Academy, where as his mom, Pam, put it during a conversation last week, they "stripped him down and made him into a football machine ... six, eight, nine hours a day, whatever it took.."
Fork Union's program is not for the callow or weak-willed, but Craighead and another O-lineman from Ontario, centre Henry Lorenzen from Waterford soldiered through this season after going down to Fork Union on the recommendationg of Peter Zonta, who runs the Canadian Scouting Combines training program in Hamilton. Fork Union is a total military school, the whole nine yards: Reveille at 6 a.m., being confined to barracks at night, not being able to leave on weekends, no iPods, no cell phones, limited e-mail and telephone access. The 6-foot-6, 260-lb. Craighead, when we chatted, said he didn't even know what movies were playing in the theatres these days, that's how isolated it is -- but paid off for him.
It has also paid off for Henry Lorenzen, who (small world) played in in the Haldimand-Norfolk High School Football League, during the timeframe when yours truly was the sports editor of the Simcoe Reformer. He apparently has interest from see really good academic schools such as Buffalo, Colgate and Cornell.
Point being, a story such as Craighead's brings home a sense of what Canadian footballers have to do to narrow the gap in development between high school players up here and those in the U.S. Among the big college sports, it's tough for a Canadian to get a scholarship to a FBS (formerly Division I-A) school, relative to baseball, basketball, fastpitch and soccer players. The U.S. kids are completely on another level in terms of getting their names out there, with no small amount of thanks to a very well-developed media culture.
(It's changing in Canada, but very slowly. That being said, Rollins and Radoslav will no doubt appreciate seeing a highlight reel of Julius Jones-Carter, a running back recruited by their beloved Laurier Golden Hawks; that's Laurier safety Courtney Stephen handing the ball off in some of those clips).
Even if you can get noticed, coaches might say, "How good can he be? He's Canadian." It's another sport, but if you ever get a chance, ask Steve Nash what it was like for him. He should have been in the Pac-10 at Arizona or UCLA, rather than at Santa Clara before the days when "mid-major" entered college basketball fans' lexicon.
Anyway, it was cool to try to give Brander Craighead and his parents, Steve and Pam, some attention for their son's achievement. He is actually the third offensive tackle from Ottawa who's heading to a Conference USA program, along with Tyler Holmes at Tulsa and Scott Mitchell at Rice.
(By the way, it's noteworthy that Rice, which requires its football players be real students, signed two Canucks yesterday, safety Tolu Akinwumi from Brampton and D-lineman Hosam Shahin from B.C.; the Owls might become a favourite NCAA team yet).
Getting back to Brander Craighead, and hopefully the point of this post, it is a kick as a sports journalist to write about someone whose story is relatively untold. Craighead actually came to attention quite by accident, when the lacrosse coach at Mother Teresa High School mentioned offhandedly last spring that one of his players was headed down to Virginia to play football. The little hamster started running on its wheel that Fork Union might be the destination, and that led to having a fun feature to write eight months later. Who knows where this leads; when a team announces it recruiting class, it's hoping half the players pan out. Craighead's dug deep to get this far, so wish him well.
The Phoenix Coyotes are probably OK. Look at it this way: The NHL and Commissioner Chip Diller are used to dealing with teams that are flat broke. This is old hat.
The New York Jets' Shaun Ellis should not have been fined for throwing a snowball at fans last weekend. They threw at him first, plus, if he had any kind of arm, the Jets would have made him the quarterback by now.
The charges against two Michigan State football players stemming from a fight with hockey players are ridiculous. People should be glad to see that football players from Michigan can actually beat somebody.
(Editor's note: You made a joke about a felony assault charge. Stay classy, Sagert.)
Two days later, The Daily Norseman can speak for this Minnesota Vikings fan, except for the part about Disney: "Yes, after two or three showers and a seemingly endless series of Disney movies, I feel that I've finally cleansed myself of the fact that I wasted three hours of my life last night hoping that a team completely devoid of talent, coaching, heart, guts, or pride could give us a hand by knocking off the Chicago Bears."
More great headlines that cannot be written: "Destruction, on the eve of." (Demolition on the Ottawa Congress Centre has begun.)
This post is worth nothing, but this is worth noting
Take a moment today to think of the family and friends of Brennan Jarrett, the 19-year-old University of Saskatchewan basketball guard who died yesterday, 13 months after being diagnosed with cancer. There's a post up over at The CIS Blog.
The Huskies are slated to play the Ottawa Gee-Gees on Sunday at the Wesmen Classic in Winnipeg.
Loose Pucks is noted that the Mississauga-St. Michael's Majors got sniper Kaspar Daugavins back from the AHL, while the Niagara IceDogs owners want to keep all-everything D-man Alex Pietrangelo. These are the teams the Kingston Frontenacs are supposedly trying to catch in the OHL playoff race.
