Lehigh Football Nation

Where does it ever end? That's the question I keep asking myself lately. It seems to have added up for me from six months of lunacy, one where collegiate athletic departments have been caught up with such a large number of horrifying incidents. There's serious allegations of rape by athletes at  Baylor  and Vanderbilt .  Louisville hiring prostitutes to lure in potential recruits.  The case of the Stanford swimmer who got off with a slap on the wrist after raping a young woman.  They are literally everywhere, with new twists and turns coming in so fast it's hard to keep up with it all. Even past scandals involving college athletes don't seem to keep themselves out of the news lately, either.  The Penn State Jerry Sandusky story that never seems to die got a new lease on life when alleged abuses were revealed as far back as the 1970s .  The when-will-it-ever-end revelations of  sham classes at North Carolina .  The continuous tric...

(Graph Credit: Chronicle of Higher Ed) It's amazing to me how statistics are so frequently presented to attempt to "shock and awe" the viewer. Today, it's the Chronicle of Higher Ed's turn to mislead using statistics : If you haven’t seen it, you should check out Libby Sander and Andrea Fuller ’s piece this week highlighting the spending patterns in lesser-known Division I programs. The story found that nearly a third of the 125 athletic departments that compete just below the NCAA’s elite level increased their expenditures by more than 40 percent during a recent five-year period. Public universities, many of them grappling with overall financial cuts, had some of the fastest-growing athletic budgets. It sounds shocking - until you analyze the situation for, say, about five minutes.  (more)

Say this about Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany - he knows how to get an audience.   Yesterday, Delany put himself front and center once again after picking up a topic that two NCAA commissioners, the late Myles Brand and Mark Emmert , had floated but never pushed - the idea that scholarships to play collegiate sports should include the "full cost of attendance". Currently, the "full cost of attendance" of an athletic scholarship includes tuition, dorms, classroom materials and other expenses. But Delany's endorsement of the proposal to include transportation and a stipend for personal expenses as scholarship money turned a whole lot of heads for a lot of different reasons. (more)

(Note: This blog posting has been cross-posted at Technorati , and can also be found in its entirety there .) In January, the University of Delaware issued a press release that has unfortunately, been all too common at smaller schools all over the country. They announced they were cutting a non-revenue men's athletics program - in this case, men's cross country and track and field - due to fiscal and Title IX compliance concerns. What was different this time was that the co-captain of the hundred year-old team, Corey Wall, decided to file a complaint with the federal Office for Civil Rights. It cited reverse gender discrimination , and suggested that the enforcement of Title IX was, in reality, taking them away from men "against the spirit of Title IX." Truer words have never been spoken. (more)

(Photo Credit: The Providence Journal) Two days ago, I blogged about Rhode Island's thoughts on leaving the CAA in order to join the NEC . Yesterday, I talked about the impacts on that move on the CAA and NEC .  Today, I'll talk about whether the Patriot League is affected at all by this move by Rhode Island - because as things stand right now with the league and their stance on offering largely need-based aid, it doesn't appear to be. The problems are neatly summed up by a member of the Providence Journal 's URI Forum , a meeting place for fans of the URI program.  Reaction to the Rams' football move to the NEC have been mixed there, and some members were motivated to ask the Rams' athletic director, Thorr Bjorn , about his thought process.  He was specifically asked, "why the NEC?  Wouldn't the Patriot League be a better option for URI, with games versus A-10 leaguemate Fordham and nearby Holy Cross?" "I would have preferred URI going...

(Photo courtesy the South County Independent) Yesterday, I blogged about Rhode Island's thoughts on leaving the CAA in order to join the NEC .  Today, I'm blogging about the effects of their move on the rest of Northeast football - including the Patriot League. Interestingly,  Northeastern's discontinuation of football was certainly bad news, and Hofstra's president pulling a "Sonny Corleone in the tollbooth" on football a week later was also a seismic event concerning football in this area. But URI's decision could have an even greater impact in the long run for all three Northeastern FCS football conferences. It could have an impact that affects directly or indirectly all three conferences: the NEC, CAA, and Patriot League. (more)

I learned one thing, really, on my ten day vacation from my day job, blogging and writing: in college football, there truly is no offseason. I planned a vacation in the mountains right before the Fourth of July, thinking that it's generally a dead time for college sports.  I'm not alone, either.  Most sportswriters do the same thing. So what happens the week I'm gone?  Mike Szoztak, the longtime Rhode Island beat writer from the Providence Journal , drops the bombshell that the Rams are looking at moving their football team from the CAA to the NEC starting with the 2013 season. Ram sightings at Delaware's Tub, seen in this picture, might be less and less frequent. At the beginning of 2009, the CAA had twelve teams and had split into North and South divisions. The main discussion point back then was how they were going to be able to accommodate Old Dominion and Georgia State in their powerhouse conference - and how many at-large bids they might have in the futur...

At this time in history, I think numbers have never been more misunderstood. The misunderstanding of numbers permeates every level of politics, business, mutual funds... everything. You don't have to go far to find examples, either. Look at Lehman Brothers, who three years ago thought that getting wholesale into the business of subprime loans and issuing bonds against them was a great idea because there would always be suckers to buy their bonds and real estate would have nowhere to go but up.  Look at Washington, where we've been promised a 1 trillion dollar new spending package without any form of revenue to offset this gargantuan new cost coming up in the next decade.  And not all that long ago came the book " Dow 36,000 ", a book which actually argued that stocks were undervalued since their valuations of "perfectly reasonable prices" showed that it was so.  Now Jim Delany , commissioner of the Big 10, and a gaggle of breathless sportswriters would...

I've been getting caught up with some nice MLK day "holiday reading" this weekend concerning the history of the fall of American University's president and how it's spurred a fresh look at university spending across the board. Maybe it's simply my focus on football all these years that made me miss the spectacular fall of former American University president Ben Ladner . Mr. Ladner did a lot of good things for AU in his nine-year reign, like increasing the academic profile of the school and multiplying their tiny university endowment by nearly ten, from $29 million to $271 million in 2005. Unfortunately that allowed Mr. Ladner to engage in a high-rolling lifestyle that included jet-setting around Europe, complete with personal drivers and limos, a personal chef making $88,000 a year and making regular five-figure trips to destinations such as the US Virgin Islands, UAE and Nigeria - all paid for by AU and the endowment that he grew. It's pretty remarkab...

For anyone who's interested about Patriot League athletics, this article from "Inside Higher Ed" is a must-read not only because Lehigh athletics are mentioned fairly prominently, but it talks about something I've talked about before - how football is, whether people like it or not, a vital way for college campuses to be diverse. Data drawn from the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s annual survey of graduation rates, analyzed by Inside Higher Ed, show that scholarship athletes make up at least 20 percent of the full-time black male undergraduates at 96 of the nearly 330 colleges that play sports in Division I, the NCAA’s top competitive level. At 46 of those colleges, according to the data, which are from 2005-6, at least a third of the black male population play a sport. And at 31 one of them, football players alone make up at least a quarter of the black undergraduate men. The trend is most evident at [a type] of institution...where the proportions of bla...