Monday, July 14, 2014

If You Can't Make it There...



If there’s one thing that makes me and most Lions fans angry, it’s seeing local top football recruits go to other Ivy League schools.

This year’s poster boy for that issue is Joe Percival, an incoming linebacker for Princeton who excelled in many ways for St. Anthony’s on Long Island.

Rubbing salt in that wound is the fact that NOT ONE of Columbia’s incoming freshmen is from the greater NYC area, (we do have two players coming in from the South Jersey Shore area, but that’s much closer to Philadelphia and not even in the NYC media market).

Of course, none of us will really care about geographic origination if the players turn out to be great. But we keep seeing top players who have actually proven their worth as winners come out of the NYC area and excel for other teams.

And this happens over and over again.

The best example lately is Caraun Reid, also from Princeton, who was picked in the NFL draft earlier this year. Reid was a monster defensive lineman from the Bronx -- literally 10 minutes from Baker Field – and we lost him.

Here’s a breakdown of how many NYC area players are in each Ivy team’s class of 2018:


Princeton: 7

Penn: 5

Dartmouth: 2

Yale: 2  

Brown: 1

Harvard: 1

Columbia: 0

Cornell: 0

I guess we can understand schools like Princeton and Penn doing well with NYC-area recruits since they’re very close to New York City. But CU was also beaten out this year by Dartmouth, Brown, and Harvard.

That’s an embarrassment any way you cut it.

And notice that the only other team with no NYC-area freshmen is Cornell, our usual friend at the bottom of the Ivy standings. 

Meanwhile, our successful baseball coaching staff doesn’t have this problem. Two of our 9 incoming players are from the NYC area, or more than 1/5 of this year’s haul. And looking at the overall roster including these new freshmen, you see our baseball team has a total of eight NYC-players including Ivy Rookie of Year Will Savage and team power hitting leader Rob Paller.

Failure to recruit good players, or any players at all, from the NYC area is a big red flag for Columbia sports teams. And that’s especially true for football, which has the luxury of bringing in 30+ players per year.


And for those of you who are still wondering when I’ll stop piling on this failed football coaching regime at Columbia, the answer is simple: I’ll ease up once they stop failing. 

The Brawl

HOWEVER, I will reserve one word of praise for Head Coach Pete Mangurian as a part of another general critique of the program below.

Many of you have heard of a bar brawl late in the spring semester that led to the suspension of a number of Columbia players from the University and their removal from the team. 

Because this is such a personal matter, I will comment only generally about this incident based on the reports I've seen and heard about it.

First, it doesn't not look like more than one CU player was really an aggressor in this fight but sadly more than that one player has been punished. 

Second, the fight mostly took place outside the bar in question. But underage players were inside the bar before that. 

Third, this incident is just another example of how the "Pete Mangurian may not be winning, but he's a tough disciplinarian" myth is just that, a myth. This team is unprepared on the field and not so in control off of it either, and it's clear the players aren't buying into Mangurian or acting loyally to him. 

Now, here's the good part: to his credit, Mangurian DID fight like Hell for the players who were punished by the University. He did get some good results for some of them and I do expect some of them back on the team in 2015. At least Mangurian's very public desire to reduce the roster did not translate into him abandoning his players in this instance.

Of course, this is the same guy who trashed the upperclassmen coming into last season. This is the same guy who didn't allow all the players to dress for home games either until we made a stink about it. 

So when it comes to showing his players the proper loyalty, Mangurian's accounts are still in the red.

And I think that's why we still have players committing more and more stupid acts like cheating, brawling, and vulgar Tweeting than ever before. They don't believe in this guy or the program.

And neither do the fans when this kind of failure is allowed to remain in place. 



14 comments:

Big Dawg said...

Schools typically try to assert geographical "ownership". Greg Schiano did that when he came to Rutgers and aggressively went after NJ talent. NJ should also be one of our top states as well, regardless of Princeton.

However, our recruiters need to understand how to "sell". On typical comps, Princeton can kill us, so our people need training in how to accentuate our superiorities. It's called Sales 101. Clearly we haven't been doing that very well.

RE: team discipline. That all starts with the desire to stay on the team and/or the fear of being removed from the team. Also a sense of appropriateness and location. From all the terrible incidents I have learned about over the past couple of years, it doesn't seem any of the aforementioned exists in sufficient strength.

These guys aren't bozos. How could they be that dumb? I mean brawling, twitter and all the rest. It does not compute. It tells me that there is an extreme level of frustration and apathy pervading much of the team.

I welcome any other thoughts aside from mine as to reasons for this behavior.

Jake said...

The sales pitch is simple vs. Princeton and Penn: just show them a map and remind them that they can get jobs and internships in NYC and still get back to class and campus in minutes.

Anonymous said...

Long Island has been under-recruited for years in football. It is surprising since there is a fairly high level of competition there. It's not just Ivies missing out in that regard.

