FB: Old Dominion Athletic Conference

[allsky7]

Jim Lampley was there. Sitting in my locker, I watched him interview our RB (Friday afternoon before practice).

Sounds like an awesome memory.

     Hey tiger....was that RB Jimmy Ferguson?  As Stokeley Fulton would have said between puffs on his Tareytons and sips of coffee..."Gosh darn son, I still want to know if Howard Cosell was ever on campus and I missed it." 

[tigerfanalso]

AllSky

You nailed it. Jimmy was the RB and I was his blocking back. Many fond memories. On another note; if your Dad is who I think he his, I think the world of him. Great guy, taught  us many things having nothing to do with f'ball. Hope he his well. Last saw him at a reunion of the '77 team several years back and really enjoyed catching up with him. If  have you begged correctly, you are a very lucky man !!!!

To my knowledge Howard Cossell was never on campus BUT Marvin Gay was. I wonder if you missed that ?

[allsky7]

AllSky

You nailed it. Jimmy was the RB and I was his blocking back. Many fond memories. On another note; if your Dad is who I think he his, I think the world of him. Great guy, taught  us many things having nothing to do with f'ball. Hope he his well. Last saw him at a reunion of the '77 team several years back and really enjoyed catching up with him. If  have you begged correctly, you are a very lucky man !!!!

To my knowledge Howard Cossell was never on campus BUT Marvin Gay was. I wonder if you missed that ?

      tiger (aka BM)    Thanks for the nice comments.... He nailed who you were the second I asked him who the blocking back for Jimmy was. You are correct that I am fortunate. He is doing fine and now retired in the Atlanta area. While we are killing time waiting for the 07 football season to get underway, (not soon enough for some folks  )he could tell some major stories on here if I could ever get him to buy a computer. My chances of winning the lottery are greater than that happening I think.  Not only can he tell a zillion H-S stories, he knows so many about folks from other ODAC schools that I'm sure everyone could appreciate.
     BTW...do you remember who H-S's only regular season loss was to during the 77 playoff season? Of course, it was Albany St in the D3 playoffs. I have press guides from 69-77 but the 77 scores are in the 78 press guide. I think it was JMU but am not positive. I'm sure they were PO'ed from the Tigers beating them the year before on TV.
     I'm still curious about the Howard Cosell thing too because I can't find anyone will a recollection of that. I do vaguely remember MG being on campus. I also remember John Denver, Atlanta Rhythmn Section, & Bruce Springsteen being there as well in the early to mid 70's.

allsky7 (aka SS)

[Pat Coleman]

JMU -- that's on the HSC site:

http://www2.hsc.edu/athletics/football/2006/mediaguide/at1974-1988.html

[allsky7]

JMU -- that's on the HSC site:

http://www2.hsc.edu/athletics/football/2006/mediaguide/at1974-1988.html

     Thanks Pat. Didn't realize this info was available on their web site.

[WLU78]

Jim Lampley was there. Sitting in my locker, I watched him interview our RB (Friday afternoon before practice).

Sounds like an awesome memory.

My buddy remembers Lampley participating in some extra curricular activities after the game, but I was afraid to post that.  You know, memories, 70's, et al.

[WLU78]

Look I just have to call BS on that.  I left Matt's thesis alone because the arguement was so weak I thought it would be rhetorical to refute it.  But KMack your statement boarders on idiocy and may be the reason why newspaper readership is in a nosedive, and ad revenues along with it.  There is a reason Jason Blairs and others are discredited, a lack of professional discipline and integrity.  At the better schools you learn that kind of stuff.

It does matter because the better schools have stronger programs.  Period, that is how they got to be the "better academic schools", and the kids that don't screw around, who are disciplined enough to make the good grades, have the extracurriculars, etc will generally outperform those that "didn't" have it.  Put this same thesis on the football field and I will show you a 2-8 team, or worse. 

If any of you would saunter over to the future of DIII thread you would see most of my statements have been in line with guys that have thousands of posts and have forgotten more about DIII than I will ever learn.

But don't come on here and tell me that Camden Community college is as good as W&L after one job.  It really makes your RMC degree look like a piece of paper.

A quick disclaimer, KMack your statements could very well be true and accurate in the world of the minimum wage earners, I confess I am unfamiliar with that world.

You really aren't doing fellow W&L graduates a favor by arguing these points.

You know as well as the rest of us that many graduates of "higher institutions" already have this air about them that turns off those who don't graduate from "like" institutions.  Why continue to distance yourself from the rest of us?

((( awaiting the "That sounds like your problem, not mine" reply )))

Kid I am not trying to do anything to anybody.  I am sitting here pointing out idiotic statements on an internet board.   

[WLU78]

Newspaper readership is dropping because corporate ownership is more interested in squeezing profit margins from 15% up to 30% than producing a robust product, because the newspaper is not a timely enough medium for an increasing number of people. Newspaper Web site readership is on the rise. Who produces those sites? Journalists.

Pat I thought you might find this interesting:

http://www.drudgereport.com/hit.pdf

Note the NY Times, the only newspaper site, is falling in this arena as well.

[Pat Coleman]

No -- if you were a journalist perhaps you would know how to read charts and graphs.

What it says is that New York Times is ranked 11th for one week out of a year where it previously had been ranked 10th.

That does not mean it got less traffic. It just means AOL passed it. In fact, overall net traffic may be growing faster than overall newspaper traffic -- I have no idea and am not going to make up facts to back my point. But it doesn't negate the fact that online news readership is also climbing.

Also, how many of those journalists at Yahoo and ESPN and AOL and the like came from newspapers? It happens all the time. Oh right, except they lack discipline and integrity, something only W&L can grant.

