Touch of Madness

Excuse to post Night Ranger for the win!

While dozens, if not hundreds, of schools of all sizes either opened the college basketball season with Midnight Madness-esque festivities last Friday night—or are planning a similarly themed party at some point in the preseason, a la Iona tonight and Stony Brook next week—Mo Cassara and the Flying Dutchmen are getting underway in a low-key fashion. The first practice of 2011-12 came and went late last Friday afternoon with nary an undergrad nailing a half-court shot and having his tuition paid for by ESPN and his books covered by Dickie V.

And other than the season ticket holder meet-and-greet scheduled for next Thursday, practice will continue unfolding in perfectly routine fashion leading up to the season opener against Long Island three weeks from tonight. Cassara and the marketing staff at Hofstra figure their efforts are better utilized focusing on filling the Arena for that rare Friday night home game and using that as a springboard to a season that features a program-record 17 home games rather than on an event long on filler and short on substance.

That’s not to say Midnight Madness won’t someday actually arrive at Hofstra (those of a certain age—mine—will recall that Midnight Madness in the Jay Wright Era didn’t actually include basketball). But holding Midnight Madness now would be like planning an extension on a house whose foundation has barely been poured. The program made great strides expanding its heretofore meager fan base last year, but there’s still work to be done retaining the students and other newcomers to the bandwagon last year.

Plus, you don’t need Midnight Madness to go a little mad. For one thing, these realignment rumors will make anyone go nutty. How about Stuart Rabinowitz, that noted sports fan who is less than two years removed from begging Mike Francesa to get Hofstra out of the CAA and into the Atlantic 10, not only serving as the president of the CAA Council of Presidents/Chancellors but, per the New York Times, cold-calling Charlotte, George Washington, Richmond and Boston University to see if they’d like to join the CAA?

As the kids say: What is up with that? I mean, geez, two of those schools play that dreaded brand of I-AA football. What does Rabinowitz say to 2008 national champion Richmond as well as Charlotte, which will begin I-AA play in 2013? “I was just kidding, CAA football is awesome!”

I half-think Rabinowitz’ new gig is just his way of paying homage to horror movies past and present: “We all go a little mad sometimes.”

Anyway, Rabinowitz suddenly emerging as a member of the CAA’s inner circle is just one of the reasons I’m a little less WHOOHOO WE’RE GOING TO THE A-10 SEE YA CAA!!!! than I was a few weeks ago.

Saner, smarter people than me (line forms to the left) believe the CAA will emerge from realignment stronger than it is right now—your good friend and mine Mike Litos reminded us recently that Tom Yeager, with his conference on tilt, managed to gut and forever weaken the America East 11 years ago—and that it will be proactive in the process, not reactive, even if it is quiet right now.

As much as Southern Bias drives me freaking crazy, what good would it do Hofstra as well as Northeastern and Drexel—two more northeast schools now putting all their eggs in the basket of men’s basketball—to leave the CAA if it means taking a step down? As one of those saner, smarter people said to me recently: If the A-10 ends up losing Xavier, Dayton and Temple to the Big East or an off-shoot of it, who wants to end up in what is left of the A-10?

No matter how it shakes out, I still firmly believe the CAA and the rest of the Division I landscape will look far different 12 months from now, which creates a weird purgatory for 2011-12—for the league as well as the Flying Dutchmen.

A spate of graduations and the defection of a certain coach (sniff) means a regression for the CAA is likely and that one bid is all the league will get come March. The good news there is the CAA is more wide open than usual: Drexel is the preseason pick to finally overcome Southern Bias on the first Monday of March, but the Dragons are far from an overwhelming favorite. It’s the type of year in which just about everyone has a touch of madness when it comes to evaluating their chances at winning the CAA—even the fans of the team picked to finish eighth!

Believe it or not, eighth place ISN’T seven spots lower than I would have picked the Dutchmen, It’s a smidge lower than my projection—my ample gut is saying seventh, for some reason—but a perfectly reasonable one given how little we know about this team.

