At the midway point of the season - and in a strange week for the Patriot League - it's time to go "Around the Horn" as well on this Wednesday in order to summarize all the media stories there have been leading into this important week.Starting out is a story that some of Sedale Threatt's detractors during his senior year may have never thought possible. Threatt will be trying out for the Arena Bowl-champion Soul in his effort to play professionally.
Here's some exceprts from the article:
Logistical obstacles are irrelevant when it comes to getting a shot at playing professional football.
Consider the case of Sedale Threatt Jr., who caught a plane from Orlando, Fla., and stayed overnight to plunk down $60 for a chance to try out in Turtle Creek for perhaps an invitation to the training camp of the Philadelphia Soul of the Arena Football League.
"It's always been my dream to play on Sundays," Threatt said after a workout and an extended session featuring quarterbacks, wide receivers and defensive backs. "Ask any guy here and he'll tell you the same thing."
...
Threatt, 23, quarterbacked the Lehigh University team after playing high school football in Massachusetts and attending prep school in Valley Forge, Pa., for a year. In the first game of his senior year, he broke some ribs. But he still showed enough to get some inquiries from some NFL teams, including the Chicago Bears.
"I know I can play," Threatt said.
He displayed a strong arm, a quick release and enough raw talent in the basic drills that he was asked to stay for an extended session in which quarterbacks threw passes to wide receivers being covered by defensive backs.
"He's an athlete. He's intelligent. You can tell he's a leader," said Rich Ingold, who helped run the tryout camp.
A big congratulations for Sedale!
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Elsewhere in the Patriot League, a developing story has many Holy Cross fans scratching their heads in puzzlement. All that is really known about the story is that in an off-campus party at 2AM the day after Harvard bombed Brown 41-34, sophomore WR Luke Chmielinski was tackled by his roommate, sophomore OL Michael McCabe, and when he got up he was bleeding.
According to court records, Mr. Chmielinski, a 5-foot-10-inch, 185-pound wide receiver, and Mr. McCabe got into an argument at the party.
“The victim states the argument was over his roommate’s sister, and that they argued for several minutes,” police reports said.
“He (Mr. Chmielinski) states that this went on for a few minutes and Michael then got off of him and walked away,” Officer Michael H. LaHair wrote. “He states that he then got up off the floor and noticed that he was bleeding.”
Friends took Mr. Chmielinski to UMass Memorial Medical Center — Memorial Campus to be treated for a puncture wound to the back and a cut across the right side of his chest.
His father also said the following:
“He is absolutely convinced he was not stabbed,” Christopher Chmielinski said. “He thinks his injury was a result of the scuffle.”
On the football field, the injuries have a small effect in the sense that Chmielinski, on the depth chart at receiver is now out for the year. The worry is that this incident gets blown out of proportion - that it becomes a symbol of a renegade program, which anyone who follows Holy Cross knows is patently ridiculous.
My questions are as follows: If he was stabbed, where was the weapon that was used? Wouldn't that have been pretty easy to find? And if Chmielinski did, as his father claims, told police that his roommate didn't do it, why was he arraigned and ordered by the judge to stay away from campus? Is there really enough evidence to do that?
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Turnabout is fair play for Princeton: themselves a winner over Lehigh on a last-second field goal, they found themselves the victims of the same in a 27-24 defeat to Colgate.
But if you're a member of the Colgate football team and were hoping that your head coach was going to talk about your God-given abilities and maybe get some interest from NFL scouts, you'd be wrong.
No, really, in this sports page piece for the paper of record, the New York Times, are you sure you want your coach to say this?
“He’s got good, not great, ability,” said Dick Biddle, in his 13th season as Colgate’s head coach. “He’s not fast, but he gets there. He’s not big, but he does the job. He has the will. He shows up in the fourth quarter, and most of his big yardage comes in the fourth quarter. And he doesn’t act like a star. He has no ego. My son played here, and other than my son he’s my favorite player.”
I know Biddle meant it as a compliment, but c'mon... "He's got good, not great, ability? He's not fast?" Keep in mind that this is the #1 rushing leader in FCS right now by a wide margin, and he's already rewritten the Colgate and Patriot League record books.
Scott usually is a terror in the fourth quarter, but against Princeton the damage was mostly done by sophomore QB Greg Sullivan, who directed the game-winning drive from his own 20 with Scott touching the ball only once. If Sullivan is coming to his own, the rest of the Patriot League had better pay attention.
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Lehigh News & tidbits: Keith Groller of the Morning Call added this to his media column yesterday: "Best Village People reference: ''If it was up to me, I'd dress them as a cowboy, Indian and a biker,'' said Lehigh football radio analyst Kody Fedorcha on Lehigh Valley ESPN radio, talking about the three Mountain Hawks backup QBs who wear fluorescent yellow chest protectors and signal in offensive plays."... The Easton Express Times reported that senior DB Quadir Carter sat out the Fordham game with a lingering shoulder injury... Coach Coen in Keith Groller's Groller's Corner Blog: "What I liked today is that we didn't execute on one of our late series and kicked some things around, but we went back out there the next time and executed and went on to ice the game."... Finally, the Taste as You Go Blogger, on her visit to the Blue Sky Cafe in Bethlehem, had this to say: "However, in our last visit to the Blue Sky Cafe, in honor of fall, I ordered something I had never had before -- the Sweet Potato Quesadilla ($6.95), topped with scrambled eggs and black bean salsa... We wondered whether we could replicate the quesadilla at tailgates. Alas, an experiment that will have to be carried out at the next home football game up at Goodman Stadium." (Great - now I'm going to have to look out for sweet potatoes grilling in the tailgate area.)
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