Archive For The “Patsy Ratings” Category
The pie-eating contests were what I loved the best about the Worcester Patsy Parties.
Maybe it was the Purple People Eater moniker, the fact that they coincided with a particularly busy party weekend, it wasn’t abundantly clear, but they always made for a great shindig.
I remembered the undergrads, lined up, eating the blueberry pies one after another. It never ended well, but for some reason all the unsuspecting young people, waiting for the starting gun to go off, made me smile, as if they didn’t know what they were really getting into.
It wasn’t just about the pies: there was all sorts of great food and drink there: the blueberry crush cocktails, of which I had too many on multiple occasions, stood out.
Today, however, the only crush experienced in the offices were the ones of Holy Cross’ Patsy Rating spreadsheets hitting me in the head.
Frank Tavani always made sure the Patsies were celebrated in downtown Easton.
Perhaps it was the Bourger Field House needing an event to host in February when the men’s wrestling team was out of town, or that field hockey practice was finishing up – the shindigs that Bourger fielded back in those days were great.
All that steak, not overcooked, was barbecued outside, filling the Eastonian air with charred meats usually only present during Lafayette/Lehigh week. Many students would come up – giving up their vegan diets, maybe just this one time – to eat beautiful steak sandwiches, and to sip delicious Coke under huge cardboard cutouts of their beloved head coach.
Today, Lafayette has a new head football coach, and so far there’s no Coke billboards with head coach John Garrett on them. And there was no smell of steak as the Committee got the folder filled with the printouts of Lafayette’s Patsy Ratings class.
Where were you during the last Patsy Party at Lehigh?
It coincided with morning cocktails, I think – the actual memory is hazy, a gauzy film hanging over the proceedings like Vaseline over the eyelids.
It involved neon – a very large amount of neon, as Lehigh’s incoming class was announced in the morning, lights on Murray Goodman’s video scoreboard. (The neon light, I think, came from the generator trucked into the stadium to fuel the temporary lights and scoreboard, of course.)
The actual party I was actually able to recreate through my Flickr feed on my phone. Somewhere, there was a printout of several “LFN Drinks of the week” and a 1962 Freshman Dink dyed neon purple, probably because the undergrads at the time didn’t think Brown and White was an appropriate color for the party. And there was the blue curacao, of course, which made one of the concoctions that I don’t exactly remember.
Today, there is no blue curacao as the thin, typewritten letter with the “Lehigh” letterhead came to the Committee’s door. Somewhere, a microwave rang out as the steel-cut oatmeal reheated from yesterday was complete.
I remembered the time when I ate the linguine at Dominick’s.
It was back when the Yankees were good. Before we knew that Alex Rodriguez was Alex Rodriguez, and when Fordham blew away all comers to have one of the best classes of the year.
It wasn’t a party with a lot of music – just a huge, family style table with a bunch of Committee members and a really nice Chianti.
We thought we saw Jeter come in, though we weren’t certain. Maybe it was Kevin Eakin, we weren’t sure. But we were knee-deep in the pasta and four glasses in, so it was really all a sort-of blur. Jokes about the Jumbo Points we just earned kept everyone laughing.
The enjoyment of that meal seemed a bit far away after seeing Fordham’s report show up in a manila envelope marked “Fordham”. There seemed to be an effort to have the envelope be neat and crisp, at least.
I remembered the time when I ate the linguine at Dominick’s.
It was back when the Yankees were good. Before we knew that Alex Rodriguez was Alex Rodriguez, and when Fordham blew away all comers to have one of the best classes of the year.
It wasn’t a party with a lot of music – just a huge, family style table with a bunch of Committee members and a really nice Chianti.
We thought we saw Jeter come in, though we weren’t certain. Maybe it was Kevin Eakin, we weren’t sure. But we were knee-deep in the pasta and four glasses in, so it was really all a sort-of blur. Jokes about the Jumbo Points we just earned kept everyone laughing.
The enjoyment of that meal seemed a bit far away after seeing Fordham’s report show up in a manila envelope marked “Fordham”. There seemed to be an effort to have the envelope be neat and crisp, at least.
I remembered the Patsy Parties around Blues Alley.
The Hoyas, who have never won a Patriot League championship in football, have had more of an up-and-down record in the history of the Patsies. And during one of those wins, Blues Alley was the place to be.