The Dutchmen are adjusting to life without Charles Jenkins and will field a starting five that has spent far more time together in practice than on the court. The lineup against Long Island will likely include two incumbent starters from last year in Mike Moore and David Imes, two players who were in the program but redshirted last season in Stevie Mejia and Nat Lester (who is going to sweep the balloting for the “Holy crap didn’t that guy play against David Robinson?” award) and JUCO transfer Bryant Crowder.

While actual experience together is a concern, the collective maturity of the starters is not. Moore, Mejia and Lester are all five years removed from high school while Imes prepped following high school and is four years removed from his graduation. Other returnees Dwan McMillan, Shemiye McLendon, Stephen Nwaukoni and Matt Grogan have all bought into the Cassara system and will be valuable leaders this season in helping four newcomers adjust to Division I.

This team is going to be better than people think and will feature at least one and maybe two first- or second-team All-CAA players. It’s the type of year in which a seventh-place finish and an 18-15 record is a cause for celebration, or at least pursuing a CIT bid, and reason to believe the foundation—there’s that word again!—has been set for a potentially magical 2012-13 season, when the Dutchmen will welcome a loaded recruiting class that features highly touted freshmen as well as big-time Division I transfers.

Admittedly, when it comes to forecasting this season, it takes a touch of madness to think of anything beyond a middle of the pack finish for the Flying Dutchmen, at least until we get to see them in action in November. But isn’t that what this time of the year is all about—unbridled and often uncharacteristic optimism about everything?

Why can’t the league be more balanced than expected and the Dutchmen gel faster than projected? Why can’t Hofstra work in the CAA long-term? Why can’t I root for George Mason whenever the Patriots aren’t playing the Dutchmen? I’ve got a touch of madness, and until that last sentence I really didn’t want the antidote.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

Long weekend shouldn't save Welsh

Will the hourglass run out this week for Tim Welsh at Hofstra?

The longest weekend in the lives of Tim Welsh and Jack Hayes is over. The day of reckoning is imminent, if not already here. Within the next 48 hours, Welsh’s fate at Hofstra should be sealed, one way or the other.

The question this morning, as Welsh prepares for a meeting with Stuart Rabinowitz, is whether or not the last 48 hours were enough to save his job following his arrest for drunken driving early Friday morning.

The timing of the arrest, at least, benefitted everyone and gives Welsh a better shot at strolling the sidelines this fall. If you’re going to have to deal with bad news, the day to do it is on a Friday. And the weekend gave the powers-that-be at Hofstra two valuable non-workdays (in the traditional sense, anyway) to fully focus on the decision and to allow the rawest of emotions to fade—and, of course, gave Welsh two days to present his case for retention, as he seemed to do when he told Steve Marcus of Newsday that his arrest could be a “teaching moment.”

On Friday, I thought nothing could save Welsh and that any delay of his dismissal was a matter of due process and Hofstra exercising caution to make sure there were no loose ends that could be exploited by Welsh’s legal team once he was fired. But the vibe I’ve been getting this weekend is that Hayes—whether out of a sense of compassion for Welsh, a desire to bring some stability to a program that has endured a tumultuous month, a sense of self-preservation or, likely, some combination thereof—is looking for a reason to keep him.

Of course, just like with the death of football, Hayes may not have a voice in the matter. Nothing will save Welsh if Rabinowitz is standing in front of a mirror this morning, trying on bad blonde toupees and doing his best Donald Trump.

If Welsh is going to be fired, I wonder if an announcement will be delayed until Hayes can find Welsh’s replacement. I wonder how much of these last 48 hours have been spent interviewing/seeking out other candidates. Revealing Welsh’s replacement the same day he’s fired would minimize the news cycle and allow Hofstra to immediately spin Welsh’s exit as a new beginning instead of an embarrassing ending.

My guess is that Welsh has a chance at saving his job this morning, that the new coach can still avoid becoming the ex-coach. But if it were up to me, there’d be two insurmountable hurdles for Welsh:

—The severity of the charges against Welsh. This clearly was not a matter of a couple drinks with dinner, or someone with a sub-0.10 BAC having the misfortune of getting nailed on a five-minute trip back to Hofstra. It’s inconceivable to me that Welsh could be dining at City Cellar and end up in Levittown on his way back to his on-campus apartment.

