Wednesday, March 16, 2016

A Tale of Two Cities?



Reading Craig Haley's review of each Ivy team's prospects going into spring practice, kind of gives me a Rashomon Effect as his assessment of Columbia's current situation seems a lot less positive than Head Coach Al Bagnoli's video preview released last month.

The thing is, neither Bagnoli nor Haley says anything factually incorrect. But you get a much more optimistic view from Bagnoli than you do from Haley. There is no denying that Columbia has a decent offensive line with all but one of the starters returning for this fall. Having more than three returning O-line starters is very rare even in the Ivies. And the linebacking corps is 100% back for 2016, which is rare too... especially for a crew of LB's as talented as Columbia's was in 2015.

Haley also seems to put too much emphasis on the loss of Cameron Molina. Now, I am the first guy to say I really wish he were not graduating. But if you look at the two games the Lions won, Molina wasn't really a huge factor. Now getting our QB's back and all our receivers back and healthy and getting that O-line back and hopefully better with Charlie Flores returning from injury... that's a bigger deal in my book. And that says nothing of what a full year of Bagnoli and his staff can do to improve the program.

Haley has nothing factually wrong in his brief overview of Columbia and the entire league, (especially when he intimates correctly that Penn should be the prohibitive favorite to win the title going into the season).  But he seems to missing something in a "spirit of the law vs. letter of the law" way.

3 comments:

oldlion said...

I find this analysis of Columbia to be very superficial and of little if any value.

LionAlum76 said...

Whats with listing only 5 returning starters on D? Perkovic, Rea, Brady/Patterson, Conway, Katz, Roane, Kenyon all starters last year.

Anonymous said...

I didn't get the impression it was either positive or negative, just a summary which was not untruthful. The guy covers a lot of teams so a straightforward or generic analysis is sort of expected.

Bottom line is this year's CU team has the potential to improve and we expect that to happen. It's not going to be easy with Dartmouth on the rise, Penn rebounding, Harvard reloading as usual. In fact, I am not really sure how much will actually shift in the balance of power in the Ivy conference without a serious jolt of excellence from any of the middle of the pack teams.