Rounds of Seafood Gumbo for all, along with a huge platter of red beans and rice. Earth Wind and Fire – crashing Blues Alley during the Patsies – belting out “September” in front of a packed club. They were treasured memories for all.
And then there was today, when some paper-clipped printouts were slid under the door in the Committee’s offices. Earth, Wind and Fire never seemed so far away.
The smell of aged buffalo meat wafted through his imagination.
It was some prior incarnation of the Patsies, and it was Burger Day. Flown in from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, they were the best bison burger meat the Big Sky had to offer, along with bonus buffalo milk cheddar slices. The silky-tasting burgers, with the melted buffalo cheddar on fresh brioche, was a treasured memory. Even the grilled mushrooms on the top seemed opulent in some way.
He also remembered the Bison’s mascot, sitting down on the bench, awaiting the announcement of Bucknell’s recruiting classes, Bucknell students waiting with baited breath hearing each name.
(Or perhaps they were in Sojka Pavillion for Midnight Madness, or a midweek game versus Loyola. It’s all a bit hazy.)
Nonetheless, it was still jarring to see a folder with coffee cup rings on it, “BUCKNELL” written on it in Sharpie and some numbers crossed out on it. What happened? Where were the burgers?
I had grown accustomed to the fanfare around the Patsy ratings.
I remembered that year when the Committee had Pitbull perform right by the pool, announcing the winner of that year’s Patsies – the Colgate Red Raiders, he erroneously said (by then, they had rebranded to just “Raiders”. )
The Walking Dead-colored mascot clad in Maroon embraced Pitbull as the fireworks exploded all around the pool. The champagne flowed. Caviar was consumed. Shoe pastry was eaten. “Colgate, we were born to be free,” Pitbull ad-libbed.
What a difference compared to this year.
The Patsies came in a brown paper bag, thrown under the door of the Committee’s offices. Granted, the bag was thick – it appeared that they indeed did research, more so than the Pitbull years, it seems. But the fanfare was gone. All that was left were the numbers.
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In this post, I figured I’d create the complete definition of the Patsy Ratings, which are scheduled to be released any minute now.
What are the Patsy Ratings, you ask?
The Patsy Ratings are the methodology Lafayette superfan Carney once created in an attempt to determine who had the “best” incoming class.
“At the outset let me say that this is one big heap of crapola. If anyone thinks that he or she can rate 18 and 19 year old high school football players or declare one group of these kids superior to another is delusional. This, however, is an attempt to do just that, so what does it say about me? Many of you will take issue with the methodology or will rail against the outcome because you “know” that [fill in the name of your favorite school] had its best recruiting year ever. I invite you to post your criticism. Even more, I invite you to give us something better. It’s easy to say “you’re wrong.” It is much more difficult to find a better way and actually create the results.”
It was Carney that first got the mysterious Committee together, to agree on the common system that is the Patsy Ratings. In my reading of it, the Committee came up with this rules in an old, walnut wood-adorned conference room. You could smell the cigar smoke as you take the original rules out of the desk in the corner.
The paper is very difficult to read, with many sentences crossed out and redacted with black ink. Scrawls saying “Scout? Yes” and “Long snapper doesn’t count” and “Schollies!!!!” appear, sometimes with little star stickers on the parts that were particularly contentious.
Deciphering these scrolls of (some might say) wisdom resulted in this definition below of what the Patsy Ratings are. The best part of this system is that it is reproducible – though there are a few subjective pieces, most of the Rating can be recalculated at home.
Read more »
The Committee member popped the DVD in the player once again. “The Top 25 Moments in Murray Goodman history.”
“What’cha doin’?”, another Committee member said.
“In a way, I hate this time of year,” she said. “With the Patsy Ratings done, all we have left to get us through the offseason are all these videos. Sure, there’s spring football, of course, but fall always feels so far away in March.”
“Is that a VHS copy of Colgate beating Florida Atlantic in 2003? Didn’t Howard Schnellenberger order that all surviving copies of that game be destroyed?”
“That was a heck of a find,” she said. “Apparently they were cleaning up some house in Ithaca and the kids were going to throw out an old shopping bag filled with videos. Incredibly, they found it, along with rare footage of Cornell playing a competitive game with Colgate.”
“Do we have any Yuenglings in the fridge?”
“Sure. Pull up a chair. The 1991 Holy Cross/Lehigh showdown is on.”
