Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Irish Eyes

You know it's getting serious when the South Bend Tribune is not only writing about Dartmouth quarterback recruit Cole Marcoux but interviewing him. And we're not talking about South Bend, Oregon, folks. We're talking about the one in Golden Domeland.

Here's what Marcoux told the Fighting Irish's hometown paper:
"All I know is that I can't imagine any high school football player who wouldn't be interested if Notre Dame ever came calling."
Buried deep in the story was this tidbit about Marcoux, considered a better baseball prospect until this year:
The pitcher even took an unofficial recruiting visit to Notre Dame. As part of the visit, Marcoux took in the ND football team's upset loss to Syracuse that frigid, snowy November weekend in 2008.

“If I'm not mistaken, that was not the best football game to come to,” he said. “But you know what, I had a great time anyway. I loved the campus, loved just being there. I've been rooting for Notre Dame since I was a little kid."
A couple more outtakes:
“I think Notre Dame definitely should go after this kid,” CBS College Sports recruiting analyst Tom Lemming said of the 6-foot-5, 235-pound Marcoux, a senior at the Fieldston School in the Bronx, N.Y., who has been the buzz of the college recruiting circles since his stunning performance in Saturday's U.S. Army All-American Bowl in San Antonio.

“And if Notre Dame doesn't go after him, someone else will,” Lemming continued. “He got overlooked, because nobody goes to New York City to recruit and he didn't go to any of the high-profile combines. He's got a rifle arm. He can make all the throws."
And this from SuperPrep's Allen Wallace, national recruiting editor for Scout.com:
“If college coaches were watching the same thing I was watching, they'd have to conclude this guy is for real."
Rivals.com, by the way, gave Marcoux the offensive game ball for the East team in the U.S. Army All-American Bowl that started all of this. From the Rivals analysis of Marcoux:
He left no room for error by putting the ball on the money on multiple occasions. Maybe the three top throws overall in the entire game came out of Marcoux. Those throws – and there were three or four of them – were NFL-level throws. He showed a huge arm, good touch and presence and on a two-point conversion, he showed a combination of all of the above."
Georgia commit Hutson Mason of Marietta, Ga. – one of the players Marcoux outlasted in the Reality show The Ride – told the Atlanta Journal Constitution:
“What most people don’t know is that those guys were giving Cole a hard time out there. They were, like, ‘We’re out here because we’re Army All-Americans and Cole is out here because he was on a reality TV show.’ Going through the week he was getting a hard time from those guys. They were giving him the cold shoulder.

“So for Cole to go out there and play like he did, that’s awesome for him. I hope the best for him. I hope he gets a school close to home he can play at."
In the "comment" section below that story were these comments:
We need to recruit Cole Marcoux too. Did ya’ll see that kids arm? WOW!!!
and
Cole Marcoux was outstanding in the game. He can really chuck the ball with accuracy, even cross-field off his back foot. Great arm strength, looked like a man among boys.
Anonymous comments and message boards are what they are, but here's another sampling. From a Nebraska board:
This 2-star recruit, Cole Marcoux was the best looking QB on the field today. The only reason he was there was because he won some contest on a reality show. If you missed the game you really missed out. Had the best arm of all the QBs.
A TCU poster noticed him. So did a few from Cal. And from a Notre Dame board:
He looked, by far, like the best QB out there. Moved well in the pocket, strong arm, obviously smart....He was the only player on the East squad that had a good game.
The Westside Independent, one of his local papers, also had a short piece on the quarterback here.

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Which Top-25 college football team had the highest Graduation Success Rate and "federal graduation rate?" From a release:
Penn State was ranked No. 1 in the Academic BCS standings by Higher Ed Watch, who analyzed the NCAA federal graduation data and Academic Progress Rates of the 25 teams in the final Bowl Championship Series standings. Penn State earned a score of 126.0, followed by Stanford (113) and Cincinnati (99.3), to earn the top spot in the third annual survey.
The guess here is that most people would have Penn State and Stanford switched around. The shocker, at least for me, is that Cincinnati was third. They've got to be loving that in South Bend.
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From today's Daily Dartmouth:
Dartmouth has received a record 18,500 applications for the Class of 2014 so far this year, an increase of 4 percent from this time last year, according to Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Maria Laskaris.
I don't know who 18,499 of them are ;-) (OK, that's not true. I know about some football recruits, but I think you get the point.)

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