Last but not least, some wise words from Muhummad Ali's biographer, Thomas Hauser:
"One hundred years ago (on December 26, 1908), Jack Johnson won the heavyweight championship of the world by knocking out Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia. Papa Jacks victory led to a “crisis” in boxing and controversy that was never fully resolved.
"Times change. Now the United States has an African-American president-elect."
That is from a pretty good column on Smokin' Joe Frazier, if anyone is interested.
Attendance is down 5,000 per game for the first five NCAA football bowl games, this year compared to last.
Circle the Texas Bowl on Dec. 30, since Manotick's Scott Mitchell is starting at left tackle for the Rice Owls vs. Western Michigan. The game will be on the NFL Network.
Also save the date for GMAC Bowl on Jan. 6, with Ottawa's Tyler Holmes starting for Tulsa against Ball State, which is being ballyhooed as an "offensive classic."
There's actually a chance that Mitchell could end up blocking for theSam McGuffie during his senior season in 2010. McGuffie is a YouTube superstar who's apparently transferring, likely to a school in Texas.
Small world, eh
HOOPS
Ravens: Carleton will face Acadia in a rematch of last season's national semi-final at the Jan. 2-4 Rod Shoveller tourney in Halifax.
Acadia, of course, is a far cry from the team that ended Carleton's five-year title run in March. Les Berry is out as coach, shutdown post defender Achuil Lual graduated and they also lost Paolo Santana and Andrew Kraus, among others. One also wonders what's up with Ottawa native Leo Saintil, who's played in only two AUS games.
The schedule is set up in home of having a Carleton-St. Francis Xavier or Carleton-Saint Mary's championship game. Carleton vs. St. FX would be a good one. The X-Men have a great backcourt with Tyler Richards and Christian Upshaw, who would keep Carleton's Mike Kenny, Rob Saunders and Stu Turnbull very busy.
Aaron Doornekamp would also be sharing the paint with the explosive Islam Luiz de Toledo. A game in January ultimately doesn't decide anything, but if this matchup comes off, it will be one that gets recalled around Final 8 time.
Try not to get too excited: It will be the Buffalo Bulls (8-5) vs. the Connecticut Huskies (7-5) in the International Bowl at Rogers Centre on Jan. 3.
Buffalo coach Turner Gill not only played in the CFL with the old Montreal Concordes in the '80s, but a lot of people in Central New York see him a possible saviour of Syracuse Orange football. There's something. Does that whet the appetite or what? There's is theorizing that getting an extra two weeks of practice to prepare for a game on Jan. 3 that really should be on Dec. 20 will pay off for the teams next season (it didn't hurt Ball State, up until last Friday; it didn't help Rutgers much, going by their record).
So, come on, International Bowl fever. What else are you doing on January 3?
This season's BCS mess, who's going to win the Heisman Trophy doesn't hold much sway up here in Canada. Most of you lot are better off not getting such into the byzantine minutaie of who should be playing in the Big 12 championship game.
Here's one way to bring it home: As a boy, Oklahoma Sooners quarterback Sam Bradford, who's likely to win the Heisman, really wanted to play for the Vancouver Canucks. The Tulsa World did a feature on Bradford before last season where his mom related he was "adamant" that the family move to Canada and that he got up every morning to "see how the Vancouver Canucks had done."
If that was the case, Bradford would have been 10, 11 years old when the Canucks were doing through their, uh, tranquil period in the late '90s when Mark Messier was floating along on reputation as their captain. Obviously, being from Oklahoma, and having had a daddy and granddaddy who had each played on some legendary Sooners teams, dictated what sport Bradford was going to choose (although Tulsa tried to recruit him for its basketball team).
Point being, if you're nose-up-against-the-class as a college sports enthusiast who lives in Canada, try to move past the rhetoric, past the BCS rankings and the stats. Sam Bradford was a hockey player. Fans of other teams might not have considered this, but let's see how Florida's Tim Tebow and Texas QB Colt McCoy do on skates. The bottom line is he played hockey, which ipso facto means Oklahoma deserves to be playing in the Big 12 championship game tonight, not the Texas Longhorns, and that Bradford should get the Heisman.
(No, not in that way -- the actual Heisman. For the record, the expression "getting the Heisman" to describe being rebuffed, with extreme prejudice, by someone you had been sweet on for some time was brought into the personal lexicon by the great Peter Peart back in the day -- and reinforced subsequently through much bitter experience. Ah, life'll kill ya.)
This means Rogers will struggle to sell out the stadium for a another football game involving a Buffalo team with a fair-to-middling record.
