FCS PLAYOFFS

[FUBeAR]

I didn't say Furman would beat Davidson by 100. They almost assuredly would not.

I said Furman could beat Davidson by 100 and it still wouldn't make a difference as to whether they were selected to the post season as the PFL autobid.

Put differently, Furman's on field performance and Davidson's playoffs chances are mutually exclusive. They do not relate to one another in any meaningful way.

ahhh...so you were sayin, “there’s really no point in trying to compare.” - sounded too familiar, I guess.

[Furmanoid]

OK, I understand now. The PFL champion would get killed by the SoCon 4th place 19 out of 20 times. But that’s no reason they shouldn’t be included in a playoff for the 16 best teams. Teams shouldn’t be compared to one another to decide who gets in.

Do I have to get the dirt back out of that hole, Boss?

[FUBeAR]

OK, I understand now. The PFL champion would get killed by the SoCon 4th place 19 out of 20 times. But that’s no reason they shouldn’t be included in a playoff for the 16 best teams. Teams shouldn’t be compared to one another to decide who gets in.

Do I have to get the dirt back out of that hole, Boss?

You’re either not trying very hard or you’re trying very hard.

*lose to, occasionally by a lot
*24 Teams
*Non-Champions from Conferences should be compared to one another to decide who gets in via At-Large bids

Additional Reference Assignments (please report back to this thread once you have read / watched & considered each in the context of this discussion (500-1000 words should be sufficient))

https://www.ncaa.com/news/basketball-m ... la-stories

https://bleacherreport.com/articles/10 ... nt-history

https://www.colgate.edu/news/stories/v ... title-game

[Furmanoid]

OK everybody likes Cinderella’s.

But Cinderella wasn’t a Cinderella. She was hot but was left out of the bracket because of automatic berths given to 2 undeserving ugly step sisters who had no chance of winning.

[FUBeAR]

OK everybody likes Cinderella’s.

But Cinderella wasn’t a Cinderella. She was hot but was left out of the bracket because of automatic berths given to 2 undeserving ugly step sisters who had no chance of winning.

“Left out of the bracket”???

She LITERALLY went to the “Big Dance,” won the Prince Trophy, and lived happily ever after...or until the following season (whichever came first).

Perhaps FUBeAR should have suggested an alternate reading / listening assignment for you - https://storiestogrowby.org/story/cind ... -for-kids/

[The Jackal]

OK everybody likes Cinderella’s.

But Cinderella wasn’t a Cinderella. She was hot but was left out of the bracket because of automatic berths given to 2 undeserving ugly step sisters who had no chance of winning.

Cinderella exists in the men's basketball tournament.

They do not exist in the FCS football tournament. The "just happy to be here" crowd usually gets soundly beaten by the first title contender they face.

[FUBeAR]

OK everybody likes Cinderella’s.

But Cinderella wasn’t a Cinderella. She was hot but was left out of the bracket because of automatic berths given to 2 undeserving ugly step sisters who had no chance of winning.

Cinderella exists in the men's basketball tournament.

They do not exist in the FCS football tournament. The "just happy to be here" crowd usually gets soundly beaten by the first title contender they face.

[gman84]

Great memory FuBear! That Colgate team had fantastic rb.

[gofurman]

OK everybody likes Cinderella’s.

But Cinderella wasn’t a Cinderella. She was hot but was left out of the bracket because of automatic berths given to 2 undeserving ugly step sisters who had no chance of winning.

Cinderella exists in the men's basketball tournament.

They do not exist in the FCS football tournament. The "just happy to be here" crowd usually gets soundly beaten by the first title contender they face.

I remember that run. I was astonished that they had no scholarships... then someone explained to me that they use "grants-in-aid" or some such. That was a great run for Colgate though they did get their azz kicked in the title game 40-0. FORTY to ZERO. by the same Delaware team that frustrated Mike Ayers in the semifinals - that UD team was a juggernaut.

[The Jackal]

Certainly we can all draw a distinction between a 15-1 Colgate team that finished the regular season ranked #6 and was seeded in the I-AA field that season than the 4 or 5 loss teams currently gracing the playoff field.

[FUBeAR]

Certainly we can all draw a distinction between a 15-1 Colgate team that finished the regular season ranked #6 and was seeded in the I-AA field that season than the 4 or 5 loss teams currently gracing the playoff field.

Sure we can...with the benefit of hindsight.

Now...without the benefit of hindsight, can you draw that much of a distinction between that 11-0 non-scholarship Colgate Team in 2003 & the 10-1 2016 San Diego Team that only lost to Cal-Poly (who was ranked as high as #14...and who San Diego later beat in their re-match)...and was never ranked until squeaking in at #25 in the final week of the regular season.

No way 10-1 SD makes the Playoffs in 2016 without that AQ...and maybe...if they don’t have to descend into the bowels of FCS Visiting Team Hell the following week after they knocked off Cal-Poly..the Toreros go on a little Colgate03-type run...and then get their butts whipped by that same NDSU Team in Frisco, TX...in the Finals...just like Colgate did by the Blue Hens.

