Archive For The “FCS” Category
For the last few years, “the commitee” and I have compiled the Patsy Ratings, an attempt to evaluate the incoming football classes of the Patriot League.
It’s clearly “for entertainment purposes only,” an effort to try to take a look at whether a schools’ recruiting needs are met, whether they’ve secured the playing services of a lot of recognized talent, and whether some of their measurables look good.
However, I frequently find myself wanting the Patsy Ratings to do more. For example, how did the Patriot League as a whole do in comparison to other FCS schools? Did the Mountain Hawks crush their FCS competition? Or was the actual picture different?
Without, say, an equivalent James Madison Football Nation willing to make these Patsy-like evaluations of the incoming classes of other FCS schools, there was no real good way to make that type of comparison.
However, my curiosity got the better of me. “There must be a way,” I thought, “to at least be able to see how the different schools stack up against other schools in different conferences, even if it’s not as good or as thorough as the Patsies.”
I found out that there was.
To many sportswriters who have followed English Premier League soccer in any capacity, the holy grail is promotion and relegation.
United States sports leagues, for a wide variety of reasons, do not allow its teams or franchises the ability to get “promoted” to the top flights of their professional leagues. That’s largely to protect the teams at the bottom, which can stink as much as they’d like, but will still share in the profits of the league.
In the EPL, however, the teams that finish in the bottom are “relegated” to the “Championship” division, and the teams that finish on top get “promoted” to the EPL.
Many sportswriters have tried, and failed, to devise a promotion/relegation system for a variety of pro sports. But I think where it could best work is in the worlds of FCS and FBS football.
Hear me out.
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Did you think you would get off easy on watching college football simply because it’s Lehigh’s bye week?First of all, it gives you time to catch up on watching ESPN’s College Football Gameday, where you can see the Lehigh flag that frequently makes an …
If you’re not able to catch the Bucknell game in person, you can stream the game here from the Patriot League Digital Network. It’s a 1:00 PM start and it’s the only available video broadcast of the game. The link is below:Patriot Lea…
It may not have seemed like much, a bit of news quietly released during the news dumping ground of Friday afternoon by ESPN Stats and Info.
“Upgrades sharpen ESPN’s college FPI model,” the release was titled, a piece which explained some changes that were being made to ESPN’s “Football Power Index”.
One of those changes involve how FCS wins and losses were represented in their model.
And it’s actually a bigger deal than you think.
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Like many Division I football programs, Lehigh started their preparations for the upcoming Patriot Football season last Thursday.
If you had to list the desires of the football team going into the preseason, chief among them is eradicating the memory of last season, whether it was the 3-8 record or especially the final game of last year.
But what I think really gets the Lehigh players going, and in fact what gets most players going at FCS schools, is that they get a shot at something truly special.
For Lehigh players, it means they can get a shot at taking down a nationally-ranked team, James Madison, in their own house, a shot at returning a Patriot League Championship trophy to Grace Hall, a shot at turning things around against Lafayette, and a shot at winning a national championship against the best schools of their subdivision.
It’s a time of optimism for all FCS schools, but it’s the shot that truly makes it special.
And if there’s one thing I fear more about the future of college football than anything else, it’s when schools remove opportunities to give schools a shot at something special.
When most people think of the University of Notre Dame, they generally think of three things, and not necessarily in this order: Catholicism, academics, and football.
Nobody questions the role that football has at Notre Dame. Football was what allowed the South Bend, Indiana school to grow from a growing Catholic university to a national, iconic institution.
But what allowed Notre Dame to become Notre Dame was a path that isn’t available to religious institutions today.
Much virtual ink has been spilled about the effects of collegiate realignment, how some conferences have been torn asunder, how some schools are stuck in places that don’t make sense, how other conferences are receiving piles of money that would make Scrooge McDuck envious.
But one of the biggest losers in this conference-driven realignment is the idea of independent football-playing schools, either loosely-tied or untied from the conference structure that drives the bus today.
When realignment articles come out today, floating schools like BYU or Liberty as potential conference-mates for schools like Texas or Old Dominion, they ignore the issue that they dare not speak publicly – mixing religion and football is not something they’re comfortable doing.
When you see this picture of Loyola University headgear, do you think football, or lacrosse?
If you’re a rabid college football fan, you’re forgiven if you think of this as a possible concept football helmet for a member of the Patriot League, Loyola (MD), though it’s actually a lacrosse helmet, of course.
This last week I started to take a look at the financial details of the schools of the Patriot League, and some of the other schools in the Northeast that sponsor FCS football.
Yet one nagging question kept reappearing in my mind.
Why am I looking around for Patriot League expansion candidates to aid in the League’s football conference when two of the best possible additions in the league for football are already full-sports members?
One had a decidedly modest football history that didn’t make that much of a dent on the college football consciousness. The other had a rich football history buried by a president that was an ideological zealot. Neither sponsor the sport today.
But both have the facilities, the money, and the conference to do it. You can make a very good case that they should be the eighth and ninth football-playing members of the League.
One of the best pieces of data reporting, in regards to NCAA athletics, comes from USA Today Sports and a group of lawyers and reporters.
It’s called the NCAA Athletics Spending database, which details the amount of revenue and spending that every public school makes on athletics. (By law, every public or partial-public school needs to disclose this information.)
It also computes the amount that each school receives in “subsidy”, which is a combination of institutional support (a direct payment from the school to the athletic department), student fees (fees included in tuition that end up going to the athletic department), and taxpayer money.
The full database is here, which is interesting in and of itself, but I wanted to break out the database to only include those schools with FCS football programs. That’s what I’ve done below.
I actually feel bad for the schools and athletes of the MEAC.
Last year, the players and coaches of the schools of the MEAC knew that they all had an equal chance to compete for a national championship, just like all the other schools in Division I Football Championship Subdivision, or FCS.
But with the announcement of the Celebration Bowl, a postseason bowl game which rips the MEAC’s champion away from the playoffs to face off against the winner of the SWAC, none of the talk anymore is about the athletes.
The talk on the internet around the bowl, financed and created, essentially, by ESPN, is how much money each host school could or could not bring home if they qualify for the game.
Rather than haggle over money, though, I think HBCU conferences are probably better served by doing something that probably has been needed to be done for decades – reorganizing.
The reason, oddly enough, is the bowl game.
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