Bar fights, bad judgement are nothing new. Reading the players the riot act won't do any good. Kids have to learn the hard way.

Twitter and FaceBook and the entire of social media generation are responsible for exposing the stupidity of society as a whole. If it was around earlier then we would know what kind of foul mouth people like Joe DiMaggio and Sid Luckman had too.

#1 Lion said...

The individuals are to blame, not social media. In fact, they should be even more aware of these types of things after what has happened to the program over the past two years. Hopefully, others have learned from these mistakes and we can all move forward.

Chick said...

#1 Lion--Thanks for a big laugh when you wrote we'll be
0-10, or 0-12 if we scrimmage ourselves. I laughed so hard my wife asked what was so funny so I read it to her and she laughed too. Reminded me of a reception for accepted College students we attended many years ago, hosted by an alum who was a top-flight comedy writer and tv producer (not Jake). He gave the kids a little pep talk, ending with, "Remember, any one of you here now can someday go where no Columbian has ever gone before.
Into the end zone!" It brought down the house. Some things never change.

Mr. Gelegenheit! said...

The book mentioned in the New Yorker -- "Vanity of Dulouz" -- has some good stuff about CU football that, oddly, is not referenced in the article. In the book Kerouac describes getting angry at "Coach Lou Libble" for insisting that Kerouac keep running the KF-79 play in practice. Kerouac says the KF-79 was a reverse play that Libble had used to win the big game against Army a few years earlier, and Libble had become obsessed with it. Kerouac gets disgusted with all of it and quits the team.

Also, regarding Sid Luckman, when I was a hs coach in Chicago I had a funny interaction him. For some reason he was having a one-on-one coaching session with the Bears qb Jack Concannon in the park. Sid wanted to use some of my players to catch Concannon's passes.

He ran up to me, introduced himself, and was tremendously aggressive about wanting to use the players. I would have liked to talk with him about Columbia etc but I was too startled by how he was acting -- kind of like WC Fields on speed. I managed to say that if he was still there when we finished the practice the kids could certainly do what he wanted. So that's what happened. But he was driving everybody crazy. The players couldn't keep from laughing. Subsequently Concannon almost went to prison for drugs and then passed away at a young age. I hope that day didn't hasten his demise. I wish I could do it over again. I don't know what Sid would have done if I'd managed to tell him I went to Columbia. He might have exploded.
Mitch S 68CC

alawicius said...

The KF-79 was used to win the Rose Bowl against Standford in 1934, thirteen years before the big Army win in 1947. Something not right here...

alawicius said...

The KF-79 was used to win the Rose Bowl against Standford in 1934, thirteen years before the big Army win in 1947. Something not right here...

oldlion said...

Regarding off campus incidents: there is IMHO a correlation between living in fraternity houses as opposed to dorms when it comes to antisocial conduct. Now we have all football frat houses, as opposed to the more heterogenous frat houses of my day. The longer you can keep guys in dorms, and the more heterogenous the houses the better. I would limit frat house living to seniors, and I would make the dorms attractive enough to encourage players to want to live there rather than in the houses until they are seniors. One of the benefits of an Ivy education is to meet and socialize with other students of different backgrounds and interests. That is how you break down barriers.

Jake said...

It should be noted that some of our best players over the last 40 years were not members of frats. Des Werthman comes to mind. I think fraternities are fine, but it is true that they're better when lots of different kinds of guys join.

Mr. Gelegenheit! said...

It must been Stanford not Army that Kerouac wrote about re KF-79. Kerouac was in class of 48 with Ginsberg, who did not play football.
Mitch S 68CC

Jake said...

I think Kerouac was deliberately mixing up the history to "fictionalize" the story. Lame early attempt on his part not unlike the lazy "novel" Joe Klein wrote about Clinton, "Primary Colors."

Big Dawg said...

True, it's a fictional account, so dates etc are out the window. Jack entered school prior to WW2, so he was indeed referencing the Stanford play. Poetic license.

I agree with oldlion re heterogeneity in fraternities. While I lived in a "jock house", we still had a number of non-jocks as well, who served to leaven the profile. Also, only a portion of our bros were FB; other sports like BB, etc. were represented.

I believe a scenario where the vast portion of members are FB can certainly create an inward-looking, artificial sense of values. Even so, these are still smart young men who should understand the ramifications of their actions.

Jake said...

The old house system used by Harvard is also worth trying to bring to Columbia in earnest. Harvard has killed much of what the house system stood for, which was allowing students in a big college to CHOOSE a smaller residential experience and to live with other students who were likely to have the same academic and personal interests. This is what happens anyway in dorm choice or off campus living projects, so it's really just improving on the natural instincts. In the old days, Eliot House at HU housed the government/lawyer types, Adams House was for the artistic types, Kirkland House for the sports guys, Dunster the science people, etc.