The NFL Bills are 6-6 coming into Sunday's game vs. the Miami Dolphins. The Bulls, with ex-CFL QBs Turner Gill(pictured) and Danny Barrett as head coach and quarterbacks coach, respectively are 7-5, going in as heavy underdogs vs. Ball State in tonight's Mid-American Conference championship game. (Ball State is 12-0 and has an all-everything quarterback named Nate Davis, for anyone who hasn't watched proud alumnus David Letterman any time in the past few weeks, or read Jason Whitlock's epic takedown of the BCS and ESPN.)
This is going to come off shenanigans from a second guesser. Buffalo was on the shortlist of potential NCAA football teams for OOLF to clasp to its bosom (about that, seriously, Sager, join a gym). It was one hell of a post, but it just never progressed past the conceptual stage to the get-off-your-lazy-ass-and-write it stage. Part of the problem was the content had to wag the lede dog a bit. The first line was something like, "If this were written like a Lavalife ad, it would say, 'must be able to read Proust and a Tampa Two defence.' "
(To quote an older colleague: "Oh, you still don't think you're going to marry someone smarter than you, do you?")
It had got to the point where it seemed odd to have followed a brand of football for 20 years, getting caught up in the internecine hatred between rival teams, who's-No. 1 debates, Heisman hype, and BCS boondoggles without cheering for a specific team, or ever attending a game. Talk about geek love. But how could you have any moral high ground for razzing Notre Dame fans when you don't even have a team?
Plus, some big-time U.S. sportswriters -- Bill Simmons, Joe Posnanski -- during the past couple years have put out the call to readers to help them pick a soccer team to support. Poz, bless him, said for him it was about wanting to "feel international."
With all apologies to those better, more popular writers, how about actually being international? Supporting the Manchester I-Don't-Give-A-Craps or the London Not-A-Real-Sports does not make one any more worldly -- fact.
Clamouring to have a favourite college football team seemed a perfect protest of the weak. Everyone else wants feel international? I'll be parochial. This is the sporting analogue of Stewie Griffin hearing a banjo and exclaiming, "Mommy, I want a mullet."
Of course, this could never be as simple as picking one of the old-money powerhouses, or even an arriviste team such as Texas Tech. You can't pick a school such as Alabama or Southern California, not with what's known about the serfs of the turf.
A favourite college football team would have to represent a school with a modicum of academic integrity. That condition knocks off the whole Southeastern Conference except Vanderbilt. It would have to be a team which can compete for a championship of some kind on a regular basis. So much for Vanderbilt.
On and on it went over this season, following the "brain" schools every week to see how they fared. Northwestern is 9-3, but they're out for being in the Big Ten, which has ceased to be big or ten.
The same goes for the Minnesota Golden Gophers, who are in their first season with a new coaching staff, also held appeal (especially since the Vikings might end up being their co-tenants yet). Minnesota's coach, Tim Brewster, is also a big proponent of helping create opportunities for African-American coaches; he has more black assistant coaches than any other team in the country. Minnesota could also be struck for playing in a border state -- if Syracuse, Washington and Washington State's woes have taught us nothing, it's that the population demographics in the U.S. augur poorly for major-college teams in northern states.
The search went far and wide, even dipping down to the Football Championship Subdivision. How about Villanova, or Montana? A couple of Conference USA schools, Rice and Tulsa, which have Ottawa natives Tyler Holmes and Scott Mitchell as their starting left tackles, have also been on the radar screen. They both play wide-open football, are academically prestigious, but C-USA teams very rarely have their games beamed into Canada, which would make it tough, sorry, fellas.
Anyway, Buffalo had a lot of desirable qualities. As a MAC school, they'll never get anywhere near a BCS game. If this season's Ball State team can't, who can? That doesn't mean they're not worthy. Elliott Smith didn't need to have his songs on the Billboard Top 20, right?
The Bulls seemed like an appealing underdog team. Until last season, they had averaged about two wins a season since joining the NCAA's top division in 1999. As noted, their coach, Gill, used to play in the CFL. They even had a QB with two first names in senior Drew Willy.
Besides, if Toronto interests, or any interests, are going to steal Buffalo's NFL team, one should adopt the Bulls in solidarity with Western New York football fans. It's only right.
Anyway, to sum up, that post never got written, but all you are probably better off. Buffalo is also going to the International Bowl, and one wouldn't want to do it disservice by not promoting the hell out of it.
(Yours truly is spoken for in NCAA hoops but it was noted that the UB basketball team only lost by four against the No. 2 UConn Huskies last night. Carleton beat Buffalo by 10 back in August, by the way.)
On Saturday, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish lost to a bad, bad Syracuse team which has already fired its coach, Greg Robinson.
So what movie was playing on the Canadian version of The History Channel today? Rudy. Apparently, historically minded types are in fear our generation might might forget Notre Dame once had a good football team.
