The “what ifs” are haunting for Flying Dutchmen gridders

When the Flying Dutchmen football season ends—and barring a miracle, that’ll occur sometime at Shuart Stadium in the late afternoon hours of Nov. 21—Dave Cohen and his staff will be able to look back on it as a reasonably successful one in which the program began to emerge from the wreckage of a miserable 2008 campaign, proved it could compete with most of the best teams in the land and laid the foundation for a potential playoff run in 2010.

But that is of little consolation right now to the Dutchmen, and particularly the seniors whose hopes of reaching the Division I-AA playoffs likely ended with an 18-10 loss to New Hampshire last Saturday.

“For our leadership, for our seniors, that’s a tough locker room right now,” Cohen said. “It’s a very emotional locker room. They understood that their backs were against the wall if they planned on playing past the regular season. And beyond the CAA teams knocking each other off in the next month or so…it’s going to be difficult for that to happen.”

At 4-4, the Dutchmen would theoretically be in the mix for an at-large spot if they sweep Delaware, Northeastern and Massachusetts to end the season. But Delaware and UMass are both in the top 15 and the Dutchmen’s only win against a ranked team this season came at the expense of skidding James Madison.

Beating ninth-ranked New Hampshire would have provided the Dutchmen that much-needed signature win, but missed opportunities in all facets of the game cost the Dutchmen dearly. On offense, the Dutchmen once again had the edge in time of possession (for the seventh time this year) and total yardage (for the sixth time), but were haunted again by inefficiency—particularly in the red zone, where they scored just twice in four possessions.

“As I’ve been saying all week, the yardage statistic is very, I think, overused,” Cohen said. “The point statistic is really the only one that matters. Winning and losing [and] putting the ball in the end zone.”

The Dutchmen produced another impressive performance on defense, but with the offense providing little margin for error, the cracks displayed in the second half—when New Hampshire scored its lone touchdown by marching 81 yards in just five plays on its first possession and later went 4-of-8 on third down conversions—were especially costly.

On special teams, a bad snap on a punt midway through the fourth quarter resulted in a safety, and New Hampshire drove for a field goal following the subsequent free kick.

“The same mistakes that have hurt us in some games came back to prevent us from winning this football game as well,” Cohen said, no doubt referring to the Homecoming game against Maine in which the Dutchmen committed seven turnovers, allowed one quick touchdown drive by the Black Bears and missed a field goal in a 16-14 loss. “They’re not new demons. They’re just returning ones.”

The good news is there will be plenty of opportunity to exorcise those demons. The Dutchmen returned 20 starters this season, 15 of whom are juniors or sophomores. The struggles the Dutchmen are enduring this season would seem to be the type of learning experiences that can hasten the maturity of a young team as well as provide it some motivational fuel next summer and fall.

And even throwing a scare into the likes of New Hampshire and Division I-A Western Michigan qualifies as an encouraging step forward for a program that was shut out twice last season and suffered six losses by two touchdowns or more—and is just six weeks removed from a 47-0 loss to top-ranked Richmond.

“The guys that run that locker room have done a great job,” Cohen said. “Last year, we essentially graduated our whole team after going 7-4 and those guys have kept this thing together in some much more miserable times than losing to the no. 7 or no. 8 team in the country 18-10.”

Still, what-if defeats like Saturday are even more haunting than the uncompetitive losses are discouraging. “When you have two games like this in three weeks, we’ve got to do a better job,” Cohen said. “We’ve got to play more disciplined and we’ve got to continue to grow and mature. A year ago, we’re not in half of these games, and that’s the good news. We’re in them.

“But, you know what, these kids worked too hard and this is how we support our families. It all comes down to winning these games.”

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

Nobody asked me, but…here’s how Hofstra could be part of a brand-new ECC

Take Hofstra, Northeastern and Drexel from the CAA, Providence, Seton Hall and St. John's from the Big East and mix them up with LaSalle and Stony Brook and...HIVENGLAVIN!!!!

This was a false alarm. Please return to your homes and continue pricing flights to Richmond for next year’s CAA Tournament as well as sending nasty Twitter messages to Jim Larranaga (seriously, Litos must really think a lot of my self-restraint to post that bit of info, and doubly seriously, don’t send nasty Twitter messages to anyone, even someone at George Mason).

All that talk about Hofstra leaving the CAA for the A-10 was apparently premature, as Steve Marcus reported Wednesday. But I wouldn’t be in a rush to buy a wardrobe full of clothes sporting the CAA logo, either.

