Tuesday, June 30, 2009
The Cost Of Competition
July marks the official pre-season to Georgetown's 104th varsity season and its 45th since the return of football to campus in 1964. It rightfully claims a rich football tradition that is all but obscured amidst the recent efforts of the program. For a variety of reasons, Georgetown enters 2009 with nine straight losing seasons, the most by far in its history, and sees a horizon ahead where changes to the Patriot League cast a shadow on its ability to compete under its present resources.
In 1964, a HOYA column noted that Georgetown did not seek a program such as those at Boston College, Villanova, Holy Cross, or George Washington. Unbenownst to the writer, he suggested various program scenarios which now apply two generations later: the big time, major college football power, the team competing at the highest levels of a lesser subdivision, the former power who follows an Ivy-like commitment to academics and athletics, and finally, a school who packed in football to focus all its energies on basketball, to very mixed results.
Does Georgetown want to be any of these programs, or something entirely different? If the last 45 years of Georgetown football was built on low costs and high hopes, is that enough in the next generation? Are the losing ways of the Patriot League a case of what went wrong, or the seeds to what to do right?
Boston College
For 30 years, Georgetown and Boston College enjoyed a healthy football rivalry, and while a game with the Hoyas was nowhere as important as the annual cross-state game with Holy Cross, the modern comparison between the schools shows just how far football has taken the BC athletic program from its days long ago.
The two schools share a common athletic structure and each offers a large number of sports appealing to both a Jesuit as well as an Ivy-like sensibility. (BC offers 31 sports, Georgetown 29, compared to the NCAA minimum of 14.) In building a on-campus field in 1957, BC shed itself of the high rents at Fenway Park that were mortal wounds to Catholic colleges nationwide. In 1940, nearly 20 Jesuit schools played major college football, by 1970 only three (BC, Holy Cross, Xavier), all of which were on-campus.
Like the conference they were a part of, BC football took off in the 1980's and distinguished itself as Boston's I-A program. Long gone were the days where BU or Harvard could muster huge crowds at games, but BC began to leverage its moment in the sun during the Doug Flutie years. The move to the ACC remains controversial, but it has provided a firm financial footing for the program.
Boston College runs on a $18 million football budget, covered by ACC television contracts, bowl revenues, and ticket sales (home games average 41,037 in 45,000 seat Alumni Stadium). Its men's athletic budget, roughly twice that of Georgetown, is $18 million football, $6 million basketball, and $6 million everything else. Football enjoys a 14 station, five state radio network and a steady base of season ticket holders in New England which ensure steady revenues.
Where BC has really set itself apart is fundraising. In 1998, fundraising covered approximately $3.6 million, or 90 of the school's scholarships. (Read another way, it covered 85 football grants and not much else.) In 2008, BC raised $21 million from an alumni base only slightly larger than Georgetown, or the ability to fully fund as many as 227 scholarships and still have $7 million left over. According to Georgetown's own web site, it has just five (repeat, five) endowed scholarships in the entire athletic program.
What would Georgetown Athletics look like with 227 scholarship athletes? No way to tell, but it wouldn't surprise anyone seeing a fully funded Georgetown program better than #84 in the NACDA Director's Cup totals, which is where GU ended this year.
Villanova
As the saying goes, no sadder words exist than these four: "what might have been".
In 1981, as arguably the most successful of Philadelphia's major college football programs, the Villanova University football program was terminated for what was its president referred to as a "rededication to its academic mission." A senior lineman named Howie Long had other words for it. In a 1981 article, he called it an "overnight shafting."
But instead of bidding a fond farewell, alumni undertook a vocal and visible approach to bringing the program back, holding fundraisers, getting the word out, and, in some ways, shaming the Augustinian leadership for making the decision in the first place. Villanova returned to the gridiron as a 63 scholarship Division I-AA school in 1985, and has enjoyed a fair amount of success since. Had it stayed in I-A, there is little doubt it would be playing Big East football today.
The closest peer to Georgetown as a I-AA football/major college basketball hybrid, the Villanova men's budget is actually less than Georgetown, roughly $4 million for football, $5 million for basketball, and $4 million for the remainder. Without the benefit of television contracts enjoyed by major conferences such as the Big East, Villanova is extremely dependent on ticket sales and institutional fundraising. Villanova averaged only 6,691 at 12,000 seat Villanova Stadium and raised $5.4 million in 2006 for athletics, much of it for men's basketball.
With a single I-A game each year for school pride and a paycheck Villanova football is the proverbial big cat in the smaller yard--CAA football can take them only so far and the school won't make the leap to the Big East. By some accounting standards is could be losing $3 million a year on football. But the collateral damage of not playing is something the school does not want to see repeated.
Holy Cross
Like Villanova, Holy Cross was a proud I-A program at the edge of what is known today as major college athletics when the Big East conference began to form. Unlike Villanova, Holy Cross passed on joining the league, and its programs have never been the same.
In the mid-1980's, Holy Cross was one of the founders of what was then the Colonial League, a group of former Division I-A teams like Colgate and Davidson, plus three former College Division schools in Bucknell, Lafayette, and Lehigh. The new league, soon retitled the Patriot League, would adopt the Ivy League model to recruit and compete in Division I, with the expectation that other selective schools like Richmond, William & Mary, and Villanova would join. None did. Davidson bailed after three seasons, Fordham spent a decade in PL purgatory, and the league even added Towson to make ends meet before finding a willing party in Georgetown in 2001, ostensibly taking Fordham's place in the cellar. Talk of adding new schools to a league famously referred to as the "last amateurs" remains talk.
Like Georgetown, Holy Cross does not offer athletic scholarships in football. That is not to say they don't provide more support, however. Nearly 45% of its men's athletic budget of $7.2 million goes to football, versus $1.6 million for basketball and $2.3 million for everyone else. Ironically, HC still offers more in men's athletic aid across all sports ($3.2 million) than Georgetown does ($2.8 million) because of football "equivalencies", or the aggregate amount of preferential financial aid it offers to football players. From its budget of $3.2 million, less operating (game day) expenses of $300,000 and an estimated $400,000 for salaries among its full and part-time coaches, HC has somewhere around $2.5 million available to financial aid, or 50 scholarship equivalencies. Some of that is paid from attendance revenue (8,431 a game) but that's not enough. Most comes from a university subsidy to remain competitive in PL football after a number of years in the late 1990's where HC football was treading water. (In 1999, Holy Cross lost at home to Georgetown 34-16, and someone up at Mt. St. James must had said "never again!". Since then, the Crusaders are 9-0 against the proto-Hoyas, and most games haven't been close.)
Maybe the glory days aren't coming back for the Cross--it hasn't sold out Fitton Field since 1986 and hasn't won the PL title in 18 years. But the Crusaders stand a pretty good chance of winning the title this year, and aren't afraid to invest in making that dream a reality for its student-athletes.
So what do these stories tell us?
Georgetown is not Boston College.
It is not Villanova.
It is not even Holy Cross.
What it is, and what it wants to be, remains open to question among other PL fans.
In a league where coaches are openly campaigning to go full scholarship in the wake of Fordham's shot across the PL bow, where does Georgetown stand? If Georgetown is 1-16 in the last three years of PL play against supposed "non-scholarship"opponents, what happens when everyone else in the league can offer 60+ full rides to recruits and Georgetown can't?
Georgetown doesn't have to spend 50% of its budget on football, but 5% won't cut it, either. Numbers like these point to a simple and glaring fact that anyone at BC, Villanova, Holy Cross, or any Division I program will tell you, without a systematic approach to fundraising, the competitive student athlete will almost always go elsewhere than Georgetown, leaving those behind at the Hilltop ill-equipped to meet the challenge ahead. Whatever fans say of Kevin Kelly this year, remember this--he's still bringing a knife to a gunfight. And the PL is about to about to start packing some heat.