(This line actually came to mind in the office yesterday, when Charlie Weis' Golden Domers' were up by six over the Orange early in the fourth quarter and there was an Irish fan in the office. Then a sober second thought kicked in -- "nah, it'll never happen!")
Author Michael Lewis (he wrote this thing called Moneyball — ever heard of it?) was early getting on the Mike Leach/Texas Tech bandwagon, and he shared some thoughts on the coach whose team, honestly, has been the most fun to watch in college football since Reggie Bush was at USC:
"Mike Leach is sitting there almost like a birdwatcher, waiting for something to happen so he can think about what that means. And the players, they feel like they’ve walked into the funhouse. They come out of high school and all of a sudden then find themselves on 4th and 16 in their own territory and the coach is sending in a play. It liberates the players.
"... if he had gone to say, U.S.C., 10 years ago and installed his system there, it would be comical. He would score every time - and he would have a defense by default because he would get great athletes.
Just wait until the A-11 offence starts taking the NCAA by storm in about 10 years.
Duante Culpepper has told reporters, "As a result of doing some research on different places to play, the Detroit Lions seemed to be the best fit for me." The Lions need to do some research on different places to play -- they can't win at home or on the road.
Do you have a family member who is 275-300 lbs., physically strong and very quick in the 20-yard shuttle run? Good, he might have to play defensive line for the Vikings. (Pray it doesn't come to that.)
It is actually part of a guide to being a NHL fan in a sluggish economy.
Become an entrepreneur: Haven’t the 50/50 folks monopolized the gambling racket at GM Place for long enough? If anybody would like to start a 60/40, or even a 55/45, you have our business.
Be warned, however, that those volunteers in red shirts are very protective of their territory. Best to bring some muscle along, lest you find yourself in a sticky situation. One hired goon for every two red guys should suffice. (Actually, go with three for five. Better odds.)
ShysterBall calls the idea of a neutral-site World Series "acutely retarded."
The preceding is worth nothing, but this is worth noting
Texas Longhorns quarterback Colt McCoy said that Texas Tech "did a great job of holding our receivers more than five yards downfield," after the Red Raiders' upset Saturday. Deadline-pressured reporters didn't have time to develop such an angle. (Sports On My Mind)
Does anyone follow the World Junior A Challenge? Canada West lost to Belarus last night.
One day we'll have a Canada which can have a collegiate football spectacle one-10th of the scale of Texas Tech's last-second win over No. 1 Texas on Saturday.
How would that ever happen? For starters, conference alignments and playoff formats that emphasize that every Saturday matters a hell of a lot better than the OUA, and by extension, Canadian Interuniversity Sport. It's the best against the best down there every week, produce or perish. There is no coming back from losing four games.
That is not meant to diminish the Ottawa Gee-Gees' win over the previously unbeaten Queen's Golden Gaels on Saturday. Ottawa can say it was the better team all along after its 23-13 win. Hey, it might speak well for our system that teams have more leeway if they go through an injury bug or had some close losses. To forgive is divine, eh?
Down south of the border, Texas Tech will not go back next Saturday and face a team it can beat 71-0, 71-3 or 80-0 (that is more for the first two weeks of September). The Red Raiders have No. 9 Oklahoma State, same bat time, same bat channel, since it's the national Saturday night game on ABC. They face No. 4 Oklahoma on the road the following week.
Granted, it's easier in the U.S. to line up top teams every week. They have 120 teams instead of 27, bigger budgets and don't have to pay usurious Air Canada surcharges. However, the past two years in the OUA, where three of the four teams who have earned byes have bit the dust in the semi-final, is either an anomaly or a catalyst for change.
Perhaps with a different setup would spark a different attitude about an Ottawa-Queen's playoff matchup (just look back at 2006). When one team is 8-0 and another is 4-4, there is a certain expectation for how it's going to go, even as a long-time fan. This is probably the geek lashing out, but whatever. It's not that the OUA rewards mediocrity, but it does excuse it to an unforgivably large extent.
The way it is becoming in the OUA, it's almost like you have to drop a couple games and have that feeling of no tomorrow, balls thisclose to the bandsaw, just to counter-balance the effect of cupcake opponents. I kick myself for being too stubborn to bend to this before now, but am more willing than even to accept that the regular season does not matter in the OUA.
That's fine for the teams who win. More power to them. It is completely wrongheaded when it comes to growing the game. How do you build season-long sustained interest in Canadian university football when everyone suspects the first eight weeks do not matter that much? Of course, here I am, obviously the biggest pathetic four-eyed geek who ever lived, posting about Canadian university football every week.
Competitively speaking, the bye week which can rob a team of momentum has been a mighty leveller over the past two seasons. Western got by Saturday vs. Laurier, but even the Mustangs had trouble finishing some drives.
