Archive For The “Marty Scarano” Category
It is very, very easy to “respect” New Hampshire’s football program.
Sure, they have earned “respect” nationally for their incredible, sustained success on the field.
They’re known as the original FBS killers, making it a habit of knocking off teams like Rutgers and Northwestern well before Appalachian State famously knocked off Michigan, James Madison upended Virginia Tech, or, most recently, North Dakota State took it to Kansas State.
They’re also known perennially as a team in the FCS Top 25, inhabiting the rankings in some way for an incredible 130 weeks. In 2004, behind a third-string quarterback, QB Ricky Santos and his Wildcats beat Rutgers 35-24 and have been nationally-ranked ever since.
FBS nightmares, all those Top 25 appearances, and nine consecutive playoff appearances to go along with that give UNH mad “respect” with the wider FCS community, and also make for a thrilling opponent when they come to to town.
But they also have earned “respect” in another way, too. They’ve done so by building their success the right way, not compromising academics for all their athletic success.
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This summer, the Shades of 48 William & Mary Blog posted a series on the history of the moves of the CAA in the spring and summer of 2012.
In those great pieces, it was possible to come up with a timeline, which I attempted to do to some degree, to detail the shifting sands around the CAA, Big East, America East, NEC, and Patriot League.
One important element to this timeline, it now can be told, involved New Hampshire and the Patriot League.
Somewhere after April, 2012, when the CAA was on their way to losing Old Dominion to Conference USA and VCU and George Mason to the Atlantic 10, members of the Patriot League got on the phone to certain CAA schools to remind them that there was an open invitation to a certain academically-focused conference with headquarters in the Lehigh Valley should the need arise.
One of those schools was William and Mary. The other was New Hampshire.
And both schools took the invitation very seriously.
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