FB: New England Small College Athletic Conference

Started by admin, August 16, 2005, 04:58:09 AM

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jumpshot


BigKat

Amazing how the Presidential polls are tightening and all of a sudden college and HS football is safe again. Nescac and Ivies look really bad right now.

Hawk196

Quote from: BigKat on September 25, 2020, 09:52:55 AM
Amazing how the Presidential polls are tightening and all of a sudden college and HS football is safe again. Nescac and Ivies look really bad right now.

Let's hope they make an honest try to have a spring season, even if it includes some non NESCAC Div.3 schools. I hope Tufts leads the way, I'm sure they can find a way to use fields, whether home , away or a neutral site

Trin9-0

Quote from: Trin8-0 on September 16, 2020, 12:18:40 PM
Quote from: Trin8-0 on September 09, 2020, 10:28:19 AM
This is the first announcement I've seen for the Trin '21 recruiting class:



Nate Stewart, OL, 6'1", 275 lbs, Milton Academy, Milton, MA, hudl

Speaking of recruiting; after months of back-and-forth, Connecticut has cancelled 11 on 11 high school football for the year. The current proposal is for a 7 on 7 season to take place this fall. However, there has been significant push back by schools and legislators to do what many states have already done; which is sandwich and abbreviated season in between the winter and spring sport seasons. I'm not confident that will be approved, but either way it is sure to impact NESCAC recruiting and Trinity and Wesleyan in particular since their rosters typically include the most players from Connecticut.

Something to keep an eye on...

Per twitter, TJ Abazzia, a 5'11", 225 lb LB from Greenwich, CT has also committed to Trinity:


Another recruit who has "committed to the admissions process" at Trinity per his twitter account.

Bo Faughnan OL, 6'6", 275 lbs, Brunswick School, Greenwich, CT, hudl

NESCAC CHAMPIONS: 1974, 1978, 1980, 1983, 1987, 1991, 1993, 1996, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2012, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2022, 2023
UNDEFEATED SEASONS: 1911, 1915, 1934, 1949, 1954, 1955, 1993, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2012, 2016, 2022

Pat Coleman

Quote from: BigKat on September 25, 2020, 09:52:55 AM
Nescac and Ivies look really bad right now.

The NESCAC looks exactly the same as 98% of Division III right now.
Publisher. Questions? Check our FAQ for D3f, D3h.
Quote from: old 40 on September 25, 2007, 08:23:57 PMLet's discuss (sports) in a positive way, sometimes kidding each other with no disrespect.

Hawk196

Quote from: Trin8-0 on September 25, 2020, 03:37:49 PM
Quote from: Trin8-0 on September 16, 2020, 12:18:40 PM
Quote from: Trin8-0 on September 09, 2020, 10:28:19 AM
This is the first announcement I've seen for the Trin '21 recruiting class:



Nate Stewart, OL, 6'1", 275 lbs, Milton Academy, Milton, MA, hudl

Speaking of recruiting; after months of back-and-forth, Connecticut has cancelled 11 on 11 high school football for the year. The current proposal is for a 7 on 7 season to take place this fall. However, there has been significant push back by schools and legislators to do what many states have already done; which is sandwich and abbreviated season in between the winter and spring sport seasons. I'm not confident that will be approved, but either way it is sure to impact NESCAC recruiting and Trinity and Wesleyan in particular since their rosters typically include the most players from Connecticut.

Something to keep an eye on...

Per twitter, TJ Abazzia, a 5'11", 225 lb LB from Greenwich, CT has also committed to Trinity:


Another recruit who has "committed to the admissions process" at Trinity per his twitter account.

Bo Faughnan OL, 6'6", 275 lbs, Brunswick School, Greenwich, CT, hudl

6'6", 275lbs = Ivy, Patriot league, div.1(or 1A).....what up with that?

lumbercat


Hawk196

Quote from: lumbercat on September 28, 2020, 11:54:42 AM
he's in the right place- check the tape

I just did......coaching at the H.S. level is critical

Jonny Utah

#17198
You aren't going to get much looking at a highlight tape, but his feet look a little slow.  Also a little high. 

SpringSt7

The beauty of D3 is that production and success comes in all different shapes and sizes. You get guys with great ability and no size, guys with great size and minimal ability, and everything in between. Jack Pistorius is listed at 6'2 205, hardly any sort of crazy measurements. Frank Stola can't be taller than 6 feet but Jonathan Girard is every bit of 6'4 6'5 and towers over every DB in the league.

