New York Times on Dakich and WVU

It is one of the signature moments in Falcon sports, if infamy counts.

And a turning point.

The year was 2002.  Falcon men's basketball coach Dan Dakich had done what was always expected of him...he was doing what people on the Bob Knight coaching tree did...he was moving into the upper reaches of college basketball.

Our team was 79-41 over the previous four years.

It is no secret what happened next.  Dakich spent a week in Morgantown and then decided to return to Bowling Green.  He never again had success at Bowling Green and was, in retrospect, on his way out of coaching.  Our program has also not had any real success since that day in 2002.

I know you have to be careful about taking events in time and making cause and effect relationships when you are looking back.  You can decide for yourself.

The facts are what they are.  In the 10 seasons since, BG has had two winning years.  During that time, we are 143-165.

For whatever reason, Pete Thamel of the New York Times decided to write on this story today.  You can check it out here, but it describes Dakich finding incriminating evidence of the program at WVU (a player promised $20,000 per year), reporting it, being threatened (in the presence of his wife) and then returning to BG.  It also describes the denials of WVU officials and the fact that the NCAA investigated and took no action.

Dakich haters at BG believe that he got cold feet and inflated his concerns about the payments to get out of the deal.

This story breaks down to "he said, he said" in a sense.  And I do not have a good explanation for why the NCAA never acted.

A couple notes though.

The WVU President says that Dakich's account of their meeting (in which Dakich says he threatened to "destroy" Dakich) was "grossly exaggerated."  Which, in the annals of denials, is the kind of thing that stands out as not exactly a categorical statement of innocence.

And, Dakich describes how sad the player in question was when he recounted a life of being "owned"....which is not the kind of detail you come up with when you are making something up, unless you are a sociopath...which I don't think Dakich was.

Finally, it wasn't just Dan in the room.

I mean, if you have Dan and his wife exaggerating something to that level of detail on one hand and a big-time college president threatening to "destroy" someone who is trying to expose something he'd rather have kept quiet, and you ask me which is more likely...I'm going to tell you the second.

Anyway, there are three people who know what was said in that room, and I'm not one of them.  An interesting story and an interesting chance to reflect on this moment in Falcon history.

Depth Chart Review....and injury update

So, the "media guide" is out (and has been) and has a preliminary depth chart included in it.  With all the caveats--notably, that we hear there are a lot of close competitions for various positions, so this might very well have changed.  Still, there are a couple of things I think are interesting....

Interesting things:

First, for all the talk of how we are more experienced, this is still not a relatively young team.  There are only 2 seniors on the entire defensive two-deep and 3 on the offensive two-deep.  Tons of juniors though.

Even more interesting is that we have talked on and on about how much more experienced our o-line is, but this depth chart shows that there is at least a possibility of 2 of the 5 starters being r-FR making their first game appearances.  I found that surprising.

We have a punt returner I never heard of before.  Ryan Burbrink (rFR) of DeMatha (yes, that DeMatha) is probably a walk-on.  He was all-state in Maryland in HS.  I found a forum on the Baltimore Sun that referred to him as a "shifty white boy" and even if that is a little inelegant, they seemed surprised that he was not recruited more than he was.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see how he does.

Finally, the injury update.  Ronnie Goble, starting DE, has an ankle sprain based on Coach's video on the website yesterday.  It doesn't sound terribly serious and they hope he can be back for Florida.

The Blade has the news today that D-lineman Hunter Maynard has a knee injury and could be lost for the year.  He was expected to be in the rotation on the d-line.  He played as a true FR last year.

Hallmon leaves team and Kamar Jorden update...

True Freshman Erick Hallmon has left the team, according to a story in The Blade this morning.  He was in this year's class...here is what we wrote about him at the time.....italicized part is a summation of the comments from Coach Clawson.  In general, this guy appeared to be a pretty good player who was recruited by other schools.  According to ESPN.com, he was the highest ranked recruit we had in the class.

Erick Hallmon, LB, 6-0, 195, Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. (Cardinal Gibbons)
High School: Currently attends Cardinal Gibbons High School ... coached by Mike Morrill ... team captain ... four year starter ... earned second-team all-county as a senior ... recorded 65 tackles, one interception and one touchdown that same season ... played in the Broward All-Star Game and the Nike South Florida versus Dade County All-Star Game.

Patience helped as BG outwaited a Texas Tech verbal and then other teams. Could be an OLB, even a Box LB. Could play special teams early.

He is the second Floridian to leave the program this spring, the other being DB Dernard Turner.

On a Training Camp update, Kamar Jorden is in the Vikings camp, where he suffered a broken hand.  This is pretty disappointing and would make it very difficult (obviously) for him to make the team year.

Home/Away Records in Football

So, as you know, I have been skeptical that home field is as important in college football as it is in college basketball.  Phil Steele recently published the home and away records for the last 10 years in the FBS and they do reveal some interesting results.  First, I'll look at a couple observations, and then we will look at the MAC.

First, in general I was right, even if it was less than I thought.  The home team wins just under 64% of the games.  Now, that is less than in basketball, if only by a little.  However, the presence of FCS games means that teams in FBS start with a 52% winning percentage and a significant number of the home games in the non-conference schedule are foregone conclusions.  Both are true in basketball, but make up less of the overall total and have less impact.

