Pro Style

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Two New Commits!

The recruiting news picked up finally with two new commits going public late yesterday.

First up was 6-1, 230 pound LB  Jacob "Jake" Ardron from Pomona's Diamond Ranch HS.

Here's his highlight video:

 


Jake is the first documented Diamond Ranch player to come to Columbia for football.

And you can never have too many Jakes!

Next up is 5-10, 185 pound RB/LB Cameron Molina.

Higlight video below:

Molina is a student at Tuscarora HS in VIRGINIA, not the Tuscarora HS in Maryland where our excellent former OL Ian Quirk '11 went.

That makes Molina the first ever Virginia-Tuscarora HS player to come to the Columbia football.

Welcome gentlemen!

This brings our list of known incoming freshmen to eight:

1. Jacob Ardron LB 6-1, 230 lbs. Diamond Ranch HS, Pomona, CA
2.Chris Cicilioni G/DE 6-2, 225 lbs. Valley View HS, Scranton, PA
3. Andrew Dobitsch, WR 5-11 180 lbs. Northern Valley HS Tappan, NJ
4. Michael Gerst, RB 5-10 190 lbs. Bergen Catholic, Bergen County, NJ
5. Cameron Molina, RB/LB 5-10, 185 lbs. Tuscarora HS, Leesburg, VA
6.. Daren Napier DT 6-4 275 lbs. St. John's HS Houston, TX
7. Logan Scott QB 6-2 180 lbs. Chaminade HS West Hills, CA
8. Austin Stock, C 6-3 270 lbs. Solon HS Solon, OH



No Second Keefe

There was one other bit of recruiting news... or to be more precise, non-recruting news.

Sophomore WR John Keefe's younger brother Max Keefe is not coming to Columbia this fall.

But he's not going to Princeton either.

ESPN.com is reporting that 6-2 safety Max Keefe has committed to Miami of Ohio.




Ford Tough

Another younger sibling of a curent Lion is making news. Junior Wells Childress' younger brother Ford Childress is already on campus at West Virginia University where he hopes to play QB.

Ford's improvement during the course of his senior year has a lot of Texas-area schools regretting they did not recruit him sooner.

But as a dropback passer, the question is how Childress will fit into to their mobile QB system.

Maybe Childress will surprise those Texas boys one more time and consider a transfer to the Ivy League to play with his brother????

Pro-Style Program from Mangurian

At the beginning of this month, I wrote about how Head Coach Pete Mangurian was already reminding longtime Columbia athletics employees of former Head Coach Jim Garrett.

Intensity is one characteristic that runs strong for both men, and that came through loud and clear on day one.
But now, another similarity between Mangurian and Garrett is coming through: devotion to the NFL way of doing things.

Mangurian is already emphasizing that he not only wants to run an NFL-style offense, but he wants to run an NFL-style program from top to bottom.

He wants a professional committment to excellence from the players, the assistant coaches, the support staff, everyone.

There's even talk of getting the players access to the Jets', Giants', and Patriots' training facilities in the offseason.

Garrett's plan was to create an NFL-like program here in 1985, but things were derailed mostly because the team's talent level was just not strong enough to deal with that pressure and Garrett himself was
not mentally prepared to deal with the disappointments he was bound to face in his first season.

Mangurian has a lot of advantages over Garrett in this regard.

For one thing, he's hired a staff with a lot of NFL experience that won't have to personally adapt to this philosophy AND teach the players to do it at the same time.

Coordinators Ben McDaniels and Kevin Lempa should be up to that task... especially Lempa.

The only assistant Garrett brought along with NFL experience was former L.A. Ram and Cleveland Brown safety Rod Perry who had only been a player, never a coach, before coming to Columbia.

The other key factor is that the 2012 Columbia Lions are a lot more talented than the '85 squad overall. I think if the 1985 Lions took on the 2012 team the final score would be 20-3 with the 3 coming from our buddy Larry Walsh '86, who at placekicker may have been the best player on the team!

Mangurian also has his years as a head coach at Cornell to remind him that things don't always work the right way in the Ivies. That should help.

Right now, the powers that be at Columbia are liking what they see.

And as long as Magurian avoids postgame news conference meltdowns that make national news, he'll get a decent honeymoon period.

Adams' Bad Review

Speaking of pro-style, soon-to-graduate three-time All Ivy Jeff Adams is getting a bad review
so far as he works out for the pro scouts before this Saturday's East-West Shrine Game.

Let's hope he turns it around in time.


Bollinger Gets it Wrong... Again!

All this talk of standards and professionalism and Columbia football stands in stark contrast to a
new editorial Columbia President Lee Bollinger wrote for the Washington Post.

Bollinger is predicting dire consequences if the Supreme Court even dares to hear a case brought by a white woman who says she was discriminated against by the Affirmative Action policy at the University of Texas.

Here are the key quotes from the piece that show just how clueless this man is:

“There have been few moments in our history when the nation so badly
needed institutions to unify the country, overcome divisiveness, and
dispel the unfounded 'jealousies and prejudices' that our first
president warned against. As George Washington wrote to Alexander
Hamilton, bringing together the youth 'from different parts of the
United States' at a university would allow young people to learn there
was no basis for 'jealousies and prejudices which one part of the
union had imbibed against another part."

In other words, "Colleges can solve all our problems."

Spoken like a true life-long academic.

"The places in U.S. society where people of different backgrounds have
a meaningful opportunity to learn about each other are far too rare."

Have you been to a Target lately?!? No, of course you haven't. You probably wouldn't be caught dead anywhere other than Burberry's. Also, you wouldn't want to admit that people come together much more often in the capitalist marketplace than they do in the ivory tower.

"Dismantling an educational system that for decades has valued contact
among students with different sensibilities and replacing it with one
that does not would be regrettable on many fronts."

Contact among students is okay, but God forbid they should ever come in contact with a politically conservative professor. Luckily for Bollinger, there aren't any.

College professors and administrators like Bollinger refuse to accept that universities are meant to be training and intellectual academies... NOT social engineering facilities. But admitting that fact is hard for people who have lived their entire lives in academia and thus see the world from that lens forevermore.

I regularly thank God that my tenured professor father spent 23 years working in the real world before he became a full-time academic.

Believe me, it makes a difference.

The fact that cloistered people like Bollinger and former Columbia provost Jonathan Cole are the ones who set the general policies for Ivy League sports is really a travesty.

Maybe they should take a lesson from Coach Mangurian's emphasis on creating and running a professional program with professional standards.

Sadly, too many Ivy students these days seem to think they deserve that "participation  trophy" just for getting into a school like Columbia.

In the real world, like in sports, there are always winners and losers and you don't get credit for just showing up.