Here are some links which may be of interest:
On David Brooks's recommendation, I enjoyed reading this humorous yet frustrating essay by Jonathan Rauch, titled "If Air Travel Worked Like Health Care."
I'll write my own preview over the next couple of days, but here is a look at the upcoming Florida College Classic hockey tournament.
Cornell senior wrestler, Binghamton area native, and undefeated NCAA champion Troy Nickerson was chosen as the Press & Sun Bulletin's athlete of the year for the fourth time.
Poker champ Brian Hastings '10 has donated at least $250 of his winnings to the 2010 Senior Class Campaign.
As a Christmas gift to fans everywhere, Jim Knowles '87 has resigned as Cornell football coach. You know you're doing a great job when you leave a head coaching job after six years to become an assistant somewhere else.
The Cornell basketball team is off to a great start and has a chance to win a first-round NCAA game, provided it can beat Harvard for the Ivy title.
Edit: One more. The Jerusalem Post hired Glenn Altschuler to write a review of Sarah Palin's book. Weird.
Merry Christmas -
ReplyDeleteAbout Knowles, I think it's illuminating that he chose to leave. He could have finished his contract at Cornell, but some combination of money and (likely) a feeling of futility led him to this lower-profile job.
If Duke was willing to hire him, he must have some recruiting and play-calling talent, at least on the defensive side. That leads me to believe that Knowles was sick of Cornell's financial aid situation and did not see the team improving in the next few years. Knowles caught a lot of flak from fans and others outside the Athletics Dept, especially in 09, but to me, this move indicates that Cornell's terrible record wasn't his fault, and now I really don't expect them to improve much in the immediate future.
Keenan,
ReplyDeleteYou raise some good points and of course there are plenty of college coaches who have struggled with one school before finding a good fit at another school.
I just don't know how he could have stayed after this season. These were all players he recruited, and they produced no offense. They got blown out by mediocre teams, they blew fourth quarter leads to bad teams, and they lost the last eight games of the season. At a certain point you can't blame financial aid packages for what happens on the field.
It's too bad that things didn't work out with Knowles; it was great that he was an alum and he seemed like a good guy. But if after six years the team looks like it did this year, there aren't too many more excuses.
Yeah there's no question that things weren't working out at Cornell, and "At a certain point you can't blame financial aid packages for what happens on the field" is almost verbatim what I told Andy Noel when asking if Knowles would return for another season.
ReplyDeleteNoel's mental formula for why Cornell had a crappy season included: financial aid, pure bad luck (there were some close games but I think it's telling that we didn't win any of them), Ganter's injury, players' lack of focus, and other seemingly improbable reasons. He did not openly fault Knowles's playcalling or recruiting, but that might have been part of the charade to give the "vote of confidence."
Aside from Bryan Walters and maybe Costello, this was a uniformly untalented group of seniors, especially at the lines which is where they got pummeled in every loss and which basically rendered useless whatever talent the rest of the group might have had. It's unclear whether this lack of talent was a recruiting anomaly, a byproduct of lots of players leaving the program (which obviously has to be blamed on Knowles), or simply the new (low) standard.
Knowles was also the recruiting coordinator at Ole Miss, so he couldn't be a terrible recruiter. One theory that I just came up with is that he knows how to recruit top-level, SEC-caliber talent using a combo of promises of publicity, winning, and most importantly, scholarships. Recruiting for the Ivy League is a different game, and one at which Knowles might not understand quite as well.
I guess the only thing I'm arguing is that Knowles HAD to leave. I think he very well could have stayed, but he apparently didn't see the team getting much better in the next two years.