FB: New England Small College Athletic Conference

[nescac1]

Sweet Jesus, I love the posters on this board (like Knightstalker, apparently) who feel a need to impute a non-existent snobbery to NESCAC posters without ever actually, you know, bothering to READ anything that is ever written by such posters.  Because I never said ANYTHING about NESCAC vs. the rest of the country.

My claims had absolutely zero to do with NESCAC.  I refer to NESCAC specifically, as that is the only D-3 league that I have a close familiarity with.  I am talking, more generally, about the caliber of athlete you have to be to be a varsity starting football player at a credible college football program, at any level (D-3 included), in this country.  I used an example of one player -- an example that you could probably find at ANY LEAGUE in the country -- of a guy who was first-team all state in high school, yet couldn't get any meaningful PT at a mediocre (at best) D-3 program.  The point is, in ALMOST every case (I'll exclude kickers / punters here ...) you can not be "unathletic" and be a starting college varsity football player, based on any reasonable defintion of athletic vs. unathletic.  It's a fairly basic point, and one that really should be fairly uncontroversial.   I'd also say you won't find very many "stupid" surgeons or Phd research scientists -- another really crazy remark, I'm sure.  There is a weeding out process that occurs that folks just aren't taking into account. 

[Knightstalker]

Jesus I love posters who are so uptight that they can't take a joke or a little sarcasm because they are so uptight you couldn't pull a needle out of their asses with a Cat D-9, or bulldozer for those who have never worked construction.

[nescac1]

Yup, that's me, you nailed it Knightstalker.  Thanks for sharing your illuminating thoughts. 

[lewdogg11]

Sweet Jesus, I love the posters on this board (like Knightstalker, apparently) who feel a need to impute a non-existent snobbery to NESCAC posters without ever actually, you know, bothering to READ anything that is ever written by such posters.  Because I never said ANYTHING about NESCAC vs. the rest of the country.

My claims had absolutely zero to do with NESCAC.  I refer to NESCAC specifically, as that is the only D-3 league that I have a close familiarity with.  I am talking, more generally, about the caliber of athlete you have to be to be a varsity starting football player at a credible college football program, at any level (D-3 included), in this country.  I used an example of one player -- an example that you could probably find at ANY LEAGUE in the country -- of a guy who was first-team all state in high school, yet couldn't get any meaningful PT at a mediocre (at best) D-3 program.  The point is, in ALMOST every case (I'll exclude kickers / punters here ...) you can not be "unathletic" and be a starting college varsity football player, based on any reasonable defintion of athletic vs. unathletic.  It's a fairly basic point, and one that really should be fairly uncontroversial.   I'd also say you won't find very many "stupid" surgeons or Phd research scientists -- another really crazy remark, I'm sure.  There is a weeding out process that occurs that folks just aren't taking into account. 

Maybe i'm just crazy.  Maybe i'm just realistic.  It's true.  This is not true for 99.9 percent of the players on these teams.  But you can't tell me there isn't a kid playing for Bates, or St. Lawrence, or Utica that isn't goofy and unathletic.  It's true whether you want to admit it or not. 

[amh63]

I have been reading the postings on this board the past few weeks and even taking into account that it is Summer and football season does not start for awhile it still reminds me of my grandchild's day camp chatter....funny/silly and full of faulty logic.  Having said that, I will put in my 5 cents (inflation taken in here).
First, welcome aboard posters from the Empire 8 and the Liberty League.  Your comments though hard to follow at times and often....I find...not too related to this board....are interesting. It has also been inferred that players in a conference that allows  more games in a season has better players.  It is also implied that D3 players are not as good football players as Div. l players that play more games, etc.  This is to infer that if you are a few tenths of a second slower and/or a few inches shorter and/or 10-20 pounds lighter than some other football player then you are not a good player.
Since this is a football board, let us take the points to the NFL.  Can one say that a player on a loosing team at a given position is not as good as a non-starter on a winning team?  Now to take into account time.  Is a player on a team that played when the NFL had fewer games not as good as a player today when we are talking about more games, etc.  Can we say that Johnny Unitas was not as good a football player as Tom Brady who is taller and bigger, etc.  Frank Gifford was slower than Jimmy Brown and smaller but you cannot win many arguments that one was a better football player than the other.
My position is that a bench player on the Bates football team is a football player and an athlete.  A player in an Ivy league school is not inferior to an Big-Ten player.   Any student that gives his all to play football in college at any level should be given his due.   If you take the points put forward in recent postings to other sports or to men versus women, they become silly at best.

[lewdogg11]

You guys really have a chip on your shoulder.  My points have nothing to do with the NESCAC.  Nothing to do with who plays more games in a season.  Nothing to do with size, speed or strength.  It began with iamhuge putting down a MA High School league for having 'dorky and unathletic' kids starting.  My response is that there are most likely a few dorky unathletic kids starting for college teams in the NESCAC, LL, and E8.  (Notice all 3 leagues have been mentioned several times over my posts and haven't been directed towards the NESCAC whatsoever - this just happens to be where the conversation is taking place)

I'm not saying anything about the caliber of athletes in Division 3.  I'm not stereotyping Division 3 athletes in general.  it's simply a point, that on some team somewhere in these leagues, there are goofy and unathletic kids that wouldn't sniff the field at a different school.  But they got lucky and somehow were able to grace the field with their presence. 