(Coming in part two, a look at how to build a foundation from the only source that Georgetown Football can count on--its own.)
Sunday, June 14, 2009
The Fordham Flash
If conferences were corporations, the Patriot League would be Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company. It advertises itself as "the quiet company", all the while with more assets than anyone knows.
The League tends to like things, well, quiet. it does not overly promote itself--its football media day is not at ESPN Zone in New York, but a golf club outside Bethlehem, PA. It has no television package for football (indirectly, to protect the Lehigh and Lafayette networks in their local area), and when it comes to the off-season, it likes things quiet as well.
Not this year.
With all the subtlety of a bull in a china shop, Fordham University has turned up the equivalent of a car alarm in the midst of this peace and quiet. And it's not going away. The league famous for eschewing scholarships now has a Trojan Ram inside its walls.
Fordham announced...no, told the Patriot League that it is pursuing a full scholarship program beginning in 2010, come hell or high water. Rather than lose the Rams outright, the Patriot League engaged in a delicate balance of compromise that allows Fordham to remain in the league, except it is ineligible for championships, all-League honors and the like. I'm not sure Fordham cares at this point--they got what they wanted, and will be selling the benefits of a free ride to PL recruits up and down the list, games with Connecticut, Army and Navy, and the very real possibility that they will lay waste to the rest of the league standings while the PL leadership decides what to do about this scholarship mess. It's become the talk --and not too quietly--of the I-AA off season wires.
The symbolism of the Trojan Ram is not far off. For the better part of 25 years, dating back to the days when Rev. John Brooks, S.J. steered Holy Cross out of major college athletics and sought alliances with the Ivy League that would reposition his college as an academic colossus and not just another Boston College or Georgetown (two schools he had varying degrees of cynicism against). It was the insistence that what was then known as the "Colonial League" adopt and defend the policies of non-scholarship athletics that the Ivy Group had created 20 years earlier. "The Last Amateurs", or so we were told.
There were cracks in the wall before, of course, when the next generation of leaders at Holy Cross pulled a similar move and demanded they get basketball scholarships or they would walk. The PL instituted a slow and somewhat deliberative rollout in that sport, and other sports have followed. But not football.
But not anymore.
In a different time, in a different climate, the PL schools would have turned away from Fordham as they did to Towson, a school who opted for scholarships after the 2002 season. Back then, a PL team (or two) were regular entrants in the I-AA playoff process and in 2003, it was Colgate that "ran the table" to a 15-0 record and a berth in the national finals. The only team that came close to upsetting them was...uh, well...never mind.
Those days are in the rear view mirror. Since 2003, the league has experienced a noticeable step back in the I-AA football order, with a lack of national rankings and a perception that it is becoming less competitive in the playoffs. With tougher competition from the Ivies on one side and a 40-schoalrship Northeast Conference picking off players on the other, the good times aren't as good for the Seaboard Seven as they once were. And now comes Fordham, ready to pick off a Lehigh recruiting lock here, a Colgate catch there. "Hey, you running backs at Bergen Catholic or that linebacker at Delbarton--why pay $50,000 a year to go to Georgetown? How about a free ride to Fordham, all on us!"
All the more unsettling to PL leadership, then, to see this coach's quote appear on the Lehigh Athletics web site the day after Fordham's announcement:
"At this time, I view Fordham's move to scholarship football as a positive move. I am excited that the League Presidents are committed to discussions on awarding athletic merit aid for all league members. I am certainly a proponent of scholarship football in our league. I have no doubt that scholarships would enhance Patriot League football on the national level, which I believe would help every member institution."
But more telling, this quote from its athletic director:
"The athletic merit financial aid awards that Lehigh offers in sports other than football have contributed positively to yielding student-athletes of desirable academic quality, strong athletic quality and other qualities that Lehigh values. We understand the reasons for Fordham’s decision and hope that the ongoing discussions will enable them to remain a member of the Patriot League.”
Translated: "When the vote comes, we'd like football scholarships too."
Fordham's window runs through 2012, but all signs point to some sort of position by the league whether to pursue football scholarships by the end of the 2010 season. Internet chatter considers that Lehigh and Colgate are for scholarships, Holy Cross against, with Lafayette to side with whatever Lehigh does and Bucknell to follow the majority in either case. Georgetown, which has not expressed an opinion one way or the other, is a presumed "no" on scholarships inasmuch as it has comparatively little to offer for scholarship or financial aid money under any scenario.
The league could opt for any of four options:
1. "Status Quo": No scholarships, bid Fordham adieu and rededicate itself to the non-scholarship credo.
2. "Easy Does It": Allow schools to add a small number of merit scholarships each year, say, five or six per team per year. This would extend the window of full football scholarships out 6-8 years.
3. "Laissez-Faire": Open the door to scholarships (and a considerable competitive imbalance) by allowing each school to set limits as they see fit. If Lehigh and Colgate want 60 scholarships and Holy Cross and Georgetown none, well, good for them.
4. "Step Up Or Step Aside": Set a minimum count for scholarships and hold each member to meeting the minimum. Any plan to set a minimum number would be a cannon pointed squarely at the one and only member whose financial aid numbers are only half of the least funded PL program.
By forcing the league's hand, Fordham has no aspirations to be an Ivy league-esque program any more; in fact, you'll be seeing a lot more Stony Brooks and Hofstras on the Rams' calendar that Columbia and Cornell. The larger question is what it means for the six remaining PL schools, and the one school for whom non-scholarship football is more than just a philosophy, but a financial necessity.
In part 2, Georgetown's options in a scholarship football world. And it's no time to remain quiet about it very much longer.
The League tends to like things, well, quiet. it does not overly promote itself--its football media day is not at ESPN Zone in New York, but a golf club outside Bethlehem, PA. It has no television package for football (indirectly, to protect the Lehigh and Lafayette networks in their local area), and when it comes to the off-season, it likes things quiet as well.
Not this year.
With all the subtlety of a bull in a china shop, Fordham University has turned up the equivalent of a car alarm in the midst of this peace and quiet. And it's not going away. The league famous for eschewing scholarships now has a Trojan Ram inside its walls.
Fordham announced...no, told the Patriot League that it is pursuing a full scholarship program beginning in 2010, come hell or high water. Rather than lose the Rams outright, the Patriot League engaged in a delicate balance of compromise that allows Fordham to remain in the league, except it is ineligible for championships, all-League honors and the like. I'm not sure Fordham cares at this point--they got what they wanted, and will be selling the benefits of a free ride to PL recruits up and down the list, games with Connecticut, Army and Navy, and the very real possibility that they will lay waste to the rest of the league standings while the PL leadership decides what to do about this scholarship mess. It's become the talk --and not too quietly--of the I-AA off season wires.
The symbolism of the Trojan Ram is not far off. For the better part of 25 years, dating back to the days when Rev. John Brooks, S.J. steered Holy Cross out of major college athletics and sought alliances with the Ivy League that would reposition his college as an academic colossus and not just another Boston College or Georgetown (two schools he had varying degrees of cynicism against). It was the insistence that what was then known as the "Colonial League" adopt and defend the policies of non-scholarship athletics that the Ivy Group had created 20 years earlier. "The Last Amateurs", or so we were told.
There were cracks in the wall before, of course, when the next generation of leaders at Holy Cross pulled a similar move and demanded they get basketball scholarships or they would walk. The PL instituted a slow and somewhat deliberative rollout in that sport, and other sports have followed. But not football.
But not anymore.
In a different time, in a different climate, the PL schools would have turned away from Fordham as they did to Towson, a school who opted for scholarships after the 2002 season. Back then, a PL team (or two) were regular entrants in the I-AA playoff process and in 2003, it was Colgate that "ran the table" to a 15-0 record and a berth in the national finals. The only team that came close to upsetting them was...uh, well...never mind.