—The “I didn’t have someone’s phone number” defense Welsh gave to Marcus on Saturday. Welsh has been here a month. I find it hard to believe he didn’t have Hayes’ cell and office numbers stored in his cell phone. Even so, handing over to his lawyers the task of calling Hofstra (516-HOF-STRA) or sending an email to Hayes would have sufficed. This is 2010, the age of instant information and communication. There is no excuse, none, for Hofstra finding out about his arrest from the news media. That made a bad and embarrassing situation even worse.

It’s no fun declaring someone should lose his job, especially for those of us that have been on the wrong end of a boot in the ass. I also get that America is all about second (and third) chances. And it’s easier to give Welsh that second chance since, thank goodness, Welsh was arrested before he could hurt anyone else. No one will wonder why Welsh gets a second chance that eludes the person or people whose lives were forever altered Thursday night.

Welsh deserves that second chance. I just think it’s best for everyone if it happens somewhere else.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

What kind of message will Rabinowitz send with Pecora’s replacement?

Is the sun finally ready to shine through over Hofstra athletics, or are the storm clouds just beginning to gather?

One of the bleakest days in the history of Hofstra athletics wasn’t without a shred of optimism.

“The last thing I want to say to you is that this in no way diminishes the fact that we believe a robust athletic program is extremely important to Hofstra University,” Hofstra president Stuart Rabinowitz said as he announced his decision to eliminate football Dec. 3. “In fact, we want to play at the highest national level. So we are keeping and have no plans to drop any other sports. We are keeping our 17 teams which don’t play in a low Division I-A, as football does.”

Nothing would ever make up for the clandestine way football was executed after a “two-year study,” especially for the hundreds of alumni who donned the helmets and shoulder pads for the Flying Dutchmen. But the truth was that through nearly a decade of organized organizational neglect, football had become a shell of its former self at Hofstra. As much as we’d rather see non-scholarship football at Hofstra than nothing at all, if dropping the sport encouraged Hofstra to concentrate its resources and attention on other sports, well, at least we wouldn’t have to worry about those other sports ever suffering a similar fate.

This was the belief I parroted for months, even as other observers of the Flying Dutchmen warned the death of football was just the first domino to fall in the demise of Hofstra sports. I shrugged off the Tom Pecora to Fordham rumors, feeling confident that men’s basketball was now the centerpiece sport at Hofstra and reminding myself that Rabinowitz expressed his high hopes and expectations for the program by declaring “George Mason should have been us” in 2006.

With that kind of support, why would Pecora—who often spoke of how it would take a unique opportunity for him to consider leaving Hofstra—bolt an imperfect yet reasonably thriving program he’d spent 16 years building for the mother of all rebuilding jobs in the Bronx? Except the whispers got louder and louder, peaking, of course, last week, when Pecora met with Fordham officials and agreed to a six-year contract with the school in a whirlwind 24-hour span.

Now, with Pecora plying his trade in the shadow of the Bronx Zoo, I’m no longer sure that those who were the loudest and angriest following the execution of football were so crazy after all. If I’m not ducking for cover from a falling sky, I am gazing tentatively upward, wondering what’s next.

The only person who can soothe the nerves of the Flying Dutchmen faithful—all seven of us!—is the same person who uttered the words that had us optimistic that the death of football was an isolated thing and not the beginning of the end of athletics as we know them at Hofstra.

Rabinowitz can let his athletic director do his job, and approve whomever Jack Hayes recommends as Pecora’s replacement, and sit in between Hayes and the new coach at a press conference and declare that this hire—whether it’s an established Division I coach, a highly touted assistant from a BCS conference or a hot up-and-comer in the Jay Wright vein—is proof Hofstra is not beginning its descent to the fringe of Division I, where it resided before Wright took over, or worse.

Because right now, it’s hard to believe Pecora's departure wasn't a link in a chain of events that began with the execution of football.