For whatever it's worth, the 6 1st-Team OL this year were listed at:

6'1 275
6'3 275
6'3 265
6'1 250
6'0 271
6'6 290

So 6'6 275 isn't necessarily a man amongst boys at the NESCAC level.

lumbercat

#17200
Correct and many of the great players in the NESCAC are typically the recruits that can't compete in the physical beauty contest at higher levels so they slide to the NESCAC and become diamonds in the rough. Good football players come in all sizes. The ability to recognize talent in a kid who is undersized and might not have a great 40 time is the hallmark of a winning NESCAC program.

I think of 2 Tufts guys- Chance Brady and their fine LB Holt. Both undersized and passed over by higher level programs only to be grabbed by Civetti....and that's why he's going places.

Most of the big-huge lineman in the NESCAC are there for a reason. It doesn't mean they can't develop into fine players but they typically have some deficiencies which cause the higher level programs to let them slide.

JEFFFAN

With apologies for the length, this is a nice article on an Amherst guy that was written in The Athletic, which is a subscription service so no value in sending the link:

The morning the World Trade Center twin towers fell in New York, Dave Borgonzi was sitting in geology class outside of Boston, a freshman in college without a clue what would come next. And for a while, before he weighed working on Wall Street or going to law school or trying to make it as a football coach, he felt compelled to hunt down the terrorists responsible.

In the weeks and months after Sept. 11, 2001, he dug in. He pored through books, scoured the internet for info and discussed the attacks with his professors and classmates at Amherst College. He was a Boston kid with friends in Manhattan that day, and like so many, it hit him hard. He felt the pull of patriotism. He wanted to do something about it.

Then he had a thought: What would it take the join the FBI?

He pictured a job in the counterterrorism unit. He read about the strict screening process and the fact that you can't pick where you live. He loaded up on political science courses.

He wondered what it would be like.

"I'll be honest," the Colts linebackers coach admits, "I thought about it hard."
In the end, though, something else pulled harder. His father Al had him hooked on football from an early age, dragging him and his brother Mike to Patriots training camp practices for years.

What about coaching?

The problem: He didn't know where to start. He had no connections. He had no road map.
Al worked for the city of Everett, Mass., first as director of the parks department, then director of city services. His mother Doris was a schoolteacher. Dave was an average linebacker for a Division III program that's produced all of five NFL players in its 143 years of existence.

"Most guys who go to Amherst don't plan on coaching football," Borgonzi said, and for a while, neither did he.

Even after he decided not to chase a job at the FBI, he figured he'd land in finance or head to law school. He earned his degree from Amherst's Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought department. He spent one summer interning at the Massachusetts state auditor's office, another at Fidelity Investments.

He figured it would grow on him.  It never did.

"I kept telling myself, 'I'm supposed to like this,' " he remembered. "But I just couldn't. I decided I didn't want to spend the rest of my life chasing money."

So instead he chased a job in football. Any job. As a senior at Amherst, he walked over to the career center one day and told the lady at the desk he wanted to work in the NFL. Lucky for him, she knew the director of media relations in Washington, who happened to be an Amherst alum. He called her out of the blue and asked for a job.

"You don't even have to pay me," he told her.

She didn't. He spent the summer as an intern in the public relations department. He was the grunt who rose at 5 a.m., day after day, to gather the morning clips — all the stories filed by local and national media the night before — and get them ready for coaches and staff. He passed out media credentials at training camp, arranged interviews with players and transcribed news conferences.
It was far from glamorous, but it got his foot in the door.

From there, his Amherst connection began to pay off. A young coach on the Patriots staff named Matt Patricia, who had coached Amherst's defensive line when Borgonzi was there, landed him another PR internship, this time in New England. The work was the same. Clips. Credentials. Interviews. Transcriptions.

Borgonzi rose early, collected the clips and then walked the packets into the coaches' offices at 6 a.m., day after day.

"After a while, they started asking, 'Who's this guy who's showing up every morning bringing me clips?' " Borgonzi remembers. "They knew I played college football, and they knew I wanted to get into coaching."

A year later, another break: Patricia and Patriots longtime offensive line coach Dante Scarnecchia teamed up to get Borgonzi a job as a graduate assistant at Syracuse. From there, three seasons at Harvard, coaching the secondary, until Rob Ryan — the Patriots linebackers coach in the early 2000s — landed the Cowboys defensive coordinator job in 2010. He gave Borgonzi his first shot at the NFL.
Eight years later, when Matt Eberflus became the Colts' new defensive coordinator, he tapped Borgonzi as his linebackers coach. They were building a new defense in Indianapolis, and they wanted linebackers that were fast and physical. A few months later, with the 36th pick in the draft, the Colts took a little-known player from a lesser-known school.

In his very first practice, Borgonzi saw something special in Darius Leonard.
"He made this unbelievable interception, falling backward, and you just said to yourself, 'Well, that looks different,' " Borgonzi said.