In the MAC, which is usually on the business end of those games in the early season, the winning percentage for the home team is only 55%.  Let's look at the rankings.

So, there are two clearly dominant home teams in our conference....NIU and UT.  NIU is the 23rd rank team in FBS for their winning record, and UT is 43rd.  Then, you have OU, WMU, BG and CMU more or less even as you move down.  In total, 7 of the 12 teams in the conference have winning records at home.

Now, let's look at the road records.

Here, we see the home/road picture more plainly.  Only two teams have winning records on the road, and the Falcons have the best in the MAC and 28th in the country at 51%.  NIU is very close, and you can see from there how it plays out.  EMU averages one road win a year and Buffalo isn't much above that.

Now, there is one issue outstanding here.  When you look at the Steele rankings, you see that Boise has the best home record over that period of time.  They also had the best road record--because they were the best team.  NIU clearly spent much of the last decade dominating the MAC West, as seen by their record home and on the road.

So, rather than looking at who the best home and road teams were, you might instead want to know who had the biggest home field advantage.  You could measure this by looking how much better teams did at home than on the road.

Here, we see the MAC ranking better nationally, though again there is a tougher road schedule.  Nationally, the difference was 23.7%, so the MAC actually had less differential (slightly) than FBS as a whole--this is line with the modest differences we saw on the first two categories.

There are two types of team here.  I thought we would see the Toledo and NIU teams who are so tough to beat at home and (in the case of Toledo) just average on the road.  You also have teams like Akron and Kent which are not especially good at home but really bad on the road.

Two thirds of the MAC (8 out of 12) have differentials above 20% and around the national average, so clearly it makes a difference to be playing at home and probably more than I thought.  There's a big drop to the final four, which includes Bowling Green, which has not only the lowest differential in the MAC but also the 5th lowest in all of the FBS.

Which is the result of only decent results at home and being pretty successful on the road.  I think Falcon fans had sensed that we seemed to lose a lot at home, so here's hoping we can get our home winning percentage up in the 70% range, which is where our conference's most successful teams appear to be.

New NCAA Bowl Rules

The NCAA has a little problem.  The current bowl schedule requires 70 bowl eligible teams and that has been a struggle for the past few years.  I keep hearing there will be a movement to reduce the number of bowls but nothing ever seems to happen.

The problem is compounded by the fact that four teams are now facing a bowl ban this season and there could be two more.

So, the NCAA has adopted a new method of allowing bowls to "dip" into the pool of teams that were not already eligible based on the current standards (6-6, only one FCS win) and those are pretty meager to start with.

You can check it out in this article.  A bowl can only rely on these double secret exceptions once every four years.

I never know, but I figure eventually these rules will be used to send some 6-6 BCS team to a bowl game over a qualified MAC team.  I hope to be wrong about that.

Quick report on Saturday Scrimmage

On the catch up a little, there's some stuff coming out of the scrimmage on Saturday at the Doyt, all drawn from coach's comments on bgsufalcons.com.

Basically, he thought the offense got the better of the play and the only thing that kept it from being  a great offensive day was (wait for it) the offense's propensity to self-destruct with missed signals and false starts and a turnover late.

Let me know if that sounds familiar.

Coach said we played poorly on defense, especially against the run, even though in general the defense has been practicing better.

If you want something else to worry about, he says that none of the WRs have distanced themselves from the others during practice.  Given that a couple seemed to start with a decent lead, that's kind of disappointing to hear.  As Coach said, if we played next week, we'd be in trouble.  He cited a couple of players who had made a couple nice plays but combined that with some missed signals.

He thought the O-line played very well today.

Finally, at RB, Anthon Samuel is the clear starter.  Hopgood did not participate because they are bringing him along slowly (he is practicing) and Andre Givens has a minor injury and should practice again today or tomorrow.

But, we are very deep at RB, which is a good problem to have.

No other injury issues were mentioned.

LeBron James Had BGSU Football Offer

So, Mr. Rivals.com--you didn't have this in your list of offers back in the day.

Urban Meyer offered a scholarship to LeBron James to play football at Bowling Green.

Yep.

From USA Today:

When James was a high school sophomore, Meyer said, he offered the future NBA MVP a scholarship as a wide receiver, though Meyer envisioned James as a tight end. Meyer was head coach at Bowling Green the same year James finished his sophomore year of high school at St. Vincent-St. Mary in Akron, Ohio.

As Meyer recalled, when the offer was made, James said, "Thank you very much. I'll consider it."

Then James' coach started laughing.

"What are you laughing at?" Meyer asked the coach.

"Do you know who that is?" the coach asked.

"No," Meyer answered.

"That's LeBron James," the coach said.

"Who's LeBron James?" Meyer asked.

"He'll be the next Michael Jordan," the coach said.

"C'mon," Meyer scoffed.

Interesting huh?   Meyer was notoriously focused on football, so I completely believe he was the only man in Ohio who didn't know who LeBron James was.  (Note the famous story of Meyer dropping his kids off at school on a snow day).

It is a funny story---Meyer goes on to say James would have been a Hall of Fame football player---and we are left only to dream of how James would have looked in orange and brown.