Those days are in the rear view mirror. Since 2003, the league has experienced a noticeable step back in the I-AA football order, with a lack of national rankings and a perception that it is becoming less competitive in the playoffs. With tougher competition from the Ivies on one side and a 40-schoalrship Northeast Conference picking off players on the other, the good times aren't as good for the Seaboard Seven as they once were. And now comes Fordham, ready to pick off a Lehigh recruiting lock here, a Colgate catch there. "Hey, you running backs at Bergen Catholic or that linebacker at Delbarton--why pay $50,000 a year to go to Georgetown? How about a free ride to Fordham, all on us!"
All the more unsettling to PL leadership, then, to see this coach's quote appear on the Lehigh Athletics web site the day after Fordham's announcement:
"At this time, I view Fordham's move to scholarship football as a positive move. I am excited that the League Presidents are committed to discussions on awarding athletic merit aid for all league members. I am certainly a proponent of scholarship football in our league. I have no doubt that scholarships would enhance Patriot League football on the national level, which I believe would help every member institution."
But more telling, this quote from its athletic director:
"The athletic merit financial aid awards that Lehigh offers in sports other than football have contributed positively to yielding student-athletes of desirable academic quality, strong athletic quality and other qualities that Lehigh values. We understand the reasons for Fordham’s decision and hope that the ongoing discussions will enable them to remain a member of the Patriot League.”
Translated: "When the vote comes, we'd like football scholarships too."
Fordham's window runs through 2012, but all signs point to some sort of position by the league whether to pursue football scholarships by the end of the 2010 season. Internet chatter considers that Lehigh and Colgate are for scholarships, Holy Cross against, with Lafayette to side with whatever Lehigh does and Bucknell to follow the majority in either case. Georgetown, which has not expressed an opinion one way or the other, is a presumed "no" on scholarships inasmuch as it has comparatively little to offer for scholarship or financial aid money under any scenario.
The league could opt for any of four options:
1. "Status Quo": No scholarships, bid Fordham adieu and rededicate itself to the non-scholarship credo.
2. "Easy Does It": Allow schools to add a small number of merit scholarships each year, say, five or six per team per year. This would extend the window of full football scholarships out 6-8 years.
3. "Laissez-Faire": Open the door to scholarships (and a considerable competitive imbalance) by allowing each school to set limits as they see fit. If Lehigh and Colgate want 60 scholarships and Holy Cross and Georgetown none, well, good for them.
4. "Step Up Or Step Aside": Set a minimum count for scholarships and hold each member to meeting the minimum. Any plan to set a minimum number would be a cannon pointed squarely at the one and only member whose financial aid numbers are only half of the least funded PL program.
By forcing the league's hand, Fordham has no aspirations to be an Ivy league-esque program any more; in fact, you'll be seeing a lot more Stony Brooks and Hofstras on the Rams' calendar that Columbia and Cornell. The larger question is what it means for the six remaining PL schools, and the one school for whom non-scholarship football is more than just a philosophy, but a financial necessity.
In part 2, Georgetown's options in a scholarship football world. And it's no time to remain quiet about it very much longer.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
A Tree Falling In The Forest
"Scattershooting while wondering whatever happened to Bus Ham..."
As the printed newspaper marches towards its expected oblivion, a subtle but demonstrable change has preceded it: a staff reporter's regular coverage of events, the "beat", as they used to call it, has gone the way of the Smith-Corona typewriter. Two recent stories affecting Georgetown Football are evidence of this, and a cautionary tale about how sport and its program need to keep watch on the changing skies of information and while the trees that built the print revolution could be staying up a while longer.
Before I get into that, however, some explanation on the first sentence is in order.
It wasn't that long ago when the chief source of information on teams was the daily newspaper, where the beat writers were a window into the world of sports and the stars of tomorrow. Even as they graduated into columnists, one always got the feeling they had an inside look at the games, or as one newsroom wag once dubbed it, "the world of the perspiring arts."
Here in Dallas, columnists began and ended with Blackie Sherrod, the former Ft. Worth Press editor who ran with a crop of Texas sportswriters that are long remembered today--Dan Jenkins, Bud Shrake, Andy Anderson, Mickey Herskowitz, and Dan Cook. Sherrod's weekly column, which began with the "scattershooting" entre, proceeded to weave so many stories into the article that by the time it was all over, you were convinced he forgot more about sports than you'd know, but you enjoyed it all the same.
Every town had their run of great sportswriters. At the Washington Post, it was Shirley Povich and Bob Addie, Mark Asher and Bill Gildea, Dave Kindred and Ken Denlinger, Michael Wilbon and Thomas Boswell. And those that weren't at that level still wrote, a lot.
"These were my childhood heroes," wrote a recent blogger. "These were wordsmiths who made you want to head down to the newsstand on Sunday and buy every out-of-town paper they had — even if your team lost, because you knew they would tell you everything about the game you wanted to know, and would do so in a way that made the words jump off the pages."
But those days are gone. In 1964 , Post staff writer Bus Ham was at the tail end of a 18 year tenure as a sports editor of the paper. He took it upon himself to cover an unusual beat--the revival of Georgetown football in the fall of 1964. Seven stories by Ham covered the run-up to the game, with four stories on page 1 of the Post's sports page in the final ten days.
"Georgetown's student athletes and the game of football scored a smashing triumph yesterday in an exciting revival of the sport on the Hilltop," Ham wrote in an 800 word recap of Georgetown's 28-6 win over NYU.
What would a story like that garner in today's Post? 80 words? Eight?
Today's sports section content is all about subscriptions, little more. At the Post, Montgomery County high school football will get more space in the paper than Georgetown or Howard football, each of which went an entire season without any regular coverage outside its own game. A Virginia Tech game will get more coverage because someone figured out that Hokie alumni buy papers when Tech wins, but Hoya alumni... well, they'll subscribe anyway, so what's the point. And if it weren't for Barker Davis, the Washington Times sports page might ignore Georgetown altogether.
So when Bernard Muir announced his resignation on May 12, where did you hear about it? The Times? The Post? In fact, both were left to run a blurb in the "sports briefs" column when Muir's quiet negotiations were picked up by a Delaware blog. It got big news in the Wilmington News-Journal, but a passing glance in the local papers. They got beat on the story but what's worse, they didn't care.
And outside of the smaller towns, that seems to be the trend in the coverage of college athletics. Keith Groller does a fine job covering Lehigh sports at the Allentown Morning Call, but one gets the feeling that the PL football media pool could all fit into a Toyota Celica and have seats left over. When Fordham announced it was adding scholarships in 2010, it got an Associated Press story and an note in Dick Weiss' basketball blog, little more.
Fordham's move has potentially huge implications for PL football in general and Georgetown in particular. If a reporter had botehrerd to make a few calls, they would have found that Lehigh athletic officials made public statements to the efffect that they'd support a move too, and where Lehigh goes, Lafayette follows. Count Colgate in as well. All of a sudden, you've got a majority of PL schools looking to play at a 60 scholarship level. What does that mean to Georgetown, which has lost 27 of its last 32 as an unremarkable non-scholarship program? What does that mean to a new athletic director coming in the door?
For a hundred years or more, schools have relied on the print media to get the word out about teams, about big games, about its coaches. After all, it was Notre Dame sports information assistant George Strickler that got Harry Stuhldreher, Don Miller, Jim Crowley, and Elmer Layden into uniforms and on horseback, immortalizing Grantland Rice's account of the Four Horsemen. Print media drove college sports into its golden age, but what will drive it going forward?
Sure, it you're one of about 20 schools, there's ESPN. For everyone else, they've got to think ahead.
I was at a Georgetown conference last winter where Geof Rochester (B'81), an executive with World Wrestling Entertainment, summed it up. The three words Georgetown needs to be focusing on when it comes to communications is, "mobile, mobile, mobile". As smartphones continue their assault in market share (with as many as one third of all phones within five years featuring direct data transfer), the flow of information that is being sent by e-mail will make that medium about as useful as putting a stamp on an envelope. Ask anyone under 25 if they'd rather have an e-mail or a text message and see what they say.
