Skip to main content

Patriot League Media Day 2007

Patriot League media today was today. For the uninitiated, it's a day for the media to hear the story of the upcoming football season as told by the players, coaches, and league brass. I'm planning to write a fuller recap tomorrow, but I wanted to weigh in with some "quick hit" observations first.

* Lafayette was the surprise #1 pick in the Patriot League Preseason Poll, with Lehigh only one vote behind. This may not necessarily be a bad thing, considering that the preseason poll winner hasn't ended up winning the league since Lehigh did it in... 2001.

* However, it wasn't the only surprise in the poll. Nationally-ranked in some polls, Holy Cross was picked to finish 4th behind Colgate (who was 4-7 last year). Colgate and Holy Cross were only separated by two votes as well, which shows something real interesting: the teams themselves don't seem to have a real clear vision as to who's going to take this thing. Parity among the top four - some would even say the top five, including Bucknell - seems to be the order of the day. Any of these five could win this thing.

* Senior QB Sedale Threatt (pictured) delivered what can only be called an incredible speech on what it's like to be a part of the Patriot League. Recalling what I can by memory, he talked about the "family" of the Patriot League, the Lehigh "family" and what it means to be a student-athlete in the type of academic institutions the Patriot League are. It really struck me, and I'm betting that it struck a lot of other folks there too.

* It's hard to put into words how fun it is to interview Patriot League players. They're all really great kids which tell me a lot about the exact right things about college athletics. In a world of corrupt NBA refs, steroids, the death of the Tour de France, dogfighting, and the bad goings-on around other Division I sports programs, the kids today really stood out.

* I got a very good interview with Ms. Carolyn Femovich, executive director of the Patriot League. I'll talk more about that, probably in a College Sporting News summation of the Patriot League Media day.

Tomorrow or Friday, schedule willing, I'll transcribe some of the Lehigh football players' notes and quotes here as well. But those were my initial, raw impressions of the goings-on.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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....
40 comments
Read more

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.
20 comments
Read more

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...
1 comment
Read more