Bits and Bytes: Musings from my not-so-beautiful mind

Yeah, John Forbes Nash, Jr. is a genius and a Nobel Prize winner, but does he know how many games it will take for Charles Jenkins to break the all-time scoring record at Hofstra?

Some of us are born with great gifts: An ability to sing or dance or play a musical instrument, or an ability to play a sport better than 95 percent of the population, or an ability to solve titanic mathematical problems in a matter of seconds, or an ability to pull off the miracle that is ventriloquism. Seriously, that is so cool. How do they talk without moving their lips? Wild!

Anyway, the rest of us are born with decidedly less valuable gifts. Like, say, the ability to sift through the audio torture that is a Monday Night Football broadcast and know when an ex-Hofstra player has been mentioned.

Such is my burden in life, and such was the case Monday night (of course) when Kyle Arrington picked up a blocked punt and raced 35 yards for a touchdown during the New England Patriots’ 41-14 dismantling of the Miami Dolphins. While the trio of ear-splitting announcers (seriously, is there anything or anyone Jon Gruden DOESN’T like?) were raving over Patrick Chung, who blocked the punt, I heard someone mention Arrington’s name. And of course I then ranted about the death of Hofstra football on Twitter.

Arrington was disproving the notion there is no publicity in Division I-AA football long before he scored his first NFL touchdown. The Boston Herald and Boston Globe ran nice features on him Sunday discussing his ascension from practice squad vagabond to starting cornerback. The Herald story includes quotes from Dave Cohen.

Between Arrington, Marques Colston and Stephen Bowen—as well as Kareem Huggins, who appears back from injury and ready to vie for playing time at running back for Raheem Morris’ Tampa Bay Buccaneers, known worldwide as The Official NFL Team of Defiantly Dutch—there should be plenty of opportunity the next three months to provide reminders of the publicity Division I-AA football generates. In the meantime, tide yourself over with some Bits and Bytes to tide you over until then:

—Apologies for the sporadic posting here since the start of the school year. The day jobs—Hooray! Plural!—have been busier than anticipated, but it’s October and it’s time to get serious about time management skills. So stay tuned here for plenty on the upcoming hoops season as well as the fall sports at Hofstra—and, of course, a few stories intended to try and make sure nobody forgets football used to be played at Shuart Stadium.

—The story of the fall sports season at Hofstra is the Flying Dutchwomen soccer team, which is on a school record-tying 10-game winning streak and on the verge of climbing into the national top 25 for the first time in school history. The Dutchwomen are ranked 16th in the RPI—good news, we’re going to the NCAA Tournament for sure, how could a team be ranked so high and miss out?—and first in the NSCAA Mid-Atlantic region poll. The Dutchwomen will go for their record-setting 11th straight win and, perhaps, a spot in the top 25 when they host Towson Friday night at Hofstra Soccer Stadium.

—Your good friend and mine Mike “Janitor” Litos is in the big time now, penning his first piece for AOL Fanhouse on the revival of the Richmond men’s basketball program under head coach Chris Mooney. Figures. His first piece for a national site and he doesn’t leave Richmond. SOUTHERN BIAS!!!

—Speaking of Litos, he evaluates here the then and now predictions made by his super-secret and super-mysterious “Brain Trust,” which ranked the CAA teams last spring and then again last week. Interesting stuff. As Litos notes, Hofstra’s standing actually improved despite the off-season from hell—which, of course, still turned out to be a lot better than the ones endured by Drexel and UNC Wilmington.

—Also chiming in with 2010-11 predictions is another friend of DD, Brian Mull, who, even though I took him to the finest diner on Hempstead Turnpike last season, still hates Hofstra and picks the Dutchmen fifth. Sigh.

—Here’s something fun to ponder: When, exactly, will Charles Jenkins break Antoine Agudio’s career scoring record? Jenkins has 1,767 points in three years, ninth-most in school history and 510 shy of displacing Agudio. Jenkins enters this season averaging 18.6 points per game, which puts him on pace to break the record in the Dutchmen’s 28th game of the season—the BracketBuster on Feb. 19.

However, Jenkins has improved his average every season—from 15 ppg as a freshman to 19.7 ppg as a sophomore to 20.6 ppg last year—so it’s fair to assume he’ll exceed his career average as a senior. Let’s say he increases his average the same amount this year as last year. That would put him at 21.5 ppg and allow him to surpass Agudio in the Dutchmen’s 24th game—at home Feb. 5 against Northeastern.

That sounds reasonable, but also puts him dangerously close to breaking the mark Feb. 9 at Georgia State. I really want to see this in person, but driving to Georgia would be REALLY expensive. So please, Charles, break it Feb. 5. For me!

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

I'm normally not a praying man, but if you're up there...please make Marques Colston the Super Bowl MVP, Superman

That would be the greatest thing ever. Billions and billions of people watching the Super Bowl and learning that the best player on the field comes from a school that no longer plays football, because the sport didn't generate enough attention for Little Hofstra. How would you like that for unintentional irony, Mr. President?

