Archive For The “FCS” Category
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| James Madison vs. Virigina Tech (HamptonRoads.com) |
This article from the Virginian Pilot-Online might have escaped your attention, but it could be something that has deep-ranging effects on collegiate athletics.
While the bill only affects schools in Virginia, if other state houses take up similar legislation across the country, it could deeply impact and potentially hurt smaller public universities across the country.
The article, written by Harry Minium, says it like this:
Old Dominion, Norfolk State and many other state schools will have to depend more on fundraising and ticket sales and less on student fees to fund their athletic budgets under a bill signed into law by Gov. Terry McAuliffe Sunday night.
McAuliffe signed HB 1897 without any amendments. The bill, sponsored by Del. Kirk Cox, R-Colonial Heights, sets limits on the percentage of athletic budgets that can be funded through student fees.
“I am very happy to see that Governor signed the bill,” said Cox, the House Majority Leader.
Cox said he introduced HB 1897 to try to slow the increase in student athletic fees, which he said has been one of the major drivers behind a 122 percent increase in tuition and fees since 2002.
At first glance, this bill might seem to have a worthy goal – an attempt to halt the reliance on certain public institutions on reliance on soaking students in order to fund their athletics departments. Look at the bill more closely, though, and you start to wonder if that was the intent of the legislation at all.
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Start getting used to the term “full cost of attendance”, or, as many who are obsessed about college sports are calling it, “FCOA”.
In January, the eighty schools of the “Power 5” FBS football conferences voted 79-1 to allow its members to offer additional money above the cost of a scholarship – up to the “full cost of attendance” of the school.
It’s been legislation that the “Power 5” schools have wanted to enact for years, surviving an embarrassing legislative loss when the rest of the NCAA’s membership voted in 2011 against the original proposal crafted by NCAA president Mark Emmert and many members of the Power 5 leadership.
It led to the Power 5 asking for autonomy over the rest of the NCAA’s membership to all them to enact their own legislation for themselves, without a vote by the rest of the membership.
Now, as the Power 5 wanted all along, FCOA is here.
Sadly, it’s still every bit as complicated – and unbalancing – as the many critics of FCOA feared. And at the FCS level, it seems like the strategy is to simply hope and pray that nobody decides to implement it for their own athletic departments.
When you think of FCS playoff success in the 2010s, you have to think of the most successful current program playing FCS football over the last four years: North Dakota State.
The Bison’s three national championships speak for themselves, and if you count their impressive playoff run in 2010 as well, their four-year record in the playoffs is as impressive as Youngstown State’s and Appalachian State’s runs in the last thirty years.
In 2011, the Lehigh football team saw the Thunder Dome (or, if you prefer, the FargoDome) up close, and saw what home advantage can do in the playoffs. The 24-0 win wasn’t the most impressive performance by the Bison ever in the postseason. However, the hallmarks of the North Dakota State home-field advantage, in the form of false starts and timeouts for the visiting team, were very evident in Lehigh’s gameplay that afternoon.
Today I’m taking a look at the process of determining seeds and bids to the FCS playoffs, and I found a system where a different schools have different expectations of the what the playoffs can offer.
You may remember the genius of Groucho Marx, the bespectacled Marx Brother with the grease-painted eyebrows and mustache. One of my all-time favorite films, Horse Feathers, featured Groucho, Harpo, and Chico on the football field (actually the Rose Bowl), representing their “school” in a particularly important game.
But it’s a particular quote of his that seems to summarize Division I football perfectly, at both the FCS and FBS levels.
“I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”
Division I has never truly been a large tent of equal schools. It was a division that counted as members Texas (whose athletic budget is as large as some small nations), Mississippi Valley State (whose entire athletics budget is about the size of what the University of Texas pays for socks for its athletes) and Marist (who doesn’t even spend any money on athletics scholarships for its football athletes).
But 2014 was a year of true soul-searching in athletics, where a whole lot of schools decided they didn’t want to belong to the Division I club that accepts them as members.