And to answer your other question - YES, most of the kids on the not so good teams aren't as good as the kids on the better teams.  Your NFL comparison is stupid.  They are paid professionals. 

And with all of this said, I haven't even mentioned the NEFC.  They probably have 3-4 goofy and unathletic kids.

[maxpower]

I'd also say you won't find very many "stupid" surgeons or Phd research scientists -- another really crazy remark, I'm sure.  There is a weeding out process that occurs that folks just aren't taking into account. 

I'm just going to keep piling on. ARE YOU FREAKIN KIDDING ME?? There are plenty of idiots--and I mean IDIOTS--that go through med school. (Why do you think they have med schools in the Carribbean?) Are you saying there are no bad doctors? This is not to rag on doctors--my Dad was a great doctor--but that was a really bad example. Sometimes you can be really good at one thing and really bad at most others; and often "athleticism" means more than just one thing.

The reason I jumped on to your original claim is that it didn't seem like you were just talking about athletes or whatever; you said "most if not all are in the top 3-5% of 18-22 year olds." and that's it.

EDIT: Amidst amh63's dripping condescension I managed to miss some sarcasm, so my point about that post is withdrawn. But would anyone really argue that Frank Gifford was better than Jim Brown?

[Frank Rossi]

All I'll say is that some of the prefaces I've seen in the NESCAC posters' postings are full of the worst of elitism one can hope to read ("condescending" doesn't cut it, and if there was much sarcasm in them, you need to try harder to make your text-based responses denote it somehow).  Max pulled out a central quote with a statistical hypothesis of nescac1 concerning percentages of athletes at NESCAC schools that are in the top 3-5% of athletes in the entire country.  We both blew holes through those numbers.  We didn't say NESCAC schools don't have great athletes or students.  We didn't say NESCAC institutions aren't great places for education and athletics.  We pointed out that there are many choices at D1 and other D3 options for that upper echelon of athlete (playing more games, amh, was one of a list of considerations -- we had that VERY discussion on here when a father was asking questions on behalf of his son's school choice and it was deemed not far-fetched at all... This is one of the selling points of Patriot League and Pioneer League football schools).

In sports like basketball and baseball, we see some level of NESCAC domination -- as another poster wrote to me, it makes sense since they tend to be more "cerebral sports" that tend to meld better with a more highly educated set than some of what football entails.  Problem is that football rosters on average have about as many players as all other men's rosters in schools combined -- or at least 60% in the cases of schools with 15 different sports.  

Talking about what defines a better athlete is of course a subjective question.  Like Sandra Day O'Connor said about the identification of what pornography is, "I know it when I see it."  I think Chris Coney would run circles around virtually every RB in the NESCAC, and Jimmy Robertson would have shredded most defenses there.  Gerard Byrant (you know, the guy from SLU playing for USA Football) would have broken QBs apart like he did in the LL.  These were special players that didn't go to NESCAC schools.  I'm sure there are players at NESCAC schools that I would say the same things about related to how they'd perform vs. LL players.  However, in both cases, we would see that there are great players, good players, mediocre players and players just sticking around for the love of the game and the team.

Anyway, I'll pray that the snobbery here is an exception to the NESCAC approach.  If it isn't, then I'll happily see your NESCAC degree and raise you an Ivy League law school degree since, you know, uneducated me has a Harvard Law School degree hanging over my desk.  However, I don't need to pull it out until someone tries to get into a pissing contest about how hard it is to follow straightforward arguments in an attempt to demean people from other schools.

[iamhuge]

All I'll say is that some of the prefaces I've seen in the NESCAC posters' postings are full of the worst of elitism one can hope to read ("condescending" doesn't cut it, and if there was much sarcasm in them, you need to try harder to make your text-based responses denote it somehow).  Max pulled out a central quote with a statistical hypothesis of nescac1 concerning percentages of athletes at NESCAC schools that are in the top 3-5% of athletes in the entire country.  We both blew holes through those numbers.  We didn't say NESCAC schools don't have great athletes or students.  We didn't say NESCAC institutions aren't great places for education and athletics.  We pointed out that there are many choices at D1 and other D3 options for that upper echelon of athlete (playing more games, amh, was one of a list of considerations -- we had that VERY discussion on here when a father was asking questions on behalf of his son's school choice and it was deemed not far-fetched at all... This is one of the selling points of Patriot League and Pioneer League football schools).

In sports like basketball and baseball, we see some level of NESCAC domination -- as another poster wrote to me, it makes sense since they tend to be more "cerebral sports" that tend to meld better with a more highly educated set than some of what football entails.  Problem is that football rosters on average have about as many players as all other men's rosters in schools combined -- or at least 60% in the cases of schools with 15 different sports.  