The other part of the problem is the second tier of the OUA. As several cisfootball.org commenters have pointed out, Queen's might have been more prepared if they had interlocking games against the likes of Concordia, Saint Mary's or Sherbrooke instead of walkovers against the you-know-whos.
The result suggests the Gee-Gees, much like Western last season, had a more well-honed ability to play desperate. It's OK that Queen's lost. Life goes on. What is not OK is going through a full regular season and having no certainty how it might shake out when the team batting 1.000 faces the one hitting .500. People want to believe; some of us want to know.
The OUA, at a conference level, should do some self-examination after back-to-back years when the No. 1 seed lost in its first post-season game. Is the bye really a good idea? Look into interlocking games, look at the competitive balance of the league.
Or it could rest on the laurels of Laurier's 2005 Vanier Cup. That ought to be good until well into the next decade, barring what the Ottawa-Western winner does against Saint Mary's in the national semi-final Nov. 15.
The idea of interlocking games should be explored. Next season, have the six playoff teams play the five good Quebec teams and Saint Mary's. The four also-rans can play McGill and the other three Atlantic teams.
The second suggestion is a realignment, already suggested this summer at The CIS Blog. There could be a Big East drawn from the schools which really value football. Concordia, Laval, Montreal and Sherbrooke come to mind; Saint Mary's from down East; Queen's, Ottawa, Laurier and Western from Ontario. There would not be that big a cost increase, and teams would probably draw more fans and more advertisers.
The other schools would have their own division. They, like Davidson or Valparaiso in the NCAA basketball tournament, would still have an outside shot at a national championship. It would be for the schools such as Mount Allison or Toronto, who still retain a bit of the 1970s view that football is just a student activity. They could have their own schedule, their own championship, be akin to the Patriot League in the NCAA. Perhaps there could be a promotion-relegation system akin to professional soccer, just to keep it interesting. This might encourage other universities to form teams, if they knew they didn't have play Laval right off the hop.
Play an eight-game regular season. Have each conference's top two teams play off in a championship game akin to those in major NCAA conferences. Then have a selection committee pick an eight-team national championship.
Imagine the interest you would have two weeks ago for a Saint Mary's-Western game in Week 8, both teams 5-2 and the winner likely to get a bid for the national playoffs. That sounds a lot better than matchup of two 3-4 OUA teams playing for the final OUA playoff berth, which is what The Score aired Oct. 18. (After all that, McMaster got shut out the following week.)
Ottawa-Western in the Yates Cup will draw a decent TV audience, but why settle for that?
Every team across the country would be better off in that situation. Solid programs such as Ottawa and Western would not take a mulligan on half their season -- they would rise to the level of competition. I believe they would -- it all comes back to motivation.
Texas Tech's rise is an example of having to meet a tougher standard. It was a non-entity in the old Southwest Conference, which by the mid-1980s had ceased to be competitive nationally (for proof, check out the highlights of Miami's infamous 1991 Cotton Bowl shellacking of the aforementioned Texas Longhorns). When that league broke up in the '90s, Texas Tech joined the Big 12, and once it got Mike Leach as coach, it became a powerhouse. As for its former foes which ended up in smaller conferences, none of them will ever get close to playing in a major BCS bowl game.
It all comes back to the notion of produce or perish. In Queen's case, it has now gone 6-2 or better four times in the past seven seasons, but reached the Yates Cup only once. It is almost to the point where taking Bishop's place as a plucky underdog in the cutthroat Quebec conference would be welcomed. Sure, for any school that's not Laval, that league can be a hellhole, but like Spinal Tap sang, you know where you stand in a hellhole.
It's better not to get into why, as a sports nut, Serious Issues seem less important than picayune little things. "Hey, the loonie just fell below 78 cents US." ... "Yes, but did you see that Jim McMahon's old college has never put him in their sports hall of fame, even though -- as his 72-year-old father points out in an open letter to the school's athletic director -- he is in the College Football Hall of Fame, set 57 NCAA records and was an all-America twice?"
Who outside of the great state of Utah* knew that Jim McMahon wasn't in Brigham Young University's sports hall of fame, until 30 minutes ago? Who knew BYU had a sports hall of fame? Don't answer those. There is a grave injustice to be corrected.
McMahon Sr. claims is that his son, a non-Mormon, ruffled some feathers during his time in Provo, Utah -- hard to imagine, considering what your image probably is of the punky QB. Toward the end of his run, the school made a rule that you had to have completed a degree to be in the BYU Hall -- and right after the punky QB's last college game, he was suspended from school and finished nine credits short of graduation. Other players who did not graduate -- it's major-college football -- have surely been inducted. It's major college football. There would be no Halls of Fame if graduation was a requirement.
It might seem like a "who cares?" sort of thing. It does mean that if you ever saw a clip from the 1980 Holiday Bowl on YouTube, though, you have been contributing to the Big Lie.