And hey, three of the last six Super Bowl MVPs have been wide receivers (Santonio Holmes in Super Bowl 43--OK, really, after the mid-XXXs, it's impossible to remember what is what in Roman Numerals, there's a reason we ditched these thousands of years ago--Hines Ward in Super Bowl 40 and Deion Branch in Super Bowl 39), which matched the number of wide receivers who won the award in the first 38 years of the Big Game. So it's possible.

I can see it now: Colston catches four TDs in the Saints' 31-27 win, but one is off a halfback option from Reggie Bush so Colston wins the MVP over Drew Brees. Yes, Superman, make this happen. Or, at the very least, make sure 1 and 9 come thru in at least one quarter so my wife and I can win some money in one of those box pools.

Of Alumni Day, Faux Homecoming and the inaugural Barone Bowl

The annual men’s basketball Alumni Day is scheduled for tomorrow, which in and of itself is typically no big deal and barely, if ever, receives any actual promotion from the school. Ex-Flying Dutchmen show up, maybe scrimmage a little bit before the game and ignore the paunchy, occasionally bespectacled guy sitting a few rows up in John Stockton shorts and Michael Cooper socks begging for some run. C’mon guys I’m an alumni too!! I’ll just play the point, I won’t shoot. I promise.

But this Alumni Day is different than the rest. It’s the first one since Hofstra killed football, and not coincidentally, it’s getting a bit of publicity (free food and drink at City Cellar afterward, whoohoo, ride out the blizzard on Hofstra’s dime!) as Hofstra tests run the concept of a winter Homecoming. Geez, just typing those words makes my stomach ache.

A Homecoming centered around basketball, of course, is even more inevitable than the NCAA Tournament expanding to 96 teams, and it seems to be a particularly cruel coincidence that the beta version takes place when Northeastern visits the Arena. You know, the same Northeastern whose decision to drop football Nov. 22 had absolutely nothing at all to do with Hofstra following suit a mere 11 days later. If I didn’t know any better, I’d suspect someone way high up in the food chain scheduled it this way to have a laugh at our expense.

Regardless, Hofstra and Northeastern are the closest thing either has to a kindred soul in the disjointed mess that is the CAA, even though the schools opposed each other once in men’s basketball before Hofstra joined the North Atlantic Conference in 1994 and hadn’t played each other in football in 28 years before Hofstra became a member of the Atlantic-10 in 2001.

Give credit to Husky at the CAAZone boards, who recognized the hilarious absurdity of it all and suggested the winner of the game Saturday receive the football that Frank Barone caught when an unnamed Hofstra kicker (David Ettinger? Walter Olshanski?) booted a world-record 68-yard field goal in a 2001 episode of Everybody Loves Raymond (hey look at that, promotion for a Division I-AA program, oh the humanity!)

Faux Homecoming, the Barone Bowl and potential blizzard aside, this game is plenty compelling on its own. The Dutchmen are on the verge of sucking us all back in after a three-game winning streak, but in order to really get us back on the bandwagon and enter the CAA Tournament with legitimate aspirations of playing Cinderella, they need to record a Signature Win.

Tomorrow may be the Dutchmen’s best and last chance to record it. Drexel, which visits Wednesday, is a legitimate championship contender as well, but Northeastern is in a three-way tie for first place and receiving national attention after turning its season around following a 2-7 start. The Huskies are 13-1 since then (a loss to Drexel in Boston last weekend snapped an 11-game winning streak).

Northeastern is awfully reminiscent of the Loren Stokes-Carlos Rivera-Antoine Agudio era Dutchmen: Three players are averaging at least 33 minutes per game and the quintet of Matt Janning, Chaisson Allen, Manny Adako, Nkem Ojougbah and Alwayne Bigby combining to make all but four of the Huskies’ starts.

The game will be a tasty battle of strengths, as Northeastern ranks first in the CAA in field goal percentage and 3-point field goal percentage while the Dutchmen rank first in field goal defense and second in 3-point defense.

The Huskies might be the most road-tested team in the CAA (they won at Wyoming in the CBI last year and participated in tournaments in Hawaii and San Francisco this season). But the Dutchmen are 3-1 against Northeastern at the Arena since the latter joined the CAA, including last year’s 57-52 upset win that knocked the Huskies from the ranks of the CAA’s unbeaten and jumpstarted Hofstra’s season-ending 11-4 run.

I’ll freely admit I don’t know what to expect tomorrow. I had a bad feeling going into the game Wednesday, and the Dutchmen were barely threatened in the final 30 minutes of a rout over James Madison. Hot is hot, even if the three-game winning streak came at the expense of a trio of scuffling teams, and the Dutchmen should enter Saturday more confident than they’ve been since early December.

The Signature Win will happen if Charles Jenkins shoots anything like he has the last three games (22-for-34), Cornelius Vines suffocates Allen like he did Julius Wells Wednesday and the Dutchmen’s big men limit Ojougbah like they did Denzel Bowles.

Sounds like a lot, sure, but a lot has already happened to make tomorrow matter. Either way, we are going to be there, snow be damned. I’ll leave the house at noon to get there if necessary (of course, my saner wife may have something to say about this). Follow us along on Twitter and come by and say hi if you brave the elements. I’ll be the guy randomly yelling out the names of former football players from Hofstra and Northeastern.

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