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Prior to the Duke game and in spite of the Arizona game, I thought if we won even ONE ACC game it would be a miracle. The Duke game (coupled with the Arizona game in a new light because of the Duke game) raised my expectations. The Clemson game only solidified my expectations and now I’m watching the home games, at least, with some enthusiasm! I found myself fully expecting to beat Wake and getting thoroughly p**sed off at the 3-ball-heave-fest that cost us that first half lead. It is a huge testament to Coach KK that he has taken this cobbled-together line up and made them competitive in the toughest conference in the NCAA. That makes this old Wolfpacker smile! We all know that things could go totally belly-up at any moment (Wolfpack s**t) but every indicaton to this point is that Coach KK is the real deal! Woohoo! Go Pack!
I’m with ’97 and Rye on this one. We’ll definitely struggle this year. We are clearly trying to make lemonade this season and Coach KK has done an admirable job of cobbling together a decent line-up out of transfers and the leftovers from last year. For my money only Abu and L. Freeman are ACC-caliber players right now (and maybe A. Freeman on his good nights). The rest will (hopefully) grow up and get coached-up as the year goes along. (Braxton Beverly, I believe, IS definitely an ACC-ready guy but he’s a true freshman and will need time to grow into the job.) I will give Torin Dorn an “A” for effort pretty much every day, but he’s probably not truly an ACC-calibre player either – yet hustle can still make a huge difference for the team. Y7 is improved over last year and he may be a dominant player eventually, but as Rye observed above we’ve GOT (with only one “T”) to get the ball inside and take advantage of our size – especially over a team like UNCG. It is clear that we will likely win the games where we shoot the three well and lose those where we do not. Hopefully, this will not be KK’s whole offensive philosophy in the future, but for this year, I’m willing to give him and the team a pass and look forward to the future.
Well, it looks like we were victims of the perfect “s**t-storm” described by Joe Giglio (http://www.newsobserver.com/sports/college/acc/nc-state/state-now/article186581403.html) due to Notre Dame’s loss to Stanford. I just don’t see anything good about having Notre Dame in the ACC – especially with their football team only sort of “half in”. That deal has no upside for all the other schools in the league. If we beat Notre Dame in football, it doesn’t help our conference standing. If we lose to Notre Dame, we take a beating in the national polls. If Notre Dame comes up short in their almighty “independent” schedule, they end up sucking up a valuable ACC-lined bowl berth and those of us who actually IN the ACC end up getting the leftovers. That’s a bad deal for every school in the league – except ND. And, NO, I won’t even consider flying all the way to Arizona to watch a game against a middle-of-the-league PAC 12 team. If we were playing in Charlotte, Atlanta, Jacksonville, or maybe even Orlando, I might be seriously considering otherwise.
Like most of us here on this board, I’m not inside the football program so I don’t really know what’s going on in the sausage factory. It appears from where I’m at that DD has tried to emphasize a wholesome “Band of Brothers” approach to team-building and I THINK that the on-field success is, in part, attributable to that. I KNOW these guys are not Boy Scouts and that they’re not having Bible studies when they’re not studying game tapes, but it does appear that he is trying to discourage the worst of the bad habits/attitudes that some of them bring with them from some very bad background situations. (Evidence being the quick jettisoning of two freshmen who were clearly off to a bad start involving weed, women, and whatever this fall.) It also doesn’t surprise me that a number of players might not like him for this approach – or for just being kind of an “all business” kind of guy. As I see it, he’s the CEO of that little corporation and the guy on the assembly line doesn’t have to like or approve of his personality/methods. Let’s face it, we all gripe about the boss from time to time and I expect football players are no different. As many have observed: Winning solves everything.
As for assistant coaches, I have no problem with letting him manage them, pay them well, and provide them with some security year-to-year as long as the coach’s last name does not correspond with any television character’s last name once played by Bill Cosby after 1968. (Thus, any coached named Heathcliff, Cliff, Alexander, Scott, or Scotty, is a perfectly acceptable.)
There are two major factors here that I find disturbing; one on the administration’s side and one on Doeren’s side.
First, on the administration’s side: I was rather surprised to learn while reading one of the articles about Doeren’s flirtations with Tennessee, etc., that his total compensation appears to be below average for the ACC (actually in the bottom quarter of the league.) Trying to be a ‘top half of the league’ football school in a Power 5 conference just can’t be done on the cheap – period! I thought, with the departure of Lee Foulup, State had come to the realization that trying to do such things was just not possible. Frau Yow had struck me as understanding this – now, I’m not so sure. I think we got DD at a reasonable rate (given his very short history as a Head Coach), but I also think that this season gives us some reasonable evidence that he can translate his skills to the ACC level. I’m not saying that we can (or should) compensate him at the top-3-of-the-league-level yet, but I think we should at least bring him above the league average. Anything less, in my opinion, is just sort of a slap in the face. Hey, he may tank in the future, but sometimes you got to “invest” upfront to get the big payoff.