Think about that! (Using Coldplay to score a dramatic Hail Mary touchdown pass? The crazy thing is it works.)
Other one-liners:
More headlines that cannot be written: "Charles Dubin — dead at 87, forever associated with '88."
Shaun Alexander is back in the NFL for a reason -- so Deion Sanderscould call him the "Tiptoe Burglar." It just sounds worse than it is.
Again, on some level, Tampa Bay Rays fans do come of like turnip truckers in that whole story about obnoxious Phillies fans. Of course no one should throw food at a nine-year-old. That's just stupid. What else did you expect, though?
This post is worth nothing ... this is worth noting:
The latest in the David Frost trial, not for the faint of heart.
Be ready to see Marvin Harrisonpossibly leaving the Indianapolis Colts.
A Tyler Holmes update: The Ottawa native's Tulsa Golden Hurricane are 8-0 after a 30-point win over Central Florida that was broadcast on ESPN. The Tulsa World has video -- you can see No. 78 at left tackle pop up in a couple clips, including one at the 3:15 mark where he springs the Tulsa QB, David Johnson, for a huge gain.
At the rate he's going, Chad Ocho Cinco won't have a jersey to put his new name on.
A feeble-minded attempt at headline-writing for The Onion: "Congress seeks bailout for sports blogs in wake of Matt Millen resignation."
One possiblity: The Washington Nationals.
Have the Chicago White Sox, whose AL Central lead is down to a half-game, asked the Twins to join them in suspending their season?
(Ex-Lions coach Steve Mariucciwent to town on Millen.)
There was no advertising signage on the boards during the Leafs' game at Pittsburgh last night. For once, the Leafs' play wasn't the only reason the game looked like something out of the early 1980s.
The Claude Lemieuxcomeback story might make sense. He didn't finish off Kris Draper.
Does anyone the CBC erred by using the word "deafening" Hockey Anthem Challenge? (Picture Norm Macdonald on the late '90s SNL: "Note to self: Go deaf.")
Joking about the former Nebraska Cornhuskers running back Thunder Collinsbeing arrested for murder are out today.
It's just too sad a story -- Nebraska football, that is.
It's about time someone called out collegiate sports for its excesses.
Not, not the NCAA -- Canadian university sports. Our excesses are those of restraint, modesty, derring-don't and something-for-everyone syndrome.
Since many Canadians keep a handy-dandy mental list of all the horror stories associated with major-college basketball and football in the States that is to be used whenever someone suggests we could or should be more like the NCAA, it's only fair that we should come under the kind of scrutiny, which has come courtesy of B.C. writer Alan Watson.
"The exodus of Canadian athletes south of the border has long annoyed B.C. writer Alan Watson. In his new book, A-Plus in Disconnect: How Canadian Universities Dropped the Ball, Watson tackles some tough questions:
"Why do Canadian athletes often fail to perform at a high level on the world stage? Why is university sport in Canada so little regarded by spectators? Why do our best young athletes head to the U.S.?
" 'The biggest thing we are lacking is scholarships throughout our university system,' Watson said in an interview. 'There is no depth in the system.' "
Watson's self-published tome about "this freak of Canadian nature" (which you can buy here), presuming it's isn't a book-length diatribe, attempts to force some long-standing issues about the CIS on to the frontburner. (Please don't take that as a dig at self-publishing. If Watson failed to find a publisher, even a university press, perhaps that goes to show how little the ivory-tower folk value having a sophisticated dialogue about sports, a topic something people actually care about.)
The article about Watson's book alone draws out a number of our prejudices. You've been there. Someone will argue, or express a wish that Canadian university sports should be more like the NCAA down in the U.S. -- more professional in outlook, more intense rivalries, more media coverage.
The rebuttal almost always evoke those Big-Time College Sports Horror Stories. Someone will launch into the whole litany of American excesses -- the basketball team with the 0% graduation rate, the "the corrupt grassroots basketball system that typically dices up far more players than it benefits" (Yahoo! Sports, Dec. 6, 2007), the head football coach who makes $2 million a year while his players can't accept someone paying for their meal at Applebee's, schools covering up criminal behaviour, current NFL quarterback Matt Leinart having a course schedule consisting entirely of ballroom dancing during his final semester at USC, and so on and so on. (Then there's all those Dec. 27 bowl games between teams with 6-6 and 7-5 records. That's the worst.)
At the same time, Our excesses go unchecked. Offering little for the best and brightest -- unless they're a male hockey player, then they only have to move 500 miles from home at age 16 -- should not be seen as perfectly normal in this country. It's unacceptable that anyone of a rational mind doesn't even raise an eyebrow when a basketball prodigy such as Toronto's Tristan Thompson has to attend high school in the U.S. to use his gifts, while his peers in hockey such as John Tavares and John McFarland get to stay much closer to home and become household names at age 16.The mere likelihood that only a degenerate hoops nut living in Southern Ontario has even heard of Tristan Thompson, even though he stands to be a future NBA multi-millionaire, kind of makes the argument.