Now, a bit of disclosure. I don't own a smartphone (I don't like Apple products and the cost of a data plan for a BlackBerry is still too high for me), but if I had one, would there not be value in getting scores and game highlights sent to me on a real time basis? What about post-game stories? What about coaches comments and video recaps? If I'm in Baton Rouge sitting at the LSU-Louisiana Tech game, why couldn't Georgetown send me the recap from the GU-Richmond game and tag it with a offer to give to the Gridiron Club via an easy link? Talk about connecting with your audience!
It's all part of a comprehensive communications strategy which the post-Muir era of Georgetown athletics must embrace. Georgetown was actually one of the first schools to utilize the web back in 1996, this is another opportunity. Georgetown football can't wait around for the Washington Post to discover I-AA football. By then it will be too late.
Author Stuart Brandwrote that: "Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road."
As the printed newspaper marches towards its expected oblivion, a subtle but demonstrable change has preceded it: a staff reporter's regular coverage of events, the "beat", as they used to call it, has gone the way of the Smith-Corona typewriter. Two recent stories affecting Georgetown Football are evidence of this, and a cautionary tale about how sport and its program need to keep watch on the changing skies of information and while the trees that built the print revolution could be staying up a while longer.
Before I get into that, however, some explanation on the first sentence is in order.
It wasn't that long ago when the chief source of information on teams was the daily newspaper, where the beat writers were a window into the world of sports and the stars of tomorrow. Even as they graduated into columnists, one always got the feeling they had an inside look at the games, or as one newsroom wag once dubbed it, "the world of the perspiring arts."
Here in Dallas, columnists began and ended with Blackie Sherrod, the former Ft. Worth Press editor who ran with a crop of Texas sportswriters that are long remembered today--Dan Jenkins, Bud Shrake, Andy Anderson, Mickey Herskowitz, and Dan Cook. Sherrod's weekly column, which began with the "scattershooting" entre, proceeded to weave so many stories into the article that by the time it was all over, you were convinced he forgot more about sports than you'd know, but you enjoyed it all the same.
Every town had their run of great sportswriters. At the Washington Post, it was Shirley Povich and Bob Addie, Mark Asher and Bill Gildea, Dave Kindred and Ken Denlinger, Michael Wilbon and Thomas Boswell. And those that weren't at that level still wrote, a lot.
"These were my childhood heroes," wrote a recent blogger. "These were wordsmiths who made you want to head down to the newsstand on Sunday and buy every out-of-town paper they had — even if your team lost, because you knew they would tell you everything about the game you wanted to know, and would do so in a way that made the words jump off the pages."
But those days are gone. In 1964 , Post staff writer Bus Ham was at the tail end of a 18 year tenure as a sports editor of the paper. He took it upon himself to cover an unusual beat--the revival of Georgetown football in the fall of 1964. Seven stories by Ham covered the run-up to the game, with four stories on page 1 of the Post's sports page in the final ten days.
"Georgetown's student athletes and the game of football scored a smashing triumph yesterday in an exciting revival of the sport on the Hilltop," Ham wrote in an 800 word recap of Georgetown's 28-6 win over NYU.
What would a story like that garner in today's Post? 80 words? Eight?
Today's sports section content is all about subscriptions, little more. At the Post, Montgomery County high school football will get more space in the paper than Georgetown or Howard football, each of which went an entire season without any regular coverage outside its own game. A Virginia Tech game will get more coverage because someone figured out that Hokie alumni buy papers when Tech wins, but Hoya alumni... well, they'll subscribe anyway, so what's the point. And if it weren't for Barker Davis, the Washington Times sports page might ignore Georgetown altogether.
So when Bernard Muir announced his resignation on May 12, where did you hear about it? The Times? The Post? In fact, both were left to run a blurb in the "sports briefs" column when Muir's quiet negotiations were picked up by a Delaware blog. It got big news in the Wilmington News-Journal, but a passing glance in the local papers. They got beat on the story but what's worse, they didn't care.
And outside of the smaller towns, that seems to be the trend in the coverage of college athletics. Keith Groller does a fine job covering Lehigh sports at the Allentown Morning Call, but one gets the feeling that the PL football media pool could all fit into a Toyota Celica and have seats left over. When Fordham announced it was adding scholarships in 2010, it got an Associated Press story and an note in Dick Weiss' basketball blog, little more.
Fordham's move has potentially huge implications for PL football in general and Georgetown in particular. If a reporter had botehrerd to make a few calls, they would have found that Lehigh athletic officials made public statements to the efffect that they'd support a move too, and where Lehigh goes, Lafayette follows. Count Colgate in as well. All of a sudden, you've got a majority of PL schools looking to play at a 60 scholarship level. What does that mean to Georgetown, which has lost 27 of its last 32 as an unremarkable non-scholarship program? What does that mean to a new athletic director coming in the door?
For a hundred years or more, schools have relied on the print media to get the word out about teams, about big games, about its coaches. After all, it was Notre Dame sports information assistant George Strickler that got Harry Stuhldreher, Don Miller, Jim Crowley, and Elmer Layden into uniforms and on horseback, immortalizing Grantland Rice's account of the Four Horsemen. Print media drove college sports into its golden age, but what will drive it going forward?
Sure, it you're one of about 20 schools, there's ESPN. For everyone else, they've got to think ahead.
I was at a Georgetown conference last winter where Geof Rochester (B'81), an executive with World Wrestling Entertainment, summed it up. The three words Georgetown needs to be focusing on when it comes to communications is, "mobile, mobile, mobile". As smartphones continue their assault in market share (with as many as one third of all phones within five years featuring direct data transfer), the flow of information that is being sent by e-mail will make that medium about as useful as putting a stamp on an envelope. Ask anyone under 25 if they'd rather have an e-mail or a text message and see what they say.
Now, a bit of disclosure. I don't own a smartphone (I don't like Apple products and the cost of a data plan for a BlackBerry is still too high for me), but if I had one, would there not be value in getting scores and game highlights sent to me on a real time basis? What about post-game stories? What about coaches comments and video recaps? If I'm in Baton Rouge sitting at the LSU-Louisiana Tech game, why couldn't Georgetown send me the recap from the GU-Richmond game and tag it with a offer to give to the Gridiron Club via an easy link? Talk about connecting with your audience!
It's all part of a comprehensive communications strategy which the post-Muir era of Georgetown athletics must embrace. Georgetown was actually one of the first schools to utilize the web back in 1996, this is another opportunity. Georgetown football can't wait around for the Washington Post to discover I-AA football. By then it will be too late.
Author Stuart Brandwrote that: "Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road."
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Muir's Move
When Bernard Muir was selected Georgetown's athletic director in 2005, there were more than a few Georgetown people worried that a 36 year old rising star like Muir could one day be the target of another school. But I doubt anyone had Delaware on a short list.
Muir's departure has set off all sorts of talk on the Internet, and, I suspect, in college athletic departments as well. Athletics is a close-knit community, so they tend to follow the water cooler talk. Fans may assume it's as simple as (choose one)...a) Delaware made a can't -miss offer, b) There is something big about to happen at Delaware, or c) there is something wrong at Georgetown, and particualrly when it comes to Georgetown football.
But I'll choose d): none of the above. It's a little more complicated like that.
The job of athletic director at Georgetown has changed a lot since the days of Jack Hagerty, and Muir took it a step further. He saw the need to run the athletic department more as a business than a department of student affairs, and with that change let go of a number of long-time staff in favor of a new group of administrators around college athletics. In his first two years he replaced over a half dozen head coaches and built up the compliance and support staffs. He was, in effect, the CEO of a $28 million enterprise, albeit a CEO who worked 60-70 hour weeks out of an undersized office in McDonough Gym, who traveled with teams, represented Georgetown in numerous Big East, PL, and NCAA settings, was a sounding board to every parent, alumnus, or donor that pulled him aside, and still had to balance a budget in the process. Oh yeah, and figure out how to solve the Georgetown Paradox.
