With just a few days left until National Signing Day for college football recruiting it highlights one of the most demanding and competitive aspects of college coaching. There are coaches who will do anything and say anything (within the rules or otherwise) to get certain players to come to their schools. In over two decades of recruiting there were great days and tough days and days when you just wanted to get home safely. There were nights white knuckle driving after midnight through snowstorms on I-80, route 322 or route 22 to get home. There were nights when the snow covered landscape amid the mountains of Northwestern Pennsylvania was draped in the blue light of a cloudless full moon sk
With Inauguration Day upon us it’s a good time to look back at some connections between college football, the oval office and voting. 1. The Man Who Saved The World. President Teddy Roosevelt is the President who saved football. By the early 1900s the game had grown incredibly brutal. In 1905 alone The Chicago Tribune reported 18 deaths in football games, resulting in tremendous political pressure to abolish the violent game. Roosevelt met with representatives from Harvard, Princeton and Yale at the White House to impress upon them the need to make changes. After that sixty-two schools met and implemented rule changes including the forward pass to make it a safer game. To his core Roosevelt
Before we start with the preseason top 10 rankings for 2017, before we start on the final mad dash of the over-hyped recruiting season there are still some loose ends that need to be tied up from the 2016 season. 1. The Length of Games. The games are too long. Keep in mind this is a few years after the college game adopted many of the NFL timekeeping rules to shorten the game. After those changes the length of games dipped to slightly over three hours. ESPN reported on Tuesday that the average game length ballooned to 3:24. Both The National Championship game and Rose Bowl topped 4 hours and 10 minutes. The amount of scoring in these games is a factor as are the numerous stoppages for replay
After the College Football Playoff Semifinals the narrative of the Big Ten as the toughest conference is in doubt as the conference’s combined bowl record stood at 2-5. A three game sweep on January 2nd could help restore some of the conference’s pride. But should those results concern Penn State fans headed into the Rose Bowl Game today? In 1992 after Penn State lost the Blockbuster Bowl to Stanford there was a column in the Chicago Tribune stating that Penn State’s woeful bowl result would help them fit right in to the Big Ten when they joined the conference for football in 1993. Well Penn State wasn’t buying any of that. Joe Paterno led his team to a 10-4 Bowl Record (including 7-3 agains
