Anonymity, Woes, and New members

Who the heck are these guys? Well, the short answer is that they're members of the Wofford Terriers out of the Southern Conference, and a more complete answer is that Wofford could be the best team you've never heard of right now. On College Sporting News I mention three of these member on my All-Anonymous team, which includes the son of Lafayette head coach Frank Tavani (senior SS Dan Tavani). The idea was to point out some players that didn't make the pre-season all-American teams but could very well be names you hear about by the end of 2007.

You may recognize some Patriot League names on this team as well: senior T Jesse Padilla from the Leopards, and senior FB Josh DeStefano from Bucknell. Oh yeah, there's also a kid you may recognize whose last name rhymes with... Treat? Feat?

Also appearing on College Sporting News is a quick post on this year's Summer of Woe. It attempts to deal with many of the problems that have faced FCS schools this past offseason and put it into perspective. Mercifully, no Patriot League schools have been caught up in scandals like these - but that's no reason to become complacent, since these types of incidents can happen to anybody, anywhere, and anytime.

Finally, there's an interesting piece of NCAA news involving a four-year moratorium on members switching divisions or subdivisions. In other words, if you were holding out hope that Johns Hopkins was going to join the Patriot League in all sports, well, you're just going to have to wait at least four years before revisiting that possibility.

Of the schools that are currently moving to Division I (and are thus exempt from this moratorium), only Bryant College out of Rhode Island could potentially eventually fit into the Patriot League. After that, the only candidates for short term expansion could realistically be:

* private MAAC schools willing to play up to scholarship ball with AI restrictions
* private NEC schools willing to play up to scholarship ball with AI restrictions
* private CAA schools which want to leave the conference (in the low likelihood this would happen, they would most likely be associate members) and are willing to live with AI restrictions
* a current Division I school that doesn't have football and could be convinced to restart it (e.g., Boston University)

You could also throw into this mix private schools like Davidson (Pioneer associate in football) or VMI (Big South) into this discussion as well, but the fact remains that the number of potential schools for expansion just went down substantially. Patriot League expansion never seemed so far away.

How The Ivy League Is Able To Break the NCAA's Scholarship Limits and Still Consider Themselves FCS

By now you've seen the results. In 2018, the Ivy League has taken the FCS by storm. Perhaps it was Penn's 30-10 defeat of Lehigh a couple of weeks ago . Or maybe it was Princeton's 50-9 drubbing of another team that made the FCS Playoffs last year, Monmouth. Or maybe it was Yale's shockingly dominant 35-14 win over nationally-ranked Maine last weekend. The Ivy League has gone an astounding 12-4 so far in out-of-conference play, many of those wins coming against the Patriot League. But it's not just against the Patriot League where the Ivy League has excelled. Every Ivy League school has at least one out-of-conference victory, which is remarkable since it is only three games into their football season. The four losses - Rhode Island over Harvard, Holy Cross over Yale, Delaware over Cornell, and Cal Poly over Brown - were either close losses that could have gone either way or expected blowouts of teams picked to be at the bottom of the Ivy League. W

UMass 21, Lafayette 14, halftime

Are you watching this game? UMass had this game under control until about 3 minutes in the second quarter, and then got an interception, converted for a TD. Then the Leopards forced a fumble off the return, and then converted THAT for a TD, making this a game. It's on CN8. You really should be watching this.

Examining A Figure Skating Rivalry: Tonya and Nancy

It must be very hard for a millennial to understand the fuss around the Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding figure skating scandal in the run-up to the 1994 Olympics. If you're of a certain age, though - whether you're a figure skating fan or not, and I am decidedly no fan of figure skating - the Shakespearean story of Harding and Kerrigan still engages, and still grabs peoples' attention, twenty years later. Why, though? Why, twenty years later, in a sport I care little, does the story still grab me? Why did I spend time out of my life watching dueling NBC and ESPN documentaries on the subject, and Google multiple stories about Jeff Gilooly , idiot "bodyguards", and the whole sordid affair? I think it's because the story, even twenty years later, is like opium. The addictive story, even now, has everything. Everything. The woman that fought for everything, perhaps crossing over to the dark side to get her chance at Olypic Gold, vs. the woman who

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