And he didn't.
The Georgetown Paradox wasn't cited in any of the media reports on Muir, or in Jack DeGioia's comments, or even in the praise afforded him by the Delaware press. It's somewhat invisible to the fan base who sees a Big East game or buys a Georegetown cap or t-shirt, but ask any player who's gone through the system in any sport, and while they might not know it as the Paradox, they know the issue.
Georgetown is a square peg in the round hole of major college athletics. To some, it wants it both ways: it wants to be Columbia during the week and Notre Dame on the weekends, attracting world class talent with high school facilities, to compete with the very best with good coaches and good intentions, but not much more. It's not that Georgetown doesn't want these things, but amidst the short and long term struggles of an underendowed, overleveraged university, athletics often falls behind the priority of the monent. "Maybe in the next campaign", they'll say.
That imbalance is a common refrain at Georgetown--"23rd in US News, 78th in endowment." There's no rational reason Georgetown would be on the same stage as the Ivies, Stanford, Northwestern and Duke, but there they are, a mixture of good timing, a great location, and a niche as a internationationally relevant university that draws students and scholars within walking distance of the centers of power. If Georgetown were located in Parkersburg, WV, this would be a totally different conversation.
But so it is with athletics--the Georgetown community expects great things but the school isn't ready or able to commit large sums to the ingredients that surround it: scholarships, training, gameday facilities, and institutional support. That would mean to some Georgetown is serious about athletics, which is assumed in some musty quarters as becoming less serious about their own sometimes arcane academic pursuits. Georgetown is serious about annual support, but things keep getting in the way on capital projects.
And it's not just fans, but the Big East conference that expects more. The conference has stepped up its requirements for schools to provide minimum schoalrship and coaching support for all its teams, not content to be just a good basketball conference. During Muir's tenure, Georgetown's athletic budget grew by nearly 40 percent to a level comparable with some I-A schools. But most of its sports remain under-funded relative to its peers, even at Big East minimums, and its facilities do not stand the test. The paradox:
Georgetown is a school which expects to excel in athetics.
Georgetown is a prestigious school.
Prestigious schools do not commit to major capital funding for athletics.
Therefore, Georgetown is a prestigious school which expects to excel in athetics but not commit to major capital funds in actually doing so.
An example of this conflict stands at mid-campus. While the MSF sits in its temporary glory, its north end zone sees a brand new $80+ million building, whose dean pushed his way to the front of the facilities line by making the case that Georgetown couldn't be a top 25 business school without a new building. Never mind that Old North was renovated from the ground up in 1983 and the Car Barn was a serviceable academic facility since the early 1990's, but George Daly sold his new building as a recruiting tool for students and faculty, a revenue producer (through executive education) and a part of the 21st century Georgetown. The fact that it is built on the grounds of an baseball field is ironic, but not the story.
And as the unnamed business building shines, the MSF stands as an unintended symbol of Muir's years at Georgetown. It opened four months after he arrived, served as the backfrop for a new coach who was going to reform what Bob Benson left with a 4-7 team, and draw the kind of support which would get the project built, a source of pride in Georgetown Football and the University itself, not to mention the first permanent athletic facility in 50+ years. Instead, the MSF sits alone, where major donors couldn't get assurances when the project would be greenlighted, with recruits that could no longer be told they'd play in a new stadium by the time they were seniors, and without the buzz of a team that would be justifying the investments placed in lots of new grants/scholarships and lots of new seats. If Kevin Kelly was 27-5 entering the 2009 season, people would be clamoring to get both. Instead, he's 5-27, and the temporary seats remain. Bernard Muir couldn't get the dirt flying again.
But maybe even that wouldn't have been enough. Football has a field--Georgetown's natiionally ranked track team has not even had a track of its own in 13 years. A number of years ago, track coach Ron Helmer called out Georgetown at an awards banquet on the institutional neglect facing track, saying that the fact they had done so it well might have minimized the dire need for a track. After over 20 years as a Georgetown coach, Helmer got up and left for Indiana in 2006, a school with not only a 12,000 seat outdoor facility, but an indoor track facility as well. And Georgetown still has no NCAA-grade track, although it practically takes an act of Congress to get the local community to sign off on construction of any kind.
Helmer was a builder with a tool kit, but had no bricks and mortar to build with it, and he found someone willing to give him both. So too with Muir. In that sense, Delaware is going to provide Muir with plenty of bricks and mortar to rebuild his legacy with. He wasn't running away from Georgetown, but Delaware presents an opportunity for to build a program that Georgetown did not, with a lot less red tape and a much faster timeline.
The next athletic director faces a host of challenges. For the first time since 1981, not a single Georgetown program earned a win in NCAA tournament play. Track labors without a track, the crew rows on without a boathouse in sight. Sooner rather than later, the absence of a basketball practice facility will become an issue. And at the conclusion of its worst decade in school history, people are expecting to see real results in football to justify the commitments that have been made and those additional commitments that await. If the Hoyas have another one or two win season, Bernard Muir won't have to put his original coaching hire to scrutiny, but someone else will.
I've met Bernard Muir on a number of occasions and remain impressed by his ability to build a strategy for long term success. Delaware will be well served by his arrival there, and Georgetown will be well served by a search for his successor.
Muir's departure has set off all sorts of talk on the Internet, and, I suspect, in college athletic departments as well. Athletics is a close-knit community, so they tend to follow the water cooler talk. Fans may assume it's as simple as (choose one)...a) Delaware made a can't -miss offer, b) There is something big about to happen at Delaware, or c) there is something wrong at Georgetown, and particualrly when it comes to Georgetown football.
But I'll choose d): none of the above. It's a little more complicated like that.
The job of athletic director at Georgetown has changed a lot since the days of Jack Hagerty, and Muir took it a step further. He saw the need to run the athletic department more as a business than a department of student affairs, and with that change let go of a number of long-time staff in favor of a new group of administrators around college athletics. In his first two years he replaced over a half dozen head coaches and built up the compliance and support staffs. He was, in effect, the CEO of a $28 million enterprise, albeit a CEO who worked 60-70 hour weeks out of an undersized office in McDonough Gym, who traveled with teams, represented Georgetown in numerous Big East, PL, and NCAA settings, was a sounding board to every parent, alumnus, or donor that pulled him aside, and still had to balance a budget in the process. Oh yeah, and figure out how to solve the Georgetown Paradox.
And he didn't.
The Georgetown Paradox wasn't cited in any of the media reports on Muir, or in Jack DeGioia's comments, or even in the praise afforded him by the Delaware press. It's somewhat invisible to the fan base who sees a Big East game or buys a Georegetown cap or t-shirt, but ask any player who's gone through the system in any sport, and while they might not know it as the Paradox, they know the issue.
Georgetown is a square peg in the round hole of major college athletics. To some, it wants it both ways: it wants to be Columbia during the week and Notre Dame on the weekends, attracting world class talent with high school facilities, to compete with the very best with good coaches and good intentions, but not much more. It's not that Georgetown doesn't want these things, but amidst the short and long term struggles of an underendowed, overleveraged university, athletics often falls behind the priority of the monent. "Maybe in the next campaign", they'll say.
That imbalance is a common refrain at Georgetown--"23rd in US News, 78th in endowment." There's no rational reason Georgetown would be on the same stage as the Ivies, Stanford, Northwestern and Duke, but there they are, a mixture of good timing, a great location, and a niche as a internationationally relevant university that draws students and scholars within walking distance of the centers of power. If Georgetown were located in Parkersburg, WV, this would be a totally different conversation.