One of these times, the buzz about changing leagues will be legitimate. And it won’t just be Hofstra and a handful of CAA schools doing the conference shuffle. The current Division I landscape is an overfilled backyard pool, busting at the seams and liable to explode and flood the neighborhood at any moment.

The expansion of Division I to 353 schools means 31 conferences are no longer enough. A 16-team Big East…a 14-team Atlantic 10…13 other conferences with more than 10 schools, including our beloved CAA. And no matter how much CBS and your average bracket-filling Joe might love it, the 65-team NCAA Tournament has outlived its usefulness.

It’s time to blow the whole damn thing up.

It won’t be easy, of course. Bigger is better for the BCS conferences. After all, the Big East can’t try to get nine bids to the NCAA Tournament if it only has eight schools.

And the NCAA has made it as difficult as possible for anyone to think outside the box (groan) and form conferences that are more geographically and numerically friendly. Under current NCAA guidelines, the Great West Conference, the first new conference this decade, won’t be eligible for an automatic bid to the men’s tournament until 2020, by which point we’ll all be getting around in flying cars.

The NCAA did what it does best—bent the rules as it saw fit—the last time a new conference was formed in 1999, when the Mountain West broke off from the WAC. Mountain West schools had to wait only two years to receive an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament.

Something tells me the NCAA won’t be as eager to award an automatic bid to the Great West and rob another deserving 17-12 BCS school of an at-large bid. But what if the Great West is just one of three new conferences? And what if waiving the usual requirements and awarding automatic bids to these new conferences after two years—and expanding the NCAA Tournament to 68 teams—means March Madness creeps into the national conscience a couple days earlier than it does now?

A 68-team tournament would allow for four play-in games that would take place, two apiece, on Tuesday and Wednesday. That makes for six consecutive glorious days of hoops during the first week of the tournament. Hard to argue with that, yes?

Sure, a North Dakota State might be ticked off because it was not eligible for the NCAA Tournament until its fifth year at Division I. Just because that’s the way it used to be doesn’t mean it should always be that way. I had to type my research papers in college on a Brother word processor, but I don’t plan on subjecting my kid(s) to that if I ever procreate.

Most importantly, from the perspective of a Hofstra fan, what if one of these new conferences features the Flying Dutch as a core member? It’d be the first time since the ECC that Hofstra would be on legitimately equal footing in its conference (the school was on its way to that kind of stature in the America East before the departure for the CAA).

What if the new conference was the old conference? What do you think about this East Coast Conference that features multiple natural rivalries and saves the member schools countless thousands of dollars in travel expenses?

Hofstra
Northeastern
Drexel
Seton Hall
St. John’s
Providence
Stony Brook
LaSalle

I have to think that any realignment of Division I will be centered around breaking up the Big East. And if and when that happens, the non-BCS schools that are mired in the middle and back of the conference—DePaul, Providence, St. John’s and Seton Hall—will be the ones most endangered.

All four schools have glorious hoops histories that overshadow anything Hofstra, Northeastern, Drexel, Stony Brook and LaSalle have accomplished, and I can’t imagine Providence, St. John’s and Seton Hall want anything to do with joining a bunch of eastern mid-majors. But they may not have a choice.

The Big East Three are afterthoughts in their own conference now. Georgetown and Villanova, in particular, have proven it’s possible to reverse such a downfall. But all you’ve got to do to accomplish that is hire the son of the most legendary coach in school history (actually, DePaul already did that) and a guy from Hofstra, respectively. Maybe Providence can get Rick Pitino Jr., but Seton Hall and St. John’s aren’t getting their paws on Tom Pecora.

LaSalle is the choice for the second Philly-area school because St. Joseph’s and Temple are far more established in the A-10. Stony Brook hasn’t even been a Division I school for 10 years yet, but the school has much bigger things in mind than the America East. Better to just cut ties now and take some growing pains in the new ECC.

I imagine any new conference will have more than eight teams, but such a small alignment leaves room for other schools to make the leap as well as takes into account future expansion. And the new ECC could be really interesting if the football-playing Big East schools end up overtaking the league and pushing out the non-football schools.

Can you imagine a 10-team ECC that also features Georgetown and Villanova? Lehigh Football Nation wonders if the recent departure of Georgetown AD Bernard Muir for the same position at Delaware is the precursor to Georgetown getting the boot from the Big East (and, somewhere down the line, Delaware joining the Big East).

To ditch Georgetown, Villanova and Marquette—all of whom are national championship-winning programs that have reached the Final Four this decade—would require a ruthlessness and short-sightedness that is hard to comprehend. Which of course means you can’t rule it out.