Now, on Doeren’s side: His performance to date ACC-record-wise has not been stellar until this year and we have every reason to think there might be some drop off next year. Indeed, his overall record is just above .500, as I recall BUT we have seen marked improvement considering the hot mess he started with. I guess my issue is that he seems to think he’s proved he’s some sort of miracle worker and I’m not ready to go there yet. A bit of patience on his part might be warranted. Indeed, he might find that the fans at Tennessee (or other “big time” school) might be considerably less patient than we have been.
Finally, I don’t know what’s been offered to this point. Maybe Debbie Y’s offer has been reasonably generous given the big picture and DD is just trying to maximize his compensation by threatening to leave. Or maybe he’s unhappy here and only a ridiculous (and probably unwarranted) offer might buy his loyalty until another SEC team comes calling. I just don’t know. I just HOPE that we don’t lose a good (if not proven great) coach by continuing to do things on the cheap. If State is not interested in paying the price of admission, then they should not expect to be admitted to the “big-time-football” club.
From McCallum’s mouth to Doeren’s ear! Despite all the hype about our “great defense” (and, in fairness, they did come through in the clutch at times), we were ranked just over 50th in total defense and scoring defense (In total defense we were behind Clemson (6), VaTech (13), Duke (23), “down” FSU (27), Virginia (35), and Notre Dame (44)). We were a respectable 30th in rushing defense, but ranked 97th (!!!) in passing yardage allowed! (For comparison: “banged up and depleted” UNC ranked 67th in passing yards allowed.) So, even though Chubb and Company were doing a more-than-respectable job upfront, we were clearly very weak overall against the pass and that clearly impacted our scoring defense. I am not a deep student of the game (unlike many of my Wolven Brethren on this board (especially CowDog)), but I cringed every time an opponent threw deep on us – once the ball got about 15 yards beyond the line-of-scrimmage, I figured it was no more than a 50/50 chance that we stopped a big play. Huxtable’s secondaries seem to be full of empty spots in the zones and our corners seemed to think that a big hit on a receiver AFTER he caught the ball made up for not breaking up the pass (of course that is better than a missed tackle). If that sounds harsh, I apologize to our players – because I KNOW they worked hard and tried to play as coached. My point is that Huxtable’s coverages always seem to leave room for a big play when we’ve got the opponent backed up for 3rd and long. And all of this was true of a defense that was laden with SENIORS. Hopefully, Doeren will forget the hype, personal loyalties, etc., look at the statstics and hire someone who’s qualified and ready to be our Brent Venables or Bud Foster.
Before I start, I apologize for the length of this diatribe. As I wrote it, one thought led to another and it got kind of long:
If I were an AD or Chancellor of a university that had been sanctioned by the NCAA for academic-related infractions, I would be calling my lawyers – pronto. I would have them take a long hard look at my case and see if this ruling has opened the door to suing the NCAA. Admittedly, it is sort of a unique case (let’s hope) and probably no other school in the country has so seriously compromised its academic integrity to win ball games; but I would take a second look.
I wonder if the NCAA punted on this because they felt like that this would be dragged into court (which it would) and knew that a court would adjudicate it based purely on the letter-of-the-law? Even though the whole scheme was clearly utilized to provide an unfair advantage over other schools – a clear violation of the overall intent of the NCAA rules (at the cost of making any student’s diploma that contained one of these classes a lie and at the cost of the school’s academic reputation), the NCAA refused to punish UNC because it couldn’t win in court. Make no mistake, what UNC has done here is walk out of “court” based on a technicality.
Note to all NCAA Member Institutions: When the NCAA comes calling, don’t cooperate – LAWYER UP!
Of course, all of us who attended college (NCSU, Class of 1989 and Appalachian State, Class of 1981) know that the term “student” part of “student athlete” was often only loosely applied to some of our classmates. State has its share of humorous stories (both true and apocryphal) about some of our former student athletes and we love to recite them. Likewise, every college seems to have a set of less-than-challenging courses (Geology 101 – aka “rocks for jocks”, Theory of Recreation 201, etc., etc.) that are places where athletes (and other students) looking for an “easy A” can get one. However, I see the difference here being that the students actually have to attend the classes and do the work themselves. The bar may be very low and the tutors may provide the athletes with lots of coaching to get them over the bar, but in the end they still have to do the work, take the tests, etc. This ruling seems to say that not even a pretense of scholarship is necessary. That seems just one step too far to me.
So, where do we go from here? Do all the other universities begin setting up their own sham systems? Do they keep doing what they’ve been doing? Is success in sports important enough to forfeit the academic integrity of the university as a whole? My guess is that it will simply be “business as usual” – whatever that is – because this is all now a multi-billion-dollar business.
Finally the sad bit: I was having a conversation the other day with one of my dearest friends who is a life-long UNC fan – though not an alum. We both agreed that we would cheer just as hard at the State/UNC game if the guys on the field were a bunch of non-scholarship guys that would never sniff the NFL/NBA. Intercollegiate athletics is SUPPOSED to be about school pride and bragging-rights – not money. I know that is UTTERLY NAIVE and money has been in college athletics for almost as long as there has been college athletics. But the NCAA was supposed to try to keep the field level so that, at least, all the players were “students” of some form or another – not just hired guns. Now, even that last shred of innocence is gone and it’s simply another “development-league” for the NFL and NBA – and your Mom and Dad were wrong: Cheaters do win.