But so it is with athletics--the Georgetown community expects great things but the school isn't ready or able to commit large sums to the ingredients that surround it: scholarships, training, gameday facilities, and institutional support. That would mean to some Georgetown is serious about athletics, which is assumed in some musty quarters as becoming less serious about their own sometimes arcane academic pursuits. Georgetown is serious about annual support, but things keep getting in the way on capital projects.
And it's not just fans, but the Big East conference that expects more. The conference has stepped up its requirements for schools to provide minimum schoalrship and coaching support for all its teams, not content to be just a good basketball conference. During Muir's tenure, Georgetown's athletic budget grew by nearly 40 percent to a level comparable with some I-A schools. But most of its sports remain under-funded relative to its peers, even at Big East minimums, and its facilities do not stand the test. The paradox:
Georgetown is a school which expects to excel in athetics.
Georgetown is a prestigious school.
Prestigious schools do not commit to major capital funding for athletics.
Therefore, Georgetown is a prestigious school which expects to excel in athetics but not commit to major capital funds in actually doing so.
An example of this conflict stands at mid-campus. While the MSF sits in its temporary glory, its north end zone sees a brand new $80+ million building, whose dean pushed his way to the front of the facilities line by making the case that Georgetown couldn't be a top 25 business school without a new building. Never mind that Old North was renovated from the ground up in 1983 and the Car Barn was a serviceable academic facility since the early 1990's, but George Daly sold his new building as a recruiting tool for students and faculty, a revenue producer (through executive education) and a part of the 21st century Georgetown. The fact that it is built on the grounds of an baseball field is ironic, but not the story.
And as the unnamed business building shines, the MSF stands as an unintended symbol of Muir's years at Georgetown. It opened four months after he arrived, served as the backfrop for a new coach who was going to reform what Bob Benson left with a 4-7 team, and draw the kind of support which would get the project built, a source of pride in Georgetown Football and the University itself, not to mention the first permanent athletic facility in 50+ years. Instead, the MSF sits alone, where major donors couldn't get assurances when the project would be greenlighted, with recruits that could no longer be told they'd play in a new stadium by the time they were seniors, and without the buzz of a team that would be justifying the investments placed in lots of new grants/scholarships and lots of new seats. If Kevin Kelly was 27-5 entering the 2009 season, people would be clamoring to get both. Instead, he's 5-27, and the temporary seats remain. Bernard Muir couldn't get the dirt flying again.
But maybe even that wouldn't have been enough. Football has a field--Georgetown's natiionally ranked track team has not even had a track of its own in 13 years. A number of years ago, track coach Ron Helmer called out Georgetown at an awards banquet on the institutional neglect facing track, saying that the fact they had done so it well might have minimized the dire need for a track. After over 20 years as a Georgetown coach, Helmer got up and left for Indiana in 2006, a school with not only a 12,000 seat outdoor facility, but an indoor track facility as well. And Georgetown still has no NCAA-grade track, although it practically takes an act of Congress to get the local community to sign off on construction of any kind.
Helmer was a builder with a tool kit, but had no bricks and mortar to build with it, and he found someone willing to give him both. So too with Muir. In that sense, Delaware is going to provide Muir with plenty of bricks and mortar to rebuild his legacy with. He wasn't running away from Georgetown, but Delaware presents an opportunity for to build a program that Georgetown did not, with a lot less red tape and a much faster timeline.
The next athletic director faces a host of challenges. For the first time since 1981, not a single Georgetown program earned a win in NCAA tournament play. Track labors without a track, the crew rows on without a boathouse in sight. Sooner rather than later, the absence of a basketball practice facility will become an issue. And at the conclusion of its worst decade in school history, people are expecting to see real results in football to justify the commitments that have been made and those additional commitments that await. If the Hoyas have another one or two win season, Bernard Muir won't have to put his original coaching hire to scrutiny, but someone else will.
I've met Bernard Muir on a number of occasions and remain impressed by his ability to build a strategy for long term success. Delaware will be well served by his arrival there, and Georgetown will be well served by a search for his successor.
Monday, April 27, 2009
All Football Is Local
It's late April, which means that spring practices have concluded. Recruiting has concluded for the class of 2009, and a new class is around the corner. But there's an ongoing gap in football recruiting that needs attention, and it's not limited to Coach Kelly's tenure but has been ongoing for years. You'll see a lot of names from Ohio, from Texas, from Georgia. What you don't see are a lot of names from the District, from Maryland, or from Virginia.
Like charity, recruiting starts at home.
Over the past month, I've been doing some research on the Georgetown basketball teams of the 1960's. Most of you haven't heard much about them because, well, they were good but never truly great--Georegetown didn't win a single post-season NCAA or NIT game for from 1943 to 1978.
"On the one hand, Georgetown was a parochial school and had a ferocious desire to win games, perhaps as a way of cocking a snook at the WASPs," wrote Sports Illustrated's Bil Gilbert in a 1980 article. "On the other, it admired the gentleman-sport tradition of the Ivies, the concept that young gentlemen without a lot of undignified training could dash out on the field and whale the tar out of their opponents for the greater glory of the dear old blue-and-gray.
"In the 1920s and '30s, Georgetown was a genuine collegiate athletic power, especially in football. After World War II bigtime football became too expensive and too demanding, and the university abandoned the sport in 1950, a blow to pride from which many old Hoyas have never fully recovered.... Eventually Georgetown's athletic ego depended largely on how well the basketball team did. Usually, it did badly. Occasionally, Georgetown would pull off a glorious upset, but these triumphs were too infrequent to compensate for all the defeats. Usually, the teams were a bit too slow, a bit too small and, to get to the heart of the matter, much too white."
But it wasn't simply black and white. It was a matter of zip codes.
The Georgetown basketball teams of the 1960's were almost exclusively kids from schools in Northern New Jersey, a Philadelphia Catholic League player here, a WCAC kid from Gonzaga there...and that was about it. That's not a knock on the St. Peter's Prep and Don Bosco alumni out there, because some of these players were quite talented, but with so much other talent within an hour of the campus, Georgetown passed on every major DC basketball star of the 1960's, many of whom played games on its very campus.
What would Georgetown have been like with John Thompson, Dave Bing, and John Austin in the 1964 lineup? Or Bernie Williams, Austin Carr, and Tom Little in 1966? Bob Lewis went to high school just one block from the Georgetown campus, but he became a first team All-American 275 miles south in Chapel Hill, NC.
As it relates to football, Washington DC isn't the football hotbed it has been in basketball, but there's local talent that either Georgetown's isn't reaching or, more likely, they aren't reaching back.
Ten years ago, Georgetown had 18 local kids on the roster and went 9-2. The 2008 football roster contained just seven, with only one from Washington DC. To put this in perspective, five of the seven schools in the Patriot League had more local DC kids on their rosters than Georgetown did. And while the Georgetown admissions model isn't expecting 25 or 30 local kids on the roster like Lehigh and Lafayette are accustomed to, the visible lack of any local talent feeds on itself in other ways, from a lack of public interest in the program, a lack of press coverage, and a lack of commitment by talented local kids. When Jordan Scott or Nick Hartigan wanted to go to college, they went elsewhere.
To borrow a basketball line tossed Georgetown's way from Billy Packer, "I think they need a superstar. Why would a superstar go there?"
Is there a connection in all this? Some researchers at Mercer University think so. They have developed what is called the "College Football Recruiting Prediction Model" which annually predicts college choices for about 70% of the nation's top high school recruits each year. They wrote, in part,
"There were a number of factors that we thought would significantly impact the decision of the high school athlete that didn’t. For example, factors like the school’s graduation rate, the number of Bowl Championship Series (BCS) bowl appearances, the current roster depth at the recruited player’s position, the number of players from a specific college drafted by the NFL, and even the number of national championships won by a particular program don’t systematically influence the decisions of high school athletes. Surprised? So were we. What, then, does matter? As it turns out the following factors DO significantly impact the decision of high school athletes:
- Whether the athlete made an “official visit” to a specific college
- Whether the school is in a BCS conference
- The distance from the high school athlete’s hometown to a specific school
- Whether the recruit is in the same state as a specific school
- The final ranking of a specific school in the previous year of competition
- The number of conference titles a school has recorded in recent years
- Whether the school is currently under a “bowl ban” for violating NCAA rules
- The current number of scholarship reductions a school faces for violating NCAA rules
- The size of the team’s stadium (measured in terms of seating capacity)
- Whether the school has an on-campus stadium
- The current age of the team’s stadium
close to home, are in possession of good physical facilities, and are in good
graces with the NCAA."