I can assure many people - the get-off-my-lawn crowd - in 2003 were saying Colgate had no business in the Playoffs, they were a non-scholarship program, their ranking / seeding was only attributable to the overranking of all the Ivy Teams....and on and on.

Welp...we found out...they were better than 3 ranked scholarship programs - #5 UMass, #10 Western Illinois, and #13 Florida Atlantic.

PFL, NEC, Ivy, MEAC, SWAC Champions all ‘belong’ in the FCS Playoffs...if they’ll come.

[Affirm]

These data make me suspect that the nonscholarship pfl isn’t all that nonscholarship.

Sorry. I do not see why that would be.

Well, generally really good players are offered scholarships. Most parents would pretty much insist their kid take the scholarship to Wofford or Furman rather than have to fork out $70k for Davidson or even a mere $40k for PC. So everybody else’ guys should be way, way better than PFL guys. So you would expect their playoff games to always be blowout losses.

I’m suspecting that many of their good players are on some type of scholarship. They just pretend it isn’t an athletic scholarship.

As you admit, that is a generalization. I would say there would be many exceptions. And most parents would not necessarily insist anything if the kid can go to a really, really good school, get a really, really good education, and have a good time enjoying playing football. And I would say everybody else's players being way, way better would be an exaggeration. Also, maybe most playoff games would be losses, but not necessarily blowout losses. Keep in mind that Furman has suffered a number of blowout losses or at least a large number of disappointing losses in playoffs. Having scholarships does not necessarily prevent that. Most of the players being on some type of scholarship - that's fine. Bring in good students, good citizens, who can play and maybe want to play football. Perhaps my main argument is that ROI on football, scholarship football even at the FCS level, is possibly too low to be sustainable by a school as small as Furman. Other basically all the other scholarship sports are more sustainable because they involve fewer scholarship that can be balanced in regard to Title IX, either with a women's team in the same sport (even baseball with softball). We can still have football. We can be satisfactorily competitive at our level. We can do it like Pioneer Football League does it. (Wofford ought to be smart enough to go along with us on such a move, but if they are not smart enough, I would be surprised but I would not really care, because I believe they would be wrong.)

A good many exceptions isn’t enough. You have to find at least 30 really good players. You have to fish them out of a tiny pond of really booksmart (more so than at FU), independently wealthy kids or really booksmart poor kids who will go for free based on need. Out here in the real world of high school kids, those are really, really rare. And those kids have to have a level of snobbery that causes them to turn up their noses at scholarships from other schools just because US News deems them to have less prestige. In my county of 7 high schools (Aiken) I doubt there is one such kid.

So I’m guessing the schools fake it somewhat. And sure, it’s great to give out citizenship scholarships to corner backs as long as you aren’t the 4.0 Eagle Scout who got overlooked for that same scholarship. This is policed somehow kinda in DIII, but I’m not so sure about the PFL. I could be wrong.

I agree with you that FCS football loses money. I’m just not sure the PFL model really saves as much as it’s supposed to because I’m thinking most everybody is still on scholarship. I’d like to see the real numbers somehow. And it’s not like losing a couple million a year is gonna bankrupt FU (well, maybe in about 200 years).

I will, however, eagerly join the PFL camp when I start hearing FU players complain about being exploited by a system that gives them athletic scholarships. At that point I’ll happily say FU to them and support the nonscholarship model. But our guys aren’t doing that.

A couple of disclaimers...
1) FUBeAR does not support, in any way, Furman moving to the PFL or a PFL-model
2) FUBeAR likes the PFL & their model. Having have had my DNA Recruited by several of the PFL schools coming out of HS & playing in the PFL for a year, I have, perhaps, a bit more PFL exposure than many/most posters here.

PFL Recruiting is hard & exactly as described - with the exception of, perhaps, Morehead State, all of the schools can only recruit high-academics kids...and the richer or poorer those kids’ families are, the better ‘targets’ they are. Nope, they don’t often get the Top Athletes...but there are several PFL Alums with NFL experience, so they can ‘mine’ talent.

PFL schools work very hard to cobble together financial aid for their Football Recruits...they are like your grandma eating a the meat off of a neck bone when they do it. Who knew Davidson has an endowed scholarship for male descendants of Dutch immigrants from the State of Georgia with brown hair under 6-4? Just kidding, but it’s like that - they will uncover every legitimate $ they can find to package an offer for their Recruits.

And, of course, they police it. How can you say they don’t when both San Diego & Jacksonville in recent years were ‘busted’ and penalized severely for violating the no athletics scholarships for Football Players rules?

Here’s another interesting thing. I watched PC play 2x this year and I would say they were much better than they were when they were a Scholarship program. Maybe there’s something to having kids on your Team that really want to be there instead of kids who take the PC offer because it’s their only D1 offer...which I think is what they had previously.

...and I can’t believe Jackal hates Golden Retrievers...

“During the 2018 NCAA Tournament, UMBC became the first No. 16 seed to defeat a No. 1 seed in the NCAA men's tournament, beating the Virginia Cavaliers 74–54.”