Hey, maybe it’s just a coincidence. Maybe this was a matter of perfect timing, of Pecora growing increasingly frustrated with the CAA and getting an offer he couldn’t refuse to go join the Atlantic 10, the conference he has long believed is the perfect home for Hofstra. Pecora will pull down a reported $650,000 a year at Fordham, a salary that is well beyond the means of a program that plays in obscurity. Maybe, as I wrote last week, this was destined to happen—Pecora parlaying his success at Hofstra into a higher-profile opportunity.

Or maybe Pecora knew something we don’t, knew that the events of Dec. 3 doomed Hofstra to an indefinite stay in conference purgatory. Dropping football ruined any negotiating power the school possessed. With football in the fold, Hofstra would have looked like a better fit with the CAA—nowhere near perfect, but at least still a school with similar aspirations as the league in which it resides—as it tried to negotiate its way into the A-10 or maybe even the MAAC via backroom dealings.

But getting rid of football declared, in very public and irreversible fashion, "GET US OUT OF HERE!!" And no conference is going to rush to make room for a school that is so desperate to leave its current league—especially the A-10, which has seven schools playing or planning to play I-AA football and another, Temple, in I-A.

If more than half the league can play football, why can’t Hofstra? Even if there was a vacancy and/or the A-10 was willing to expand, why would it rush to invite a school that isn’t wholly committed to all sports?

And, honestly, don’t you think it’s just a little too convenient that Fordham fired Dereck Whittenberg mere hours after Hofstra dropped football? Perhaps Fordham was sending Pecora a message that afternoon. And maybe, 112 days later, Pecora was sending a message to his former employer when he said that the job of the men’s basketball team and the athletic department is “…to be the front porch of the university.”

Rabinowitz’ actions, almost from the day he arrived in 2001, indicate he considers athletics the back yard trees, or maybe even the fort behind the trees, of the university. He’s never gone to the CAA tournament in Richmond, not even when the Flying Dutchmen made the championship game in 2006. He rarely appears at the Arena, and when he does, it’s usually for some kind of grip-and-grin ceremony before the game or at halftime. Nor, reportedly, did he show up to either of the last two open Pride Club meetings.

Rabinowitz fancies Hofstra as a premier academic institution, which is pretty funny to those of us who have actually attended class there. To paraphrase Winston Wolf from Pulp Fiction: “Just because you charge like you are Yale doesn’t mean you are Yale.”

There are those on campus who think the only sport Rabinowitz really likes is lacrosse, which fits in with the elitist air he tries to project, and that every other sport is flotsam and/or jetsam. There are also people who are authentically worried about the long-term future of ALL sports at the University. Nothing even close to imminent, mind you, but there are perfectly lucid folks in the 11550 who wonder if there will come a day when Hofstra either de-emphasizes athletics or drops them entirely.

Sounds inconceivable, doesn’t it? But at some point in the last year, so did the idea that football would no longer be played at Hofstra and that Pecora would leave the Flying Dutchmen for a program that went 2-26 this season and has recorded one winning record in the last 15 years.

We’ll get a good idea of where Hofstra is headed as an athletic department with this hire. And the rumors of an imminent agreement between Hofstra and former Iona and Providence coach Tim Welsh are an encouraging sign. While I think Pecora’s longtime top assistant, Van Macon, should get a shot at the top job, Welsh would bring to the sidelines plenty of credibility as well as an experienced tri-state recruiter.

But you’ll have to pardon me if I’m not jump-starting the welcome wagon quite yet. While I have plenty of faith in Hayes’ ability to find a good replacement for Pecora, I’m also quite curious to see what happens when he goes to the office of the president for final approval. After all, Hayes ended up at Hofstra only after Rabinowitz declined the choice of the search committee he hired to find a new athletic director in 2004.

And we won’t really know if the commitment to men’s basketball was the same post-Pecora as it was pre-Pecora for years. Don’t forget Rabinowitz spoke of winning national championships in I-AA when Dave Cohen was hired to replace Joe Gardi following the 2005 season.