Georgetown has always recruited nationally and will continue to do so. Many of its greatest football legends came from places outside the Beltway, and that's fine. To rebuild this program doesn't require local talent, but it's a region other schools are hitting early and often, and Georgetown has not kept up.
At present, the unofficial 2009 list has just two local recruits.
In a city that can say "We Are Georgetown" all winter long, are there not more who will say it in the fall?
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Online, On Point
In the midst of NCAA tournament coverage, it's natural that football talk takes a back seat.
And when I came across an article by Binghamton University alum (by way of Harpur College) Tony Kornheiser singing the praises of his school, I took it for what it was worth: a college basketball column. If course, it took one quote from a columnist at the Washington Post to grab my attention:
"I’m a sports writer of longstanding and the first time I ever went to a college football game that I didn’t cover, my son went to Penn and I was 56 years old. There are fine athletic schools that make their reputation on basketball, all those Catholic schools in the Big East, Georgetown has been able to do without a football team."
"Without a football team"? You didn't really say that Tony, did you? Don't you read your own paper?
(Oops.)
OK, so maybe Tony hasn't spent many Saturdays climbing into a press box at the MSF...no, make that any. But it does speak to an ongoing challenge for Georgetown in the midst of its worst decade (by wins and losses) in the program's 120+ year history--how do you get the word out about a program who a lot of people apparently never hear of, or don't hear anything good about?
Georgetown's challenge is to balance publicity versus promotion for its sports--publicity is free, of course, promotion costs money. And to further complicate matters, publicity is a lot different than it was a generation ago, when the only audience was a collection of beat writers whose names were enscribed inside the pocket-sized media guides that schools prepared before every season. Thanks to the Internet, everyone's the audience.
Until further notice, one has to assume "promotion" is largely limited to revenue producing sports, of which there is one - men's basketball. But publicity is the opportunity to leverage the tools at its disposal to not only publicize Georgetown football, but make a case for it. If the Kelly staff drops another one or two-win season at the feet of the Patriot League, Georgetown doesn't need to hear the grumbling of unconnected alumni asking "why are we even doing this?"
What the specifics are, I'm not sure: I'll leave that to the Gridiron Club, but here are some initial thoughts.
Let's start with a mission statement. Mission statements are, by their very nature, expansive and not terribly specific. Take a look at this mission statement:
"We aspire to be an employer of choice, providing a rewarding and team-oriented environment where a diverse group of professionals with integrity and vision work continuously to enhance our position as a formidable competitor and global market leader. In responding to a diverse marketplace, we are committed to our customer base, products, suppliers, communities, and employees to create a multicultural and diverse organization."
Sounds great, right? That's the mission statement of AIG Corp.
OK, then, the mission statement at a Division III college:
"The football program at [the college] will be a part of the educational process for the student-athletes participating in the program. In addition to learning the skills of playing football on the college level, our players will be taught the values associated with being a good citizen, a good student, and a good teammate. These values will assist our players in their lives and careers beyond their undergraduate years at the college. We want out players to be involved with the college in activities other than football."
Georgetown has clear goals for its program--let's get them out there: not just for the uninformed, but for the supporters, the benefactors, the parents, and the students themselves. Everyone works better when they all know where a program is heading, what it expects, and what it aspires to.
More than words, however, the Internet allows opportunities unforeseen in recent years to extend the message of a program beyond the campus and its borders. Yes, the Internet has brought game recaps, box scores, and even audio and video (if you know where to find it) to the community beyond the gates. There's even more around the corner.
A brief look on the alumni pages of the University notes some new icons with some unfamiliar names: Webcasts, Fora.TV, iTunes U. These Web 2.0 technologies have the potential to revolutionize how the Georgetown message is distributed to individuals and groups which may never see the campus, much less learn from their professors and speakers. Maybe coaches, too.
To date, these embyonic programs have focused on weighty, serious topics. "This is a wonderful opportunity to extend Georgetown’s mission by bringing university content to a global audience and fostering global discussions and understanding on some of the most important issues of our time,” said University spokesperson Julie Bataille on the debut of iTunes U.
Good people can agree to disagree, but if iTunes U is nothing more than a home for discussions on the gravitas of foreign affairs, it will never meet its potential.
And this is where Athletics needs to play a role.
The Georgetown story is not just about realpolitik, it's about the leadership of its students and alumni. The football program has numerous stories from its ranks that would be well suited for a podcast or video presentation.
Can it help with recruiting and fundraising? Yes. Can it do more than that? Absolutely.
And yet, there needs to be structure. Podcasts for podcasts sake are lost in the mix of the online universe. A strategic direction for utilizing these technologies as part of the overall athletics experience is vital, and now is the time for football to take a leadership role. The more I learn about this program, the more I know how important it is in providing academic and athletic leaders within the Georgetown University community, and for the communities outside the gates as a whole.
Let's get a plan together and tell the story.
And when I came across an article by Binghamton University alum (by way of Harpur College) Tony Kornheiser singing the praises of his school, I took it for what it was worth: a college basketball column. If course, it took one quote from a columnist at the Washington Post to grab my attention:
"I’m a sports writer of longstanding and the first time I ever went to a college football game that I didn’t cover, my son went to Penn and I was 56 years old. There are fine athletic schools that make their reputation on basketball, all those Catholic schools in the Big East, Georgetown has been able to do without a football team."
"Without a football team"? You didn't really say that Tony, did you? Don't you read your own paper?
(Oops.)
OK, so maybe Tony hasn't spent many Saturdays climbing into a press box at the MSF...no, make that any. But it does speak to an ongoing challenge for Georgetown in the midst of its worst decade (by wins and losses) in the program's 120+ year history--how do you get the word out about a program who a lot of people apparently never hear of, or don't hear anything good about?
Georgetown's challenge is to balance publicity versus promotion for its sports--publicity is free, of course, promotion costs money. And to further complicate matters, publicity is a lot different than it was a generation ago, when the only audience was a collection of beat writers whose names were enscribed inside the pocket-sized media guides that schools prepared before every season. Thanks to the Internet, everyone's the audience.
Until further notice, one has to assume "promotion" is largely limited to revenue producing sports, of which there is one - men's basketball. But publicity is the opportunity to leverage the tools at its disposal to not only publicize Georgetown football, but make a case for it. If the Kelly staff drops another one or two-win season at the feet of the Patriot League, Georgetown doesn't need to hear the grumbling of unconnected alumni asking "why are we even doing this?"
What the specifics are, I'm not sure: I'll leave that to the Gridiron Club, but here are some initial thoughts.
Let's start with a mission statement. Mission statements are, by their very nature, expansive and not terribly specific. Take a look at this mission statement:
"We aspire to be an employer of choice, providing a rewarding and team-oriented environment where a diverse group of professionals with integrity and vision work continuously to enhance our position as a formidable competitor and global market leader. In responding to a diverse marketplace, we are committed to our customer base, products, suppliers, communities, and employees to create a multicultural and diverse organization."
Sounds great, right? That's the mission statement of AIG Corp.
OK, then, the mission statement at a Division III college:
"The football program at [the college] will be a part of the educational process for the student-athletes participating in the program. In addition to learning the skills of playing football on the college level, our players will be taught the values associated with being a good citizen, a good student, and a good teammate. These values will assist our players in their lives and careers beyond their undergraduate years at the college. We want out players to be involved with the college in activities other than football."