My third new conference, by the way, has been dubbed the Great South and features a bunch of Division I newcomers as well as a familiar face:

Longwood
Savannah State
NC-Central
Kennesaw
SC-Upstate
Lipscomb
NC-Wilmington

The more I think about it and talk to people who know more about it than me (line forms to the left), the more I think Wilmington would be in some serious danger if the CAA wants to be known for football as much as basketball. That said, this Great South was concocted in about five minutes and with the knowledge the Atlantic Sun probably wouldn’t be thrilled if Kennesaw, South Carolina-Upstate and Lipscomb bolted.

Plus, I’m sure college hoops fans south and west of the White House can come up with a new conference or two formed from the wreckage of the bloated likes of the Sun Belt, Southern, Southland and Conference USA, though breaking up the latter would be difficult since all 12 of its schools play I-A football.

Lastly, here’s what the new CAA, Big East and A-10 would look like:

CAA:
Charlotte
Delaware
George Mason
Georgia State
James Madison
Old Dominion
Richmond
Towson
VCU
William & Mary

Like Georgetown, Villanova and Marquette in the Big East, VCU and Mason are established enough in basketball (and in the board room) to survive despite not playing football.

Big East:
Cincinnati
Connecticut
Georgetown
Louisville
Marquette
Notre Dame
Pittsburgh
Rutgers
South Florida
Syracuse
Villanova
West Virginia

A-10:
Dayton
DePaul
Duquesne
George Washington
Massachusetts
Rhode Island
St. Bonaventure
Saint Louis
St. Joseph’s
Temple
Xavier

I realize this runs counter to what I wrote yesterday, when I said Saint Louis made no sense for the A-10, but add DePaul and suddenly you can split the league into two divisions—the East (GW, UMass, URI, St. Bonaventure, St. Joes and Temple) and the West (Dayton, DePaul, Duquesne, Saint Louis and Xavier). Can the A-10 lure a Horizon or Missouri Valley school to even out the divisions?

Fun stuff to chew on, for sure, even if it’s just talk for now. But at some point this will be a lot more than talk, because it’s hard to imagine anyone being satisfied with the status quo—at Hofstra and far beyond. And for Hofstra, at least, the best solution is a fresh start in a newly formed conference…one with an old name, of course.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com. And join the Defiantly Dutch group at Facebook today!

What if…Kenny Adeleke plays his last year at Hofstra?

I have too much time on my hands, so I knew Tommy Shaw of Styx had a solo album called "What If" without even having to look it up.

A few weeks back, I mentioned to my wife a feature idea I had for the blog. (I’ve yet to debut it, so you’re going to have to remain in suspense at least a little while longer) Like she so often does, she came up with an even better idea: Asking “What if?” about pivotal moments in Hofstra basketball history.

Not the obvious ones—like what if the 2006 Selection Committee didn’t feature George Mason’s AD—but possibilities we haven’t already spent years pondering. The plan was to hold these off until after the hoops season, when there’s less to obsess over, but, well, it’s finals week at Hofstra and there’s not much to talk about, so away we go with a “What if” raised, appropriately enough, by my wife:

What if Kenny Adeleke plays his senior season at Hofstra?

As much bandwidth as I’ve spent waxing optimistic over how many solid big men the Flying Dutchmen have this year, the truth is the best one Tom Pecora ever had is Adeleke. Most of the post players who land at Hofstra are projects. Not Adeleke, who was 6-foot-9, 250 pounds and a legitimate top-of-the-line Division I talent. He was a member of a DePaul recruiting class ranked among the nation’s best in 2001 (DePaul’s coach back then was current Towson head honcho Pat Kennedy) yet asked out of his letter of intent during his senior year to attend Hofstra.

Adeleke arrived a stud and got a lot better. He racked up 35 double-doubles and averaged 14.4 points and 9.3 rebounds a game in three seasons. He led the CAA in rebounding in his final two years and earned All-CAA honors as a junior. He was on pace to become only the third Hofstra player with 1,000 points and 1,000 rebounds (that Q&A is conducted by Hofstra, WRHU alum Adam Shandler, who was also my press box neighbor at Shuart Stadium in ’94 and ‘95) and likely would have moved into the top 10 on the all-time scoring list with even an average senior year.

We forget how good he was (remarkably, this is the first time I've "tagged" him in a post) because he played on teams transitioning to the CAA—nobody’s getting nostalgic over the Dutchmen going 34-56 with Adeleke, though their record improved every season—and because of how quickly and mysteriously he left.