It’ll take a while to know if this next hire was the next step in maintaining and building what Wright and Pecora constructed, or a cosmetic move intended to delay or hasten the inevitable. But in the meantime, Rabinowitz can make us feel a whole lot better about the future by getting out of the way and allowing Hayes to do his job—and then by exiting his ivory tower and showing up for the press conference.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.

Tradition is euthanized

Almost 48 hours have passed since Hofstra ended its football program, a good bit longer than I would have liked before putting my thoughts to screen. But times like these demand caution and a few deep breaths, even as the emotions run high.

The news is no longer as fresh, but the disappointment and disgust is stronger than ever, as is the belief that Hofstra football is dead not out of a desire to invest in academic initiatives but because president Stuart Rabinowitz wanted it dead.

Before tackling Rabinowitz (I bought a box of football puns at Job Lots in August, gotta use 'em while I can), let’s get this out of the way: Unless you’re one of the 172 season ticket holders, or somebody who donated funds to the football program, you are not blameless in the demise of Hofstra football.

That most certainly includes me. Being out of state covering baseball playoffs is a pretty good excuse for not going to a game between 2003 and 2007, but what about my scattered attendance between 1996 and 2002? What about going to home games once the playoffs were over in November? Nah, too tired or too this or too that, I can always go next year.

Within hours of the news Thursday, a Facebook group called “Help Keep Hofstra Football” was formed. There were more than 2,000 members by dinnertime. As I type this in the wee hours of Saturday morning, there are 5,043 members. Where in the hell were you guys when it mattered?

The uproar over the demise of Flying Dutchmen football reminds me of when I get mad at my wife for deleting a year-old show on TIVO.

Her: “You were never going to watch it!”

Me: “Yeah but I liked having it there.”

That’s what Hofstra football was to 99 percent of us. That old reliable show whose existence you were aware of, but which you never actually planned to watch (I really am going to watch the last season of My Name Is Earl, though, I swear).

We all could have done more to save Hofstra football. But the person who could have done the most instead killed it, even if Rabinowitz said Thursday “…there really is no concrete rebuttal possible” to the decision.

But there sure are plenty of Unispan-sized holes in it. For instance: Rabinowitz said dropping the program to the non-scholarship level was not a legitimate option because if Hofstra is going to compete athletically, he wants to do so at the highest level and for national championships.

Yet he also said no other program is in danger of being cut. Well, if rubbing shoulders with the elite is the objective, then everything except the basketball, lacrosse, soccer, softball and wrestling programs should be in big trouble.

Many, many programs at Hofstra are not going to compete for a national title or receive national media attention, and that’s fine. Athletic competition, even if the ceiling is no higher than a conference championship and the audience no vaster than friends and family, is a vital part of the college experience.

I wrote this when I was a student in 1994, and I believe it to be as true now as then: Even the sports that exist in complete anonymity—cross country, tennis, baseball—have a ripple-like effect on building Hofstra’s reputation. The parents of Hofstra athletes are scattered across the country, wearing Hofstra garb and spreading the school’s name recognition, year after year after year.

And over the last 15 years, nobody has boosted Hofstra’s profile more than its football alums. Hofstra gets scads of free publicity every weekend in the fall thanks to the likes of Wayne Chrebet and Marques Colston and Willie Colon and Raheem Morris. But Rabinowitz said Thursday he didn’t like the tone of the publicity Hofstra got via its grads in the NFL.

“I think we’re so proud of Marques and Wayne Chrebet and all those people and all they did for us,” Rabinowitz said. “But when you hear those names, what I hear, whether it’s explicit or not explicit, is ‘Wow, isn’t that shocking. Little Hofstra, these players made the NFL.’”

But what, precisely, is wrong with people identifying Hofstra with the ability of the underdog to make something better of himself? Isn’t that what college is all about? Grabbing hold of an opportunity, making a fresh start in a new place and reshaping your life? How many thousands of students arrived at Hofstra and pulled a Chrebet or a Colston of their own? I can tell you I sure did.

There aren’t a whole lot of kids born on third base thinking they hit a triple when nearly two-thirds of the population is comprised of commuters. Hofstra is not Yale, even though it charges like it is.