Georgetown has clear goals for its program--let's get them out there: not just for the uninformed, but for the supporters, the benefactors, the parents, and the students themselves. Everyone works better when they all know where a program is heading, what it expects, and what it aspires to.
More than words, however, the Internet allows opportunities unforeseen in recent years to extend the message of a program beyond the campus and its borders. Yes, the Internet has brought game recaps, box scores, and even audio and video (if you know where to find it) to the community beyond the gates. There's even more around the corner.
A brief look on the alumni pages of the University notes some new icons with some unfamiliar names: Webcasts, Fora.TV, iTunes U. These Web 2.0 technologies have the potential to revolutionize how the Georgetown message is distributed to individuals and groups which may never see the campus, much less learn from their professors and speakers. Maybe coaches, too.
To date, these embyonic programs have focused on weighty, serious topics. "This is a wonderful opportunity to extend Georgetown’s mission by bringing university content to a global audience and fostering global discussions and understanding on some of the most important issues of our time,” said University spokesperson Julie Bataille on the debut of iTunes U.
Good people can agree to disagree, but if iTunes U is nothing more than a home for discussions on the gravitas of foreign affairs, it will never meet its potential.
And this is where Athletics needs to play a role.
The Georgetown story is not just about realpolitik, it's about the leadership of its students and alumni. The football program has numerous stories from its ranks that would be well suited for a podcast or video presentation.
- I want people to hear about David Fajgenbaum and his efforts to build a nationwide support network for families who have lost parents to cancer.
- I want them to hear about Janne Kouri's battle with paralysis and how he is helping others succeed through his efforts.
- I want everyone to hear about the lessons learned by Gen. George Casey on a football field 40 years ago that helped him in a distinguished military career.
Can it help with recruiting and fundraising? Yes. Can it do more than that? Absolutely.
And yet, there needs to be structure. Podcasts for podcasts sake are lost in the mix of the online universe. A strategic direction for utilizing these technologies as part of the overall athletics experience is vital, and now is the time for football to take a leadership role. The more I learn about this program, the more I know how important it is in providing academic and athletic leaders within the Georgetown University community, and for the communities outside the gates as a whole.
Let's get a plan together and tell the story.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Let There Be Light
Some news (and perhaps a little future history) was made this past week, and few noticed it.
Not on GUHoyas.com. Not in the Washington Post. Not even at HoyaSaxa.com (though it was saved for this post). The news was from The HOYA, where it was reported that lights were installed on the unnamed but no less busy Multi-Sport Field.
Staff writer Kevin Suyo is only a sophomore, so his use of the phrase "Harbin Field" is either a sign of a longtime fan or the fact that the "Multi-Sport Field" name has lost its touch with the student body.
It's sometimes lost its touch with the University, too.
A quote from University spokesperson Julie Bataille, herself a former college journalist, tells the story of this project. "The field has been enhanced over the past few years, with the project being completed in phases as funds are available,” she said.
Of course, that's not quite true. Nothing has been enhanced on the field for quite a while, or about the time the Brown Bears came to town for the 2005 home opener. The temporary stands, the temporary fencing, the reused soccer scoreboard...all signs of a project which sends a very mixed message to recruits, players, and alumni that Georgetown wants to support the sports of football and lacrosse.
So this is why lighting is important--it not only opens up the field for extended practices (no more spring ball at a high school field), it adds three words not heard at Georgetown since the Truman administration: night football games.
Back in the 1940's and early 1950's, Georgetown played most of its games at night, owing to the fact that the Senators used Griffith Stadium by day. When the team reformed at Kehoe Field, the old Kehoe had no such option, and while lights were constructed in 1979, they were not built to have the coverage for a nighttime game.
Yes, maybe Coach Kelly is old-school enough that he wants all games played in the afternoon, end of story, but Georgetown ought to give serious consideration to getting one or two 2009 home games under the lights. Attendance would increase, particularly among students to whom 1:00 pm on a Saturday is brunch time, and add something long since missing at a Hoya football game--a dash of excitement.
Now many Georgetown students come from an area of the country where Friday afternoon and Saturday morning football games draw tepid interest. If you happen to come from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, Florida, or a few other places, the so-called "Friday Night Lights" bring communities together in a big way during high school football season. And among colleges, particularly those in the Sun Belt, an evening game in the fall is a special occasion that brings fans together in a big way.
Nighttime athletics, especially on the weekend, is a somewhat lost tradition at Georgetown. Men's basketball games are almost uniformly in the early afternoon at Verizon Center, and even the women's games tend to be played before, not after, dusk. But for local alumni who are busy with the kids in the early afternoon, the out of towners that can't get up at 6:00 am to make a 1:00 kickoff, or for the students that would rather watch the early game on TV than in the bleachers, a night or game or two might raise the level of interest and participation in Georgetown football that has been much lacking in recent years.
It might even help in the won-loss column. Since 1997, Georgetown is 3-1 in games under the lights, all on the road, including a pair of last minute wins at San Diego and Bucknell.
Hey, every little bit helps.
Not on GUHoyas.com. Not in the Washington Post. Not even at HoyaSaxa.com (though it was saved for this post). The news was from The HOYA, where it was reported that lights were installed on the unnamed but no less busy Multi-Sport Field.
Staff writer Kevin Suyo is only a sophomore, so his use of the phrase "Harbin Field" is either a sign of a longtime fan or the fact that the "Multi-Sport Field" name has lost its touch with the student body.
It's sometimes lost its touch with the University, too.
A quote from University spokesperson Julie Bataille, herself a former college journalist, tells the story of this project. "The field has been enhanced over the past few years, with the project being completed in phases as funds are available,” she said.
Of course, that's not quite true. Nothing has been enhanced on the field for quite a while, or about the time the Brown Bears came to town for the 2005 home opener. The temporary stands, the temporary fencing, the reused soccer scoreboard...all signs of a project which sends a very mixed message to recruits, players, and alumni that Georgetown wants to support the sports of football and lacrosse.
So this is why lighting is important--it not only opens up the field for extended practices (no more spring ball at a high school field), it adds three words not heard at Georgetown since the Truman administration: night football games.
Back in the 1940's and early 1950's, Georgetown played most of its games at night, owing to the fact that the Senators used Griffith Stadium by day. When the team reformed at Kehoe Field, the old Kehoe had no such option, and while lights were constructed in 1979, they were not built to have the coverage for a nighttime game.
Yes, maybe Coach Kelly is old-school enough that he wants all games played in the afternoon, end of story, but Georgetown ought to give serious consideration to getting one or two 2009 home games under the lights. Attendance would increase, particularly among students to whom 1:00 pm on a Saturday is brunch time, and add something long since missing at a Hoya football game--a dash of excitement.
Now many Georgetown students come from an area of the country where Friday afternoon and Saturday morning football games draw tepid interest. If you happen to come from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, Florida, or a few other places, the so-called "Friday Night Lights" bring communities together in a big way during high school football season. And among colleges, particularly those in the Sun Belt, an evening game in the fall is a special occasion that brings fans together in a big way.
Nighttime athletics, especially on the weekend, is a somewhat lost tradition at Georgetown. Men's basketball games are almost uniformly in the early afternoon at Verizon Center, and even the women's games tend to be played before, not after, dusk. But for local alumni who are busy with the kids in the early afternoon, the out of towners that can't get up at 6:00 am to make a 1:00 kickoff, or for the students that would rather watch the early game on TV than in the bleachers, a night or game or two might raise the level of interest and participation in Georgetown football that has been much lacking in recent years.
It might even help in the won-loss column. Since 1997, Georgetown is 3-1 in games under the lights, all on the road, including a pair of last minute wins at San Diego and Bucknell.
Hey, every little bit helps.
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