Saturday, February 21, 2015

Here's The Scoop

FootballScoop is now chiming in that Al Bagnoli is heading to Columbia, and gives the move this ringing endorsement:
The winningest coach in Penn football’s 137-year history, Bagnoli stands as one of just six coaches in FCS history with 200 career victories.
There is quite literally not another coach in football that knows more about how to win at an urban, Ivy League school than the coach Columbia is about to hire.
Speaking of Penn, the Quakers have received a commitment from Brendan McGinty, the Virginia quarterback/athlete who had flirted with Dartmouth and William & Mary. He told the Daily Press (LINK):
“The coaches at William and Mary and Dartmouth treated me well and I have the utmost respect for them. But in the end, the deciding factor was (Penn’s) Wharton School of Business and proximity to Philadelphia.
Business Insider has a story about successful CEOs who played sports in college. The lede heading a list heavy with Ivy Leaguers is about General Electric's Jeff Immelt, a former Dartmouth lineman. (LINK)
Still on the topic of former Dartmouth linemen who went on to great success in the business world, the Hartford Courant has a story headlined, UConn Not Ready To Embrace Endowments For Coaches. It includes this:
Henry Paulson, the former U.S. Treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. chairman, gave $2 million to Dartmouth College in 2000 to endow the football coach at his alma mater.
There's another NJ.com story about former Rutgers quarterback Gary Nova prepping for an NFL shot and it has Nova saying this about Jay Fiedler, who is helping train him:
"It's awesome. A guy like him who played in the league, who didn't have an easy path to the league and bounced around, but just kept fighting. He's about my size so a lot of things correlate when he shows me. He's a great teacher and he puts me to work." 
From a story by The Sports Network in the aftermath of the Eastern Washington quarterback using his final year of eligibility at Oregon (where he will play against EWU):
The graduate transfer rule was created to allow a student-athlete to pursue a graduate degree that is not offered at his school. Too often, though, it has created an opportunity for free agency - a chance to jump to a better situation. 
Whenever this comes up I think about Seattle Seahawks kicker Steven Hauschka, who I first saw one year in the Dartmouth-Middlebury scrimmage. At the time he was a an Academic-All America neuroscience major with designs on entering the family business and becoming a dentist. He then went to NC State to study . . . wait for it . . .  parks, recreation and tourism management, a very helpful degree for a future dentist ;-)

A story in the Seattle Times explained Hauschka's thought process before chasing that masters degree:
With one year of eligibility left, he sat down and compiled a list of roughly 30 schools that had lost their kickers or had struggled in that area the previous year and contacted each one.
Green Alert Take: Good for Hauschka. A bright and accomplished cum laude graduate of one of the finest schools in the nation, he played by the rules and made them work for him. But clearly the rule isn't being used the way it was intended.