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.