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At the halfway point of the FCS college football season, chances are you’re mad.
You’re mad that the human pollsters, who comprise the voters in the Sports Network or Coaches’ poll, don’t properly value your team, or your team’s opponents.
You’re mad that the folks who program the computers, who either underrate your favorite team or overrate something in another team that you, yourself, don’t value in your own rankings.
It’s just like the picture above: everyone sees the statistics and stories, and part of a football helmet, without really seeing the accurate picture.
It begs the question: is there really, honestly, a way to get an accurate picture of how to rank the Top 25 teams in the country?
Or will arguments on the relative worth of one football team vs. another always be a part of the fabric of college football, never to be settled – even after the end of the regular season?
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At the halfway point of the FCS college football season, chances are you’re mad.
You’re mad that the human pollsters, who comprise the voters in the Sports Network or Coaches’ poll, don’t properly value your team, or your team’s opponents.
You’re mad that the folks who program the computers, who either underrate your favorite team or overrate something in another team that you, yourself, don’t value in your own rankings.
It’s just like the picture above: everyone sees the statistics and stories, and part of a football helmet, without really seeing the accurate picture.
It begs the question: is there really, honestly, a way to get an accurate picture of how to rank the Top 25 teams in the country?
Or will arguments on the relative worth of one football team vs. another always be a part of the fabric of college football, never to be settled – even after the end of the regular season?
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As sports comebacks go, this one was pretty epic.
Down 5-1 in the bottom of the eighth inning, Boston OF David Ortiz jumped on the first pitch from Tigers P Joaquin Benoit, a pitch he put over the short right-field bullpen fence in Fenway Park.
OF Torii Hunter leaped, and the baseball appeared to bounce off his glove, but he went head-over-heels into the dugout without the ball in hand, and Big Papi had tied the game at “five”.
Like so many Lehigh football games this season, Boston came from behind, thanks to heady baserunning by OF Johnny Gomes, and ultimately won Game 2 of the ALCS 6-5.
It seemed apropos that this game would have that score, and be won in this way, because it seems like that game could also be a microcosm of this Lehigh football regular season, too.
Everywhere you look at this season thus far, things are coming up “fives” for Lehigh.
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It’s that time of the week where I share with you your weekly Lehigh fan viewing guide for Week 2 of the college football season. Why go to website after website when all the information you need is right here?
(Photo Credit: The Express-Times)
You don’t have to remind anyone connected with the Lehigh football program about the drama and subjectivity of the playoff selection process.
Last season, Lehigh went 10-1, their only loss coming to eventual Patriot League winners Colgate. Despite the ten wins, the FCS Championships committee decided to deny the Mountain Hawks a playoff spot, thus making them the only school from an autobid conference with 10 or more Division I wins to be snubbed since the playoffs were expanded.
Lehigh fans might, then, see some of the news that “blindsighted” some of the FCS athletics directors with some interest.
For the upcoming season, there will be a new ratings system used by the FCS Championships committee members in that smoke-filled room. The question is, though: will it prevent future snubs like the one Lehigh endured last season?
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Unless you’ve been living under a rock the last five years, you’ve probably heard about “realignment”, or, as I like to call it, “realignmentageddon”, in Division I athletics.
Led by Nebraska’s departure from the Big XII to the Big 10, the dominoes have tumbles all through Division I, directly affecting pretty much every conference’s membership with the exception of the Ivy League.
Central to “realignmentageddon” is football, whose value to television executives is broadly accepted as the reasons why, say, Rutgers and Maryland abandoned decades-long relationships with their old conferences in order to get larger chunks of TV money.
But why is it only individual schools? Why wouldn’t a conference which currently sponsors FCS football just decide, one day, to become an FBS conference?
The short answer is: the NCAA rulebook is written than way.
But the long answer is that the NCAA rulebook, essentially, forces the current FCS and FBS conferences to stay the way things are.
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