If you ever want to know how the weather is at Hofstra, ask someone In The Know the real deal with Adeleke. The school cited his “violation of university and team rules” and announced his dismissal from the team for with a terse one-sentence press release on a Friday afternoon in September 2004, an old-school move intended to bury the bad news during the quietest news cycle of the week.

The school also distanced itself from Adeleke in the 2004-05 media guide, the front cover of which featured a photo of the huddling Dutchmen and the words TEAM FIRST! Inside, Adeleke’s departure was mentioned, in the briefest terms, on page 12, under starters lost. The reason: “Dismissed.”

Adeleke transferred almost immediately to Hartford, whose head coach, Larry Harrison, was an assistant at DePaul during Adeleke’s initial recruitment. And more than four years later, his departure is still topic non grata in Hempstead. Something pretty serious had to happen for 1,296 points and 837 rebounds to get tossed to the curb—even at a school like Hofstra with a no-nonsense school president who suspended Wendell Gibson and Rick Apodaca half a season for smoking marijuana.

The Flying Dutchmen sure could have used Adeleke in 2004-05, when he was probably the missing piece and the difference between a first-round exit in the NIT and a trip to the NCAA Tournament. Adeleke would have been a huge help that year, especially with Gibson limited to 18 games as he recovered from knee surgery. Can you imagine the inside-outside game with Loren Stokes, Carlos Rivera, Antoine Agudio, Adeleke, Gibson and junior transfer Adrian Uter?

Hofstra went 12-6 in CAA play and led Old Dominion by 10 points in the second half of the semifinal before falling to the eventual conference champs 72-58. How many more conference games would the Flying Dutchmen have won with Adeleke? How much higher would they have finished? How safe would a 10-point second half lead been with him patrolling the paint?

Some details about Adeleke’s tumultuous time at Hofstra trickled out after he landed at Harford, including chronic tardiness that got him yanked from the starting lineup during the final two games of the 2003-04 season and his arrest stemming from a fight in Staten Island the day before his dismissal (all charges were dropped). And his time at Hartford—which nearly came to an end before it ever began—was marred by more tardiness as well an incident in which he punched out a mirror in the locker room.

But he was predictably dominant once he hit the floor for the Hawks in 2005-06. Adeleke racked up 24 double-doubles (breaking by one Malik Rose’s single-season conference record), led the conference in scoring and rebounding and won the player of the week a record eight times (yet somehow did not win player of the year). But he got no closer to the NCAA Tournament in his lone year with Hartford, which fell to New Hampshire in the quarterfinals of the 2006 America East tournament than he did in his final year with Hofstra, which was knocked out in the quarterfinals of the 2004 CAA tourney by Old Dominion.

Hartford fans (I’m honestly not sure if they exist, my brother-in-law graduated from there and has never uttered word one about the hoops program) probably wonder what could have happened if he’d played there four years. We wonder what might have been if he’d played here one more.

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com.

There but for the grace of Jim...

This used to be the Gaels' playground...

The news flew under the radar last week, but Iona disbanded its football program, effective immediately. It was a predictable demise precipitated by age-old—or at least decade-old—factors.

Iona doesn’t award football scholarships, which made it as relevant on the Division I-AA landscape as the newspaper in the dotcom world. Even more damaging to the Gaels was the collapse of MAAC football, which had 10 teams at its peak but which saw most of its member schools drop football earlier this decade. The MAAC was down to four teams last year, but Duquense left for the Northeast Conference, Marist bolted for the Pioneer Football League, which is the only non-scholarship I-AA conference in the land, and LaSalle disbanded its program.

Iona declined an invite to the PFL and found it nearly impossible to fill out a schedule or compete as an independent. The Gaels went 3-8, but recorded all three victories against Division II or Division III foes by a grand total of 13 points and were 0-7 against Division I-AA opponents.

A loss to Division III Wesley began a season-ending six-game losing streak in which the Gaels lost by more than 30 points three times lost by more than 40 points twice—including a 68-9 thrashing at the hands of Stony Brook. (So, if Stony Brook was 59 points better than Iona, then Hofstra would have beaten the Gaels 99-0) Iona’s closest game against an I-AA opponent was its last, a 23-7 loss to I-AA rookie Bryant.

Decisions like this make me glad I’m not a college president or athletic director. From a bottom line perspective, it’s tough to argue with the decision to dump the program. Even at the non-scholarship level, it was surely hemorrhaging money, and to make football relevant again, even in the Pioneer, Iona would have had to follow in the footsteps of Georgetown and infuse cash into upgrading the program and facilities. Iona’s Mazzella Field, which had the lowest seating capacity of any Division I or I-AA stadium, looked like a high school field.