Great comments all around guys. Obviously, I was not the only one influenced by the “space race.”
The courage of all the early astronauts (and especially the Mercury 7) is just astounding. The old Redstone which carried Shepard was just a slightly modified ballistic missile that was never designed for carrying people. As I recall, he ended up riding it because the newer, more powerful Atlas that was supposed to be their ride to space kept blowing up and they wanted to get someone up there quickly to keep from being perceived as too far behind the Russians. I’ll never forget the first time I saw a Redstone “in person” so-to-speak, and I thought, “Wow, that thing is so small! I can’t believe Shepard let them strap him to the top of that thing!” Of course, Glenn was the first American to orbit because he was the first man to fly the Atlas booster – the one that kept blowing up. Talk about guts! Just astounding.
It’s funny, but back in those days, I think most Americans (including myself) thought that NASA had everything very under control and flawlessly engineered so that we fully expected those guys to always get home. Even as things went wrong right before our eyes on TV, we didn’t realize what was happening because those guys were so cool under fire and the NASA engineers always seemed to have a “fix”. The Apollo I fire was shocking, of course, but that wasn’t a flight – and, of course, in light of the Cold War everyone was very tight-lipped about things. It was only with near-tragedy of Apollo XIII that we got a glimmer that spaceflight was still a VERY risky business.
It has been very eye-opening over the last 20-30 years as the astronauts and other folks began to tell the “behind the scenes” stories of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. We (the general public) have now come to realize how many “near misses” those guys encountered in those days. It is amazing that the U.S. never lost a person on a spaceflight until Challenger, yet much of the credit must go to the early astronauts who NEVER lost their cool under even the most trying of circumstances. Col. Glenn and his fellow-travelers certainly had “The Right Stuff.” Godspeed John Glenn!
For what it’s worth, John Galt, I’m turning 60 in a couple of months and I like the black uniforms as a once-a-season thing. However, I do NOT want to see them in the Carolina game – EVER. That game is special enough and embodies enough pressure without adding the strange-uniform-factor on top of everything else. My son, who’s 24 and barely even follows sports, DOES like the black uniforms, so I’m guessing it’s mainly a “young” thing. Overall, I’m pretty much “old school” on the uniforms (and everything else, it seems): red top, white pants (with or without red stripe) and white helmets. Of course the main thing is: WIN!!!
Always great to get well-regarded recruits! Welcome to the Pack Mr. McGirt and Mr. Zuniga!
With regard to nav’s observations about our neighbors over in Orange County: Sure, they’ve got seven four-star recruits now; but where will those recruits actually end up next year? Might be kind of tough to play football while sitting out “the death penalty.” (OK, I can dream can’t I?)
Go Pack!
I guess we shouldn’t get too worked up about this just yet since this was a ruling out of the Chicago-based branch of the NLRB. As I understand it, Northwestern is appealing to the main board in Washington, DC. Of course, given that the Washington board seems to be more concerned with promoting unionization than with striking a balanced approach between labor and management, maybe we should be concerned.
Personally, I have thought that a standard stipend for “incidentals” should have been in place for some time now. These kids do spend an extraordinary amount of time either in class (except for UNX) or directly involved in their sport. A stipend could alleviate some of the temptation to seek “other income” and by being standardized it prevents a bidding war between schools.
As for compensation, generally-speaking, these kids are BEING compensated. The ones on a “full ride” are getting tuition, books, lodging and meals in exchange for their “services”. Even at a relatively-inexpensive, state-supported school like NC State, that’s worth somewhere north of $30K a year (in-state fee levels). In addition, they are afforded the opportunity to receive high-level coaching to prepare them for a professional career (if they’ve got the talent) and a nationally-televised showcase for those talents. What’s the price-tag for those two things?
I do understand that the universities reap millions in revenues from the games, apparel, etc. And, maybe, there should be some sort of standard apportionment for the players out of that. However, I do not see that the unionization of college football is going to be anything but BAD – period. This is especially true considering that this ruling from the NLRB does NOT apply to state-sponsored schools (by law.) So, what will we end up with? Traditional “amateur” sports at state schools and professional sports at the private schools? Will schools in right-to-work states avoid unionization altogether? Will all the “profit” generated by football and basketball be plowed right back into compensation for the players thus reducing the funding for all the “olympic sports”, women’s sports, and the like? How will the schools meet their “Title 9” obligations if they are forced to turn their only two revenue-producing sports into, essentially, professional sports?
Quite honestly, if this were to become pervasive, I would rather see colleges and universities cease athletic scholarships altogether and let it go back to being truly student-athletes like the Ivy League. Oh, the quality of play would drop off, but at least we could stop pretending that those kids who obviously have no business in college (due to scholastic aptitude or lack thereof) are “gentlemen and scholars.”
OK. That’s my two-cents worth for now.
Go Wolfpack!