A real journalist would not take one pseudo-fact out of a chart and say it's proof of their point. That's what a pundit would do. AKA, that's what you would do. Guess that's the high-falutin' education for you.

[K-Mack]

Whether you want to admit it or not, there is something to be said for some academic rigor in your undergraduate work.  Learning to read critically, write persuasively (spelling aside Hasa), formulate a thesis and defend it are tantamount to what the was intended by a liberal arts training.  Whether you continue to use those skills after your graduation is up to you, but there is value to mastering those skills beyond being a good person.

All that falls under the "working hard" aspect of what my dad was trying to get across.

A student can find easy courses or easy professors at any college or university (yes, including W&L).

I think there may be a misconception with schools with "high academic reputations."

Schools like W&L will just get high school students who performed really well in the classroom, were active in extracurricular activities, and are good standardized test takers.

Schools like BC will get high school students who performed really well and not so well in the classroom, were active and not active in extracurricular activities, and are good and not so good standardized test takers.

This may be difficult to grasp, but that may be the difference (academically) between a W&L and a BC.  A W&L won't have any kids who barely made it through their HS studies, or the students who couldn't (or didn't want to) be involved in school activities beyond the classroom, or the students who don't take standardized tests well.  A BC will have some of those kids.

But that doesn't affect W&L's and BC's quality of professors or difficulty of courses.  If you think that, you're suggesting a BC professor couldn't get a job at W&L or that W&L's Linear Algebra is more rigorous than BC's Linear Algebra.

Hats off to the BCs of the world that give kids another chance who, intentionally or not, faulted in an area or two.

I tend to agree with Barnhart more than WL78 here.

I'm a strong proponent of the 'what you get out of it is what you put into it' theory. There are a lot of people (myself included at times) who learned early how to beat the system, master the answers they want you to master by paying attention during lectures and completing your assignments. While those are also useful skills in the real world, along with being able to follow directions, it's not necessarily the same thing as being engaged in a topic and having a passion for learning. Furthermore, in college, there is certainly learning that goes on beyond the textbooks and tests, and outside the confines of academia.

In some sense, there are probably people at W&L and other more highly-regarded schools who are just getting by by beating the system, so to speak, and there are people who are at Bridgewater and other places who are fully engaged in the process of educating themselves and will be better off for it.

I disagree with Barnhart on the point that more highly-regarded schools have the same quality of faculty as other schools ... but we could also disagree on what makes a quality faculty. Good credentials or the ability to push students, or connect with them. We had a Harvard grad at R-MC in the English Dept., and he was really a prick about his class ... in the end though, I really appreciated him for pushing me, as I would have done whatever it took to get by. So by demanding a lot, I did a lot ... and the people who were just trying to coast through his class, he wasn't having that.

I'm guessing, generally speaking, there are more professors like that at highly-regarded schools than less-highly-regarded schools ... but there's more than one way to get through to students. Some teachers encourage freedom and exploration and challenging thought, not just gobs of busy work.

One other point that may have been lost the first time around. There are fields, journalism being one, in which your degree generally means very little. Now, if you go to Columbia or Missouri or Syracuse, chances are they pushed you harder or had more resources to better prepare you, and you may come out into the real world more qualified for that first job than a guy from Gulf Coast Community College.

But the bottom line is, especially after your first job in the field, they don't care whether you had a 3.4 GPA at Washington & Lee or earned a Master's at Columbia or did two years at Camden County College ... the person with the best clips and the strongest references (i.e. the person the interviewer believes is going to be the best journalist for the open position) is probably going to get the job.

So in that sense, it doesn't matter where you go as much as it matters what you got out of wherever it is you went.

Look I just have to call BS on that.  I left Matt's thesis alone because the arguement was so weak I thought it would be rhetorical to refute it.  But KMack your statement boarders on idiocy and may be the reason why newspaper readership is in a nosedive, and ad revenues along with it.  There is a reason Jason Blairs and others are discredited, a lack of professional discipline and integrity.  At the better schools you learn that kind of stuff.

It does matter because the better schools have stronger programs.  Period, that is how they got to be the "better academic schools", and the kids that don't screw around, who are disciplined enough to make the good grades, have the extracurriculars, etc will generally outperform those that "didn't" have it.  Put this same thesis on the football field and I will show you a 2-8 team, or worse.  

If any of you would saunter over to the future of DIII thread you would see most of my statements have been in line with guys that have thousands of posts and have forgotten more about DIII than I will ever learn.

But don't come on here and tell me that Camden Community college is as good as W&L after one job.  It really makes your RMC degree look like a piece of paper.

A quick disclaimer, KMack your statements could very well be true and accurate in the world of the minimum wage earners, I confess I am unfamiliar with that world.

It's fine if you don't agree.

There is a very solid point to our theory, and if you choose to ignore it and go with insults and name-calling, then it's no longer a discussion, and no longer anything I need to be a part of. I'm not going to beat you over the head if your mind's made up.

I'm in this business, and I know whereof I speak. I work with people from Kentucky, Tennssee, Florida, Colgate, another guy who did a year at R-MC then went to Florida, Hampton (after year at Missouri), Iowa, Fresno State, George Washington, George Mason and a bunch of other people who I'm not sure where they went. And formerly one from Catholic. Al Neuharth, who started this paper, went to the Universtiy of South Dakota (just in case you don't think businessmen and CEOs can come from non-fancy-pants places).

That just a snapshot, obviously, but the point is you don't need an expensive degree to do well for yourself or to be good at what you do, in this particular field or many others. It doesn't hurt, but it's not required. There