In his latest column for ESPN The Magazine (not to be confused with ESPN "The Movie" or ESPN "The Fragrance"), Bill Simmons discusses his plan to resuscitate the athletics program of his alma mater, Holy Cross.
Simmons turns this idea into a harangue against the Patriot League, which he calls "a homeless man's Ivy League" where the goal is to "try to win, but not really." Furthermore, he labels Lehigh and Lafayette as especially indicative of the Patriot League's inferiority before making the obvious toothpaste joke about Colgate. Ouch, Sports Guy--that hurts.
Like a good citizen of the Lehigh Valley, I tried to muster the troops for an assault on Simmonsville, until my good friend (and Lehigh University student) HartFoundation made a rather trenchant point:
I was fired up to write an e-mail in defense of Lehigh and the Patriot League, but then I remembered Lehigh was the third seed in our conference tourney. With a 12-19 record. And we lost to Army. Because there wasn't a TV camera in the building.
I like having a sense of perspective on this--indeed, I can get a little too sentimental about a league with three teams from eastern Pennsylvania. Plus it's true that Holy Cross and Bucknell have dominated Patriot League basketball for the past 6 years (except in 2004 when--guess who!--Lehigh won the conference tourney...then promptly lost the play-in game).
But I disagree with Simmons when he says that there's no school spirit in the Patriot League. Though the academic mission of the member institutions often takes precedence over athletic success, there's plenty of pride on those campuses. And I don't think that "homeless man's Ivy League" crack would be welcomed at West Point or Annapolis in light of the rigors found there.
How about Lehigh-Lafayette, the nation's longest-running collegiate football rivalry? How about Bucknell's upsets of Kansas and Arkansas in the last two NCAA Tournaments? How about sour grapes: Holy Cross surrendering football supremacy to Lehigh and Colgate over the past decade? How about intense student body support of other, non-revenue sports that produce national champions (i.e. Lehigh wrestling)?
I'm therefore inviting the Sports Guy to come out to Bethlehem, or Easton, or Lewisburg, or hell, even Center Valley and catch a game. Mr. Simmons, I'll show you that we've got plenty of kids with a basketball jones--and then some.
The Plan to Save the Cross [Page 2]
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