Needing a Fast Start

Jim Parady and the Marist Red Foxes return to Wien Stadium on Sept 15th

With exactly six months to go before the season opener against Marist, let’s talk 2012 schedule again... shall we?

Columbia starts the season with three crucial home games against Marist, Fordham and then Princeton.

I say “crucial” because those games look to be the most winnable of the season. If the Lions go 1-2 or 0-3 out of the gate even with home field advantage, then this could be a very long season.

I’ve noted in the past how well Pete Mangurian did at Cornell when it came to taking on “beatable” opponents at home, especially early in the season.

In fact his 1998 Big Red team, which was by far his weakest, burst out of the gate by winning four of its first six games, three of them at home.

The final four games saw Cornell go an inevitable 0-4, (including a resounding loss at Columbia), by an average of 12 points per game.

Mangurian will need to jump start his new Lion charges this year to make sure they get the most of those crucial first three weeks.

Incidentally, the Big Red were a combined 6-3 in the first three games of each of the three seasons he coached in Ithaca.

But what’s interesting about those nine games is that Cornell outscored their opponents by a total of just 14 points in those nine games… despite winning 2/3 of those games.

Mangurian’s teams had a great knack for winning close games, something Columbia hasn’t been able to do for decades now.

Columbia will welcome an about-face on that!

Think about it, when teams lose a lot of close games a lot of us tend to think those teams are just barely missing out on being winning or even championship squads.

But in a parity-driven league like the Ivies, you could argue that a team that chronically loses close games is really worse than the club that loses an occasional rout or two… or at least is more poorly coached than the teams that get routed.

Norries Wilson and Ray Tellier in particular had terrible records in games decided by a TD or less.  Tellier was 10 games under .500 in those games and Wilson’s winning pct. In those games was .277.

In short, these guys and their teams couldn’t come through in the clutch in the games where they had better than a fighting chance.

Back to the 2012 schedule…

After the Lions get that favorable start this fall, things get brutal.

Columbia has to go to Lehigh and to Penn in what will surely be the toughest two week stretch of the season.

The week six and seven home stand against Dartmouth and Yale provide the next best opportunities for wins. Going 0-2 here could be almost as devastating as going 0-3 in the first three weeks of the season.

The final three weeks of the year look like they’ll be a return to brutality.

The games are at Harvard, home against Cornell and then at Brown.

Any win in those last three games would be a good surprise.