Talking about what defines a better athlete is of course a subjective question.  Like Sandra Day O'Connor said about the identification of what pornography is, "I know it when I see it."  I think Chris Coney would run circles around virtually every RB in the NESCAC, and Jimmy Robertson would have shredded most defenses there.  Gerard Byrant (you know, the guy from SLU playing for USA Football) would have broken QBs apart like he did in the LL.  These were special players that didn't go to NESCAC schools.  I'm sure there are players at NESCAC schools that I would say the same things about related to how they'd perform vs. LL players.  However, in both cases, we would see that there are great players, good players, mediocre players and players just sticking around for the love of the game and the team.

Anyway, I'll pray that the snobbery here is an exception to the NESCAC approach.  If it isn't, then I'll happily see your NESCAC degree and raise you an Ivy League law school degree since, you know, uneducated me has a Harvard Law School degree hanging over my desk.  However, I don't need to pull it out until someone tries to get into a pissing contest about how hard it is to follow straightforward arguments in an attempt to demean people from other schools.

I think Tufts is going to be better this year.

[Frank Rossi]

What's their plan with Trevor?  Straight-up fullback or something else?

[iamhuge]

What's their plan with Trevor?  Straight-up fullback or something else?

He has to make the team first.

[lewdogg11]

What's their plan with Trevor?  Straight-up fullback or something else?

He has to make the team first.

How can someone with Alabama-level talent be worried about 'making' the team at Tufts?

[nescac1]

Frank,

(1) nothing I have said is in any way condescending towards non-NESCAC athletes.  I am not sure if you are talking about me, but I wish you (and some others, I've seen it before on this board, and it is annoying -- I've certainly seen a LOT more posters claiming NESCAC people are elitist than examples of NESCAC posters ACTUALLY being elitist) would stop generalizing about NESCAC posters as if we are all a bunch of snobby prep school elitist villains.  I've never claimed that NESCAC was a better option for all student athletes than any other school.  There are tons of places that are better for certain student athletes than NESCAC, just as NESCAC school are great for others.  And no one has EVER claimed that NESCAC football schools are the equal of other D-3 powers in terms of caliber of play, that would be the height of insanity.  I can't recall any other NESCAC posters making that claim.  You are perhaps imagining what you ASSUME NESCAC posters will state.  I am not an elitist, nor are the vast majority of NESCAC folks who come to these boards.  

(2) As I keep repeating, my point is not NESCAC-specific.  I am celebrating just how hard it is to be a starting varsity football player at any college program.  I think, while it may be possible, it is extraordinarily rare for someone to reach that level -- again, don't shift the goal posts here folks, not make a roster, START for a legitimitate college football team -- and be what fairly could be called "unathletic."  The vast, overwhelming majority of kids who are starting at NESCAC (or probably any other D-3 program, I assume, I just don't see them so I can't really say) were the star, or one of the stars, of their high school team, if not their entire conference or often region.  To me, those kids are tremendous athletes, and I appreciate and applaud the hard work it takes to get to that point.  Not to mention talent, talent I myself don't possess, and wish I did!  So, if that comes across as elitist, well, sorry, I think y'all are the elitists who chose to minimize / denegrate the accomplishments of certain D-3 athletes.  That is you, not me.  

(3) My analysis is correct, and you've said nothing whatsoever that actually challenges it, or even directly addresses the points I've made.  NESCAC (and I'm sure E-8, etc.) football starters are, if not exclusively, overwhelmingly derived from the top 10 percent of their population group, athletically.  To me, saying someone is unathletic is akin to saying they are below-average, or at a mininum, an average athlete.  The guys who start on college football teams, NESCAC and elsewhere -- who are almost always highly / specifically recruiting to play football -- are very athletic guys.  It's really quite a simple point that for some reason has suddenly turned me into an elitist / asshole / whatever.  

But fine, turn this board over again to folks who want to crow about how corrupt all law enforcement agents are, or whatever, if complimenting the athleticism of D-3 athletes on -- gasp -- a D-3 football board -- is such a ridiculous leap of faith and logic.  Sheesh, I'm done wasting my time trying to make a reasonable point to people who would rather attack without even reading.  

[nescac1]

And Frank, for the fifth time, I NEVER SAID NESCAC athletes are in the top 3-5 percent of college athletes.  Stop acting as if I did.  I'll spell it out ONE MORE TIME: NESCAC football starters are generally in the top 3-5 percent, or at worst top 10 percent, of all americans in their age cohort.  That is a huge, huge difference.  I am judging "athleticism" as a term relative to the general population, NOT a subset of the population that plays college athletics.  Of COURSE NESCAC kids fare much, much worse agains that metric! 

[dlippiel]

Well, needless to say no post should be made on this board without the proper illustration and/or invitation for afternoon tea that's for sure.