Speaking of that: When Rabinowitz talks about how the money from football will go towards need-based academic scholarships, I don’t want to hear him tugging at the heartstrings with stories of kids who can’t afford to go to Hofstra or can’t afford to finish their studies there. Not when he has presided over a school whose costs have risen at rates that almost defy description.

During the 1999-00 school year, the Hofstra student paid $20,922 for tuition, room and board and student fees. The cost this year? $42,526.

Tuition and room and board at Yale, by the way, is $47,500, an increase of 3.3 percent. Tuition at Hofstra this year ($29,980) increased more than nine percent from last year ($27,600). Tuition rose almost four percent from 1998-99 ($13,328) to 1999-00 ($13,750).

“No, it’s a relatively inexpensive school,” Rabinowitz said to Mike Francesa Thursday. Let them eat cake.

Even if the university wanted to reallocate football’s funds to general scholarships, there was still so much more that could have been done to save the program and allow it to survive at a lesser level. Why not call on the Hofstra and Long Island communities to offer their support or else? Why not solicit donations from the NFLers to help offset some of the giant investment?

It should also be noted that, in the mid-1990s, the lagging wrestling program was told to raise its performance or else. And look where it is now.

If, after a year or two, the Flying Dutchmen are still wallowing around .500, Shuart Stadium is still playing to one-third capacity and the endowment is still couch change, fine. The decision wouldn’t sting any less, but at least there would have been a feeling that all options had been exhausted in trying to save Hofstra football.

And at least people would have had a chance to say goodbye to Shuart Stadium and their memories of it, even if they said hello to football far too infrequently.

But that’s how it works at Hofstra. This was the plan all along, and the less people that knew about it—and the less time they had to build a case for the survival of football—the better. Rabinowitz can say the final conclusion was reached Wednesday night, but it’s really hard to believe he didn’t know the answer to the question as soon as the two-year review of athletics started.

It’s still hard to wrap my mind around the finality of it all. This isn’t analogous to getting fired, because the company usually goes on. In some ways, this isn’t even like a business folding, an analogy that CAA commissioner Tom Yeager used quite eloquently Thursday (I’m going to miss that guy when Hofstra is in the A-10 next year). There’s always the possibility that the displaced journalists at a newspaper, for example, could start their own website.

There is NO picking up the pieces from this, NO coming back from it. The big red button has been pushed. If there’s anything left after the dust settles, it’ll take decades before it’s inhabitable again.

Nothing happens quickly in college athletics, yet it took Hofstra just 19 years to go from Division III to Division I-AA power to defunct. From 1991 through 2000—Hofstra’s independent years—the Flying Dutchmen went 13-5 against Marshall, Montana, Buffalo, UConn and South Florida. Everyone except Montana—which is in the I-AA playoffs for the 17th straight season—has moved to I-A. The four I-A schools have combined to make 15 bowl appearances.

Again: Nobody really expected Hofstra to make the leap to I-A, and as I have written many times before, it was impossible to expect Rabinowitz to turn a James Shuart-like blind eye to the reality of football’s bottom line. But to let the program crumble? To destroy what generations of campus leaders built? To leave dormant in the fall a gorgeous stadium named after a former school president who played football here?

As someone who gave his life to Hofstra and rescued the school from real financial distress and gave it the type of foundation that has made Rabinowitz’ big dreams possible, Shuart deserved better. A lot better.

Instead, Rabinowitz didn’t even refer to Shuart by name Thursday. “My predecessor was president for 25 years, was a football player,” Rabinowitz said.

Even if you support the decision, or don’t mind the dismissal of football, think about this: It has taken nine years for the first 65 years of Hofstra athletic traditions to be erased. Flying Dutchmen? Gone. A football program that was almost as old as the school itself and produced more professionals than the rest of the programs combined? Gone.

Of Hofstra football, Dave Cohen always said “tradition never graduates.” Turns out, though, it can be euthanized.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com or follow Defiantly Dutch at http://twitter.com/defiantlydutch.