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My longtime readers know I have a special place in my heart
for the exciting and excellent 1996 Columbia Lions football team.
The team started the season 6-0, and many of the wins were
incredible comebacks.
But an upset loss at home to Princeton and a drubbing at
Dartmouth the following week foiled the Lions championship hopes. A nice rebound
in the final two games led to an 8-2 season.
Compared to all the Columbia teams since our last title in
1961, surely the ’96 team was the best overall.
But now that team has been officially enshrined into the Columbia Athletics Hall of Fame.
Is this some kind of joke?
Think about what this says to football fans at Columbia. It
says that an 8-2 second place season isn’t just an excellent and rare finish for us,
but it’s literally HALL OF FAME results!
Again, a SECOND PLACE team that lost to the eventual Ivy
champs, FORTY TO NOTHING, is the best we lowly fans can expect to get… ever.
Wait, didn’t the baseball team, (which hadn’t won a title
from 1976-2007), just win its THIRD CHAMPIONSHIP in six years just last month?
Isn’t THAT the standard Hall of Fame-worthy excellence we should be honoring?
Soon, we’ll be enshrining football teams that went 4-6, and after
that we’ll honor squads that had the courage to return to the field after halftime.
I’d like to personally invite every member of the 1996 Dartmouth
team that kicked our ass and went 10-0 that year to attend the Hall of Fame
ceremonies this fall. They should discuss how great that CU team was and how disappointed
they were not to be able to beat us by 50-0.
Tell someone you work with today, without editorial comment,
that Columbia is literally enshrining into its Hall of Fame an 8-2 team that
lost 40-0 to the 1st place team in its league that season.
If anyone you tell DOESN’T laugh, please let us know here.
In the past, we at
least had decency to enshrine individual excellent players who stood out
despite our usually woeful W-L records.
Now, we’re literally settling for second best and pretending
it’s legendary.
Earth to the CU Administration: WE WANT CHAMPIONSHIPS!!!
EVERYONE ELSE GETS THEM. EVEN BADLY-FUNDED BROWN FOOTBALL GETS TITLES! STOP
ASKING US TO CELEBRATE FAILURES!
9 comments:
Amen.
While I diverged from Jake a bit on his previous blog (suggesting we lay off PM a bit), I have to jump in with 2 size 13's on this one.
This is PRECISELY the idiot loser mindset engendered at CU. First, I take nothing from the 8-2 team. Thank God for them. But Jake is spot on in terms of perspective.
I have been banging this same drum. Example: a gratifying basketball season, but we finished tied for THIRD! So while we can appreciate a decent effort, we didn't come close to winning the title, and yet many alums were walking around at Reunion Weekend all psyched up about basketball.
We are so used to failure that we treasure and reward mediocrity. How is this possible?
Because there is no system or mindset re expectation. When a coach and a team and an Athletic Department is EXPECTED to succeed, and held to account, then more often than not they do. When CU rewards second place finishers with HOF, they work directly against this, and they have been since 1956. There is no "connect" in their mentality.
Quite frankly, there are no cojones in the whole rotten place.
Amen guys!
1996 was the football season ruined by DE Marcellus Wiley doing a sack dance in the Princeton game. The penalty for it blew the game and an Ivy title. That season began great at 6-0. The New York newspapers and Sports Illustrated ran nice stories on the Lions' success. Then the penalty blew up the season. 8-2 and no title does not make a Hall of Fame performance.
Another reminder of how poorly the Ivy League is operated, and especially so when Columbia is concerned. Any exuberance is frowned upon by the league. Celebrate more than 1.5 seconds and you are penalized even if it changes the outcome.
Still, blowing a potentially great season is not the same as achieving one.
Wiley was subjected to a cheap call. But without Wiley that team would have been 5-5 or 6-4. He was a man among men that season. So while it is hard to quarrel with the Big Dawg here, I do think that Wiley should not be blamed for either the Prinnceton loss or the Dartmouth blowout.
Who was the QB in '96? Bobby Thompson?
Amen to thoughts on Wiley. Cheap call ruined the Princeton game but an essential component to any wins at all. Memo to Pete or whoever dropped Chad Washington from the roster: drop 6'4" animal D linemen at your own peril. Tough to backfill those types of guys.
Must be nice to have a 10-0 season once in a while. Though I think the Big Green deserve better than Teevens as head coach. Stanford and Tulane could not argue with the success they had once he left those programs.
If we had Teevens, we wouldn't be this bad; it's that simple!
What is the basis for that claim #Lion? That he wins some games for Dmouth? Teevens is a great example of a good man with good intentions but he's not a good coach. At least not anymore. He should have stayed at Dmouth when then going was good. He has done nothing of note since that time. I don't think he would be effective at CU.
^ Sorry for the vague statement. Teevens had a previous stint as HC at Dmouth. He left to become HC at Tulane and then Stanford and then returned to Dmouth (all from memory, could be some gaps in that flow of events). His first stint at Dmouth was successful but his 2nd stint is less so.
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