The response is to Watson is fraught with an all-too-Canadian anxiety about abandoning the middle ground. We want the big shiny things but, but, but while keeping it in perspective. Of course, if you agree with Watson, you're also ignoring the fact that almost everywhere outside of the U.S. and Canada, professional sports teams pay to raise their future stars instead of co-opting the education system.
(Update: You'd also be ignoring that in many parts of the U.S., educators are having enough trouble keeping high school sports alive.)
One response is to try and have a few Canadian schools join the NCAA for select program. Let UBC and Simon Fraser be in the Pac-10 for baseball, softball and swimming. A women's hockey team playing out of Calgary (where the national team is based) would probably win the NCAA title inside of five years. There's enough top-end basketball talent in the GTA that a team based at a Toronto university could be competitive in the Big East or Big Ten. (Of course, there's the whole issue of whether athletes getting federal funding would be considered pros by the NCAA. This is the same regal body which lets a baseball bonus baby play football, but considers a kid getting a $60 weekly stipend in the OHL a professional.)
A better tomorrow, for this CIS nut, would mean that a basketball team which is used to playing in front of 500 fans on a Saturday night would play in front of 2,000. A football team could count on getting the same crowd each week that it only gets at Homecoming (and in Queen's case, students wouldn't leave at halftime). The CIS website wouldn't be down for an entire weekend, as is the case at this writing. There would be more fans keeping blogs about their teams and more year-round media coverage like the kind Greg Layson in Guelph and Howard Tsumura in Vancouver, among others, offer their readers.
It's moving like molasses in January, but there are stories here and there about a promising high school student-athlete who's getting her/his education paid for in Canada instead of farther away at a NCAA Division 1 school. The day when someone such as Devoe Joseph chooses to go to the University of Toronto instead of the University of Minnesota is not happening, not in my lifetime.
There are other reasons for our sucktacular Olympic performances beyond Canadian schools having been slow to offer scholarships. Douglas Coupland's line about how, "Aliens assessing the national diet would note that, from a biological standpoint, it is imperative that citizens live on concentrated forms of sugar, carbohydrate, fat and salt," might have something to do with why Canada was shut out in the pool four years ago at the Athens Summer Olympics, for instance.
Watson should get credit for attacking our Canadian mindset, this whole belief that sports is foreign to our culture, head-on. His remedy, ironically enough, is to "have Canadians pay a small tax that would go towards providing full athletic scholarships." It's not likely to happen. In Ontario, spending on university education has remained flat for more than 25 years, even though enrolment has doubled. (Even the author admits the hope of that happening is slim and none, and slim has stepped out for a smoke.)
No one should be closed-minded to thinking we could change. Our university sports are light-years removed from the bizarro world of the NCAA, for good or ill. The CIS has its charms, but it's ignorant to lose sight of what this might be doing to our best and brightest.
Competing for the stupid and ugly award, in case one is ever created ... Brett Favre to the J-E-T-S Jets Jets Jets? Far be it to suggest someone from Mississippi would be impressed by the fans' ability to spell the team name.
People still drive directly to a sports event in Toronto? Apparently the turnip truck wasn't taking passengers.
More great headlines that can never be written: "Six synonyms for carpetbaggers" would have worked perfectly for the story about Oklahoma City patenting possible names for Seattle's NBA team.
Deadspin had a post yesterday about a football offence that doesn't require any offensive linemen. It's lot like how the Tampa Bay Lightning are planning to play this season without any defencemen. (Mike Smith, the gentleman goalie from Verona, is in for a long year.)
(Seriously, though, this offence is intriguing ... of course, remember when Texas Tech coach Mike Leach, one of college football's big X-and-Os gurus, was profiled in the New York Times by none other than Michael Lewis ... you made a point to clear some time to watch Texas Tech play in the Cotton Bowl on New Year's Day -- and they scored 10 flippin' points.)
The blogosphere has erupted since news broke that NFL draftee Caleb Campbell was being recalled to a position within the US Army rather than pursuing his dream of playing in the NFL, which he was told he could do. The talk has exploded and rightly so! Now this is neither the time nor place to comment on the way the US Army's treatment of its troops in the past in terms of recalls, but it is a place to discuss the negative PR that will result from this situation. And it's also a place to make mention of the ordeal this young and promising athlete was put through by the organization he served loyally for the past few years.
