Don Shula
The Athletic Department has now made the official announcement listing the incoming freshman class for the 2021 season.
No, we don't yet know what the 2021 season will look like. But as of June 3, it sure seems like we will have a full 10-game season. I think the biggest variables are going to be exact dates and locations, (the allowed level of crowd size no longer seems like it will be an issue).
We do know that this class is just about 100% what I reported it would be over the course of the last year. The only name missing on the official list from my list is Anthony D'Angelo, who in retrospect may have been a result of me mistakenly putting him on the list in the first place. Another change is that OL Patrick Passalacqua, originally slated to be a part of the 2020 freshman class, is now a 2021 class member.
My LionFeeders all-time recruitment database will be updated to include this new class sometime over the next few days.
I've written a few words about each of these incoming players over the past year, so I won't rehash that now, but I would like to launch the restart of the Roar Lions Blog after this long hiatus with a look at how Columbia looks position by position.
I'll start in the coming days with a look at the QB position, but before I do that let's not ignore the elephant in the room and discuss what may be the effects of this unprecedented canceled year due to the COVID-19-related lockdowns.
"Unprecedented" is a word that gets overused and abused in news and sports reporting, but I don't think this is one of those cases. They kept playing football at all the current Ivy schools even during World Wars I and II, and other hard times in our history. This is truly the greatest disruption Ivy sports have ever seen.
There's a school of thought out there right now that the teams that return the most players with previous experience *playing with each other* will have a big advantage this season. The trouble with that theory is that a full year off from games and practices represents more than 5% of the entire lifespan of these players. The experience of a year, or even two years, of playing with others in a program is likely to fade after all this time. I'm not saying this experience is nothing, but the adjustment of getting back to official practices and games is going to be so massive this fall that it is really likely to erase any muscle memory these players may have established way back in 2019. So, I'd say this is a secondary factor to overall talent and one more variable that should be very obvious: coaching.
The way things have been thrown into disarray in Ivy Football right now reminds me most of the situation the NFL faced during and immediately after the 1982 players strike. It's no coincidence that after that tumult the two teams that made it into the Super Bowl were Miami, coached by the AFC's most experienced leader in Don Shula, and Washington, coached by the best young coach in football at the time, Joe Gibbs.
Would the Redskins had made Super Bowl XVII without the strike accentuating the coaching prowess of Gibbs? There's a very good chance the answer to that question is "yes," especially since the 'Skins posted a 14-2 record the following year and an NFC championship to go with it.
But I'm a strong believer that there is NO WAY the Dolphins would have won the AFC title without the strike acting as a magnifier for Shula's talents. Given a full season, surely the Raiders or the Jets that year would have won the AFC crown.
So which coaches in the Ivies are the best suited to weather this very unusual and disorienting storm?
Columbia has to feel good that the Ivies' best coach over the last 30 years is on their sideline in Al Bagnoli. No, Bagnoli's talents couldn't overcome the issues the Lions had in 2019 with injuries and inexperience at QB. But given this blank slate of a season to come, his abilities serve as one certainty to build on. As high as the hurdles are for every team this year, they are nothing like the adversity Bagnoli faced when he came to Columbia in 2015. As accomplished as people like Bob Surace at Princeton and Tim Murphy at Harvard may be, I'd argue that only Buddy Teevens at Dartmouth has been through anything like that kind of adversity and been able to overcome it.
This doesn't mean Columbia should be favored to win the Ivy title. But Bagnoli's name on the office door is one of the most valuable commodities in this league right now.
