Skip to main content

Scholarships And Recruiting In 2008

I've been spending the past two weeks recovering from the "worst cold I've ever had in my life", so apologies for not talking about the upcoming week in Lehigh sports (although I'm beginning to think I shouldn't, since as soon as I skipped the preview the wrestling team, men's basketball team and women's basketball team all sported big upset victories).

As we're in the long offseason, we catch glimpses and rumors of players that may be committing to the Brown and White for the class of 2012. Starting next week I'll start posting more information on some of these "potentials" as more information starts to become available.

But deserving of equal time is the ones that don't choose the Patriot League - over, presumably, a free education. Looking for Lehigh recruiting information, I stumbled across this:

Two-way linemen Austin Kugler of Toms River River North and Mike Murphy of Toms River East said Saturday they have made oral commitments to play football at Monmouth University.

Kugler, a 6-3, 225-pound defensive end/tight end, and Murphy, a 6-4, 254-pound center, defensive end and defensive tackle, were 2007 Asbury Park Press All-Shore first team selections.

Kugler said he was impressed with the scholarships offered by Monmouth and with its plans for a new athletic facility.

"They're building that new sports complex for basketball and for football locker rooms and things like that," he said.

Kugler said he was recruited to play defensive end.

"I really didn't care what position," he said. "I liked them both. Whichever one they thought I was better at was fine with me."

Kugler said he also was recruited by Albany, Bucknell, Lafayette, and Lehigh.

This is becoming a more familiar refrain around the Patriot League these days. Division I football athletes, "impressed" with scholarships, picking a less selective school because his education at Monmouth is paid for.

It's just a stark reminder: scholarships at schools like Monmouth are truly taking a hefty slice out of former Patriot League recruiting strongholds. And it's probably going to take more free education to have these same athletes -who obviously have the grades to be considered at Bucknell, Lehigh and Lafayette - consider going back to a Patriot League school.
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