Deadspin wrote an article that reveals Campbell was completely unaware of what was transpiring:
I spoke to Campbell last night, after all this went down. He had spent the past week at West Point, and says the Army's decision “left me in the complete dark. No one said a thing to me on campus last week about anything changing. Nothing.”
It is great to see though that despite the outrageous misstep on the part of the Army here, Campbell has played his cards right through this whole situation. Stating that, “I’m a soldier first and foremost and I go where they order me to go", it's clear this is a young man who does not deserve the kind of treatment he's going through right now.
On the Dan PatrickShow this morning it was reported Campbell said these orders came from further up the chain of command than West Point, more like Capitol Hill, that they had apparently changed the 2005 policy which allowed soliders "with unique talents and abilities" to choose a different route, in exchange to recruit in the process. However what I'm still lost and trying to figure out is why Campbell is then not reporting back to serve as a troop on the battlefield, but rather assuming the role of graduate assistant with the Army football team or the West Point Prep School team...really?? According to Campbell anyhow this is the case, however as (unfortunately) proven recently, Campbell is not necessarily given the full details of what he will be doing at any given time by the Army.
If this comes down to a staffing issue I feel that the matter grows into something larger than it already is. Athletes have been allowed to function under this policy in the past, to play professional sports while recruiting for the Army, and generally that's the best PR the Service could ever receive! For the sake of U.S. Army Lt. Col. Jonathan P. Liba anyways I hope that Campbell is wrong in his understanding, as the Colonel reportedly wrote how Caleb was ordered to return for "full-time traditional military duties." I'm pretty sure there's many capable graduate assistants out there the Army could pursue, but hey maybe that's just me. One blog makes some great insight into the whole situation and sums it up quite nicely:
Two baseball players and a hockey player went pro under the policy before Campbell did. Perhaps no one noticed, so there wasn’t a controversy, so there wasn’t a reason to examine the policy and revise it. I suppose they now will have to give up their pro sports careers, too. It’s only fair.
Or unfair.
The U.S. Army looks bad after this one, and really there's no reason they shouldn't either!
Notes on our athletes/teams of interest from The 613. Football: Both the Athlon Sports and The Sporting News college football annuals are projecting Scott Mitchell, of Manotick, to start at left tackle on the Rice Owls offensive line.
Mitchell led St. Mark to those back-to-back OFSAA Bowl Series titles in 2005 and '06, when they quite likely were the best high school team in Ontario. The odd part is that TSN lists him at 270 lbs., absurdly small for an offensive lineman in Division 1 (even at a Conference USA school), but the Houston Chronicle's Moisekapenda Bower has a more recent update:
Expect to see a visible difference with the interior linemen on both sides of the football. Left tackle Scott Mitchell, the original Capt. Canuck, weighed 247 lbs when the Owls played Tulsa last November, down from the 270 he weighed when he arrived late last summer. Now, he's pushing 300, so expect him to be a beast come August.
The Sporting News also includes Rice going to a bowl game among their Fearless Forecasts for Conference USA. Maybe so, maybe not, but it sounds like it's looking up for Mitchell. Rice runs a spread offence and has a running quarterback, so that gives him a good grounding if he ever tries the CFL.
It's probably not in the plans to give regular Rice football updates, but they did sign a rush end from Vieux Montreal, Arnaud Gascon-Nadon, bringing their Canadian content up to four players. One of them is Luke Willson, afirst baseman/tight end who's on Canada's roster for the World Junior Baseball Championship later this month.
The way it works at Rice is they often recruit someone for football just to get him on their top-ranked baseball team. Remember the name: Luke Willson. It shouldn't be hard, there's already another one, albeit with a different spelling.
Gee-Gees: One of the winningest high school coaches in Ottawa over the past 20 years, Andy Sparks, is taking over the Ottawa Gee-Gees women's basketball team.
Sparks guided the Ashbury Colts to successive OFSAA gold medals the past two seasons. The program is a real fixer-upper after the turmoil from last season, when four players left the team right at the outset of the conference schedule, which led to the team spiralling downward into a 3-19 record in the OUA (all three wins over schools from a certain Eastern Ontario city). Scaling to the top of the OUA East isn't exactly like tackling Everest, but York and Toronto have a bit of a recruiting edge, what with being closer to home for many of the players from the 519/905 belt west of Toronto (Hamilton, London, Brantford).
Taffe Charles raised the bar at Carleton in his first season with the Ravens women, so perhaps Sparks can respond with the Gee-Gees. It's preferable to have the Carleton-Ottawa rivalry reflected in having two highly competitive teams, just like in men's basketball, hockey and women's soccer.
Incidentally, will the Montpetit Hall P.A. announcer say, "All the way from Sparks Street!" after Gee-Gees player swishes an exceptionally long three-pointer? That joke was terrible.
Here's one for the too-funny-by-half files: The Buffalo Bulls are 
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