And all that expense for…what, exactly? As we’ve all learned over the past 15 years, even an I-AA program that consistently wins is little more than a curiosity to the general public. If you’re not competing for a BCS berth, nobody cares except a tiny fraction of the alums. And the last game at Iona drew 483 fans. That’s not a misprint.

But that tiny fraction is passionate about the sport. This was the 31st season of football at Iona, which began as a Division III program in 1978 and made an NCAA-mandated move to I-AA in 1991. That’s thousands of alums who donned the shoulder pads and are now quite sore at the alma mater. And there are surely hundreds, if not thousands, of fans who took pride in rooting for a football team at a basketball school and continued to follow the team well beyond graduation. They’re surely not happy today.

The demise of Iona football got me thinking about Flying Dutchmen football and what could have been had Hofstra not upgraded the program at the behest of a passionate and rather powerful alum—school president and former football player James Shuart.

Like Iona, Hofstra jumped from D-III to I-AA in 1991. But unlike Iona, which had a natural home for all its sports in the MAAC, Hofstra had to make the move to I-AA during a turbulent time for the athletic department. The East Coast Conference was in its final season and down to just seven teams in 1991-92, and all four football-playing schools (Buffalo, Central Connecticut and Towson State were the others) were independents making the same transition as Hofstra.

Fortunately for Hofstra, being an independent in the early ‘90s wasn’t the scarlet letter it is today. According to the 1994 football media guide, 17 of the 116 I-AA teams were independents. (Thanks to Jim Sheehan for including the list, no doubt realizing how handy it would be for me 14 years later) This year, it was six out of 125.

The scheduling challenges remained, though, and played a huge role in Hofstra missing the playoffs following a breakout 8-1-1 season in 1994. “Maybe it would be easier if we were in the Yankee [Conference],” Joe Gardi told Newsday in a story published Nov. 29, 1994.

Shuart traveled to the NCAA Convention in January 1995 to personally pitch Hofstra’s candidacy to the Yankee Conference. But despite Shuart’s enthusiasm, the seemingly natural fit, Hofstra’s continued success—the Dutchmen proved to be no fluke by going 10-2 and earning a playoff berth in 1995, the first of four postseason appearances it would make in a six-year span—and the addition of scholarships, getting into the Yankee took so long that it was called the Atlantic 10 when it finally accepted Hofstra for the 2001 season.

And by that time, being in a conference was a necessity, not a luxury. The 17 independents from 1994 had either upgraded to Division I, landed in a I-AA conference or disbanded the program by the start of the 2001 season. (Thanks to this site was an invaluable resource in figuring out where everyone went between 1994 and now)

So what would have happened if Shuart wasn’t the program’s biggest booster? Would Hofstra football have beaten Iona to the where-are-they-now file?

Probably not. Even back at the beginning of the I-AA days, Hofstra football appeared too big to fail (you know, like America’s banks). Hofstra Stadium was one of the better facilities in I-AA and the multi-million dollar Margiotta Hall opened in 1992. And football at Hofstra began in 1937, which makes it almost as old as the school itself.

Even without Shuart’s encouragement, Hofstra probably would have ended up moving into the Atlantic 10 for football, since the A-10 housed all the football-playing CAA schools.

There’s no doubt, though, that Hofstra made the move into the upper echelon of I-AA programs at the right time, because it’d never happen today. Shuart, who retired in 2001, is merely a big fan of the program and the school is now run by a president and athletic director whose passion for the sport is directly tied to the bottom line…which is ugly and getting worse.

Even if the program is a giant money loser, there’s too much invested in and around Shuart Stadium to pull the plug. It doesn’t make much sense for the stadium to merely host graduations, Hofstra lacrosse games and the Long Island high school football championships.

It will be interesting, though, to see what happens when the fledgling programs at Old Dominion and Georgia State complete their transition periods and join the CAA in 2011 and 2012, respectively. A 14-team conference is just about unmanageable. Will Hofstra take one for the CAA by volunteering to downgrade the program to the partial or non-scholarship level? Getting rid of scholarships and competing in the Pioneer would surely save the school huge chunks of change, even accounting for the travel expenses in the coast-to-coast league.

Such a decision would be a disappointing one, but it would sure beat the alternative. Just ask fans of Iona football.

(PS: Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!)

Email Jerry at defiantlydutch@yahoo.com.