I wish FUBeAR would explain clearly the reason for Disclaimer 1. I do not understand.

[FUBeAR]

These data make me suspect that the nonscholarship pfl isn’t all that nonscholarship.

Sorry. I do not see why that would be.

Well, generally really good players are offered scholarships. Most parents would pretty much insist their kid take the scholarship to Wofford or Furman rather than have to fork out $70k for Davidson or even a mere $40k for PC. So everybody else’ guys should be way, way better than PFL guys. So you would expect their playoff games to always be blowout losses.

I’m suspecting that many of their good players are on some type of scholarship. They just pretend it isn’t an athletic scholarship.

As you admit, that is a generalization. I would say there would be many exceptions. And most parents would not necessarily insist anything if the kid can go to a really, really good school, get a really, really good education, and have a good time enjoying playing football. And I would say everybody else's players being way, way better would be an exaggeration. Also, maybe most playoff games would be losses, but not necessarily blowout losses. Keep in mind that Furman has suffered a number of blowout losses or at least a large number of disappointing losses in playoffs. Having scholarships does not necessarily prevent that. Most of the players being on some type of scholarship - that's fine. Bring in good students, good citizens, who can play and maybe want to play football. Perhaps my main argument is that ROI on football, scholarship football even at the FCS level, is possibly too low to be sustainable by a school as small as Furman. Other basically all the other scholarship sports are more sustainable because they involve fewer scholarship that can be balanced in regard to Title IX, either with a women's team in the same sport (even baseball with softball). We can still have football. We can be satisfactorily competitive at our level. We can do it like Pioneer Football League does it. (Wofford ought to be smart enough to go along with us on such a move, but if they are not smart enough, I would be surprised but I would not really care, because I believe they would be wrong.)

A good many exceptions isn’t enough. You have to find at least 30 really good players. You have to fish them out of a tiny pond of really booksmart (more so than at FU), independently wealthy kids or really booksmart poor kids who will go for free based on need. Out here in the real world of high school kids, those are really, really rare. And those kids have to have a level of snobbery that causes them to turn up their noses at scholarships from other schools just because US News deems them to have less prestige. In my county of 7 high schools (Aiken) I doubt there is one such kid.

So I’m guessing the schools fake it somewhat. And sure, it’s great to give out citizenship scholarships to corner backs as long as you aren’t the 4.0 Eagle Scout who got overlooked for that same scholarship. This is policed somehow kinda in DIII, but I’m not so sure about the PFL. I could be wrong.

I agree with you that FCS football loses money. I’m just not sure the PFL model really saves as much as it’s supposed to because I’m thinking most everybody is still on scholarship. I’d like to see the real numbers somehow. And it’s not like losing a couple million a year is gonna bankrupt FU (well, maybe in about 200 years).

I will, however, eagerly join the PFL camp when I start hearing FU players complain about being exploited by a system that gives them athletic scholarships. At that point I’ll happily say FU to them and support the nonscholarship model. But our guys aren’t doing that.

A couple of disclaimers...
1) FUBeAR does not support, in any way, Furman moving to the PFL or a PFL-model
2) FUBeAR likes the PFL & their model. Having have had my DNA Recruited by several of the PFL schools coming out of HS & playing in the PFL for a year, I have, perhaps, a bit more PFL exposure than many/most posters here.

PFL Recruiting is hard & exactly as described - with the exception of, perhaps, Morehead State, all of the schools can only recruit high-academics kids...and the richer or poorer those kids’ families are, the better ‘targets’ they are. Nope, they don’t often get the Top Athletes...but there are several PFL Alums with NFL experience, so they can ‘mine’ talent.

PFL schools work very hard to cobble together financial aid for their Football Recruits...they are like your grandma eating a the meat off of a neck bone when they do it. Who knew Davidson has an endowed scholarship for male descendants of Dutch immigrants from the State of Georgia with brown hair under 6-4? Just kidding, but it’s like that - they will uncover every legitimate $ they can find to package an offer for their Recruits.

And, of course, they police it. How can you say they don’t when both San Diego & Jacksonville in recent years were ‘busted’ and penalized severely for violating the no athletics scholarships for Football Players rules?

Here’s another interesting thing. I watched PC play 2x this year and I would say they were much better than they were when they were a Scholarship program. Maybe there’s something to having kids on your Team that really want to be there instead of kids who take the PC offer because it’s their only D1 offer...which I think is what they had previously.

...and I can’t believe Jackal hates Golden Retrievers...

“During the 2018 NCAA Tournament, UMBC became the first No. 16 seed to defeat a No. 1 seed in the NCAA men's tournament, beating the Virginia Cavaliers 74–54.”

I wish FUBeAR would explain clearly the reason for Disclaimer 1. I do not understand.

Clearly enough?

[apaladin]

Colgate has never been non-scolarship in football.

[FUBeAR]

Colgate has never been non-scolarship in football.

The Colgate-Maroon News begs to differ... https://thecolgatemaroonnews.com/7292/ ... olarships/