Six months later Leonard was the NFL's Defensive Rookie of the Year.

But it's been more than Leonard. As a rookie in 2017, Anthony Walker couldn't get on the field. After Borgonzi took over in '18, he became a reliable starter at middle linebacker. Bobby Okereke, a third-round pick a year later, ascended to a starting role late last season, further solidifying the unit.
The Colts kept seven linebackers on their 53-man roster this fall, a surprise considering they often only play two on the field at the same time. It spoke to the unit's depth and the development Borgonzi has nurtured.

Good drafting? Yes.
Great coaching, too.

"An outstanding coach," Frank Reich said. "Very smart. Very detailed. Very methodical."
Walker said the speed Borgonzi demands on the practice field spills into Sundays. The Colts do everything fast, and it's not by accident. Eberflus' rush-and-cover scheme relies heavily on players getting off blocks and covering ground quickly.
It's a must the linebackers can move.

"I doubt there are many units in the league that practice as fast as us," Walker boasts. "We always joke with each other — if we make it through individual drills, the rest of practice gets easier. Everything's all out and at top speed. He never lets up. I think he'd be a great defensive coordinator one day."
Borgonzi isn't going there. Not yet at least. But one day soon, the Borgonzi name might be far better known in NFL circles than it already is: Dave's older brother Mike has spent the last decade climbing in the Chiefs' personnel department. He's currently the director of football operations in Kansas City and has been tapped by some as a future general manager.

While Dave admits he has aspirations down the line, he loves where he's at and the group he's got.
"Sundays never get old," he reminds his players every season, and he believes it. Those are the afternoons when it hits him the most. He made the right call. This is what he's meant to be doing.
FBI agent?

Lawyer?

Investment adviser?

He was a football coach all along, even if he didn't know it, even if he had to work at it, with no connections and no road map to follow. Just weigh where the Colts were three years ago at the position: Borgonzi stood in a hallway inside the team facility, a first-time position coach, shaking his head when he was asked who his starters would be for the following season.
He didn't know. Neither did anybody else.

"We're gonna have to find out," he said.

Then he went to work.

Three years later, they've got one of the best young linebacking units in the league.

lumbercat

#17202
Bowdoin has 120+ offers pending for 28 spots in the class of 2025.....and many of those are in the new "fertile recruiting turf' they see in Ohio which has previously been NESAC oblivious along with Pa which is somewhat the same.
At the risk of getting killed by the boys from Wabash or Wooster where everybody gets in not sure what vaunted recruiter Hammier is doing here....hope all those Ohio kids fit into the 28 admitted prospects in Brunswick or future recruiting in the Buckeye state will be tough and the Keystone state might also be a challenge.

VoodooDoc

Lumbercat

What is your point?  The quality of high school football in Ohio and Western PA is top notch.  Coach Hammer and the football staff at Bowdoin are trying to widen the talent pool to improve the quality of football at Bowdoin.  The talent pool in New England is already heavily mined by the other NESCAC schools.  Why not reach out to other areas such as Florida, Georgia, Texas, Arizona and California and the Midwest for talented players?

While the standards for admission to Wabash College and the College of Wooster are not in the same stratosphere as Bowdoin  relative to most of the other colleges in the Midwest they are more difficult.  The notion that those schools will admit whomever the coaches bring to the door is just plain silly.  The coaches at those schools have to search for the right mix of football talent and GPA etc to be get their players admitted.  I am not sure why you included the College of Wooster.  It is a fine school and with a good reputation, but I don't believe Coach Hammer or other members of the Bowdoin football coaching staff ever coached there.

In these days of COVID-19, the  football staff at Bowdoin, or elsewhere for that matter, really don't know what they will have returning next fall from the current upperclassmen who are on furlough from campus at the moment.  Will they have standard 25 slots for next fall or will there be fall out and more slots will be available?  Sounds like they are being sensible whether you agree or not with the approach. 

lumbercat

#17204
Voodoo?

My point is this and I'll re state because you missed it.

I'm talking about over promising to high school seniors and it's not fueled by the covid. It was well underway before the covid.
Sorry to reference Wooster....a fine school in a great Football conference but respectfully the admission dynamic is not like the NESCAC.
The quality of HS football in Ohio and Pa is top notch- no debate there. I commend Hammer for aggressively recruiting all the states you mention but I don't understand throwing "offers" around indiscriminately. When you over commit like that it's going to hurt you down the road especially with HS coaches in those areas. Hammer has got to make an offer from prestigious Bowdoin meaningful, instead he's watering it down.
Sad to see the recruitment of HS student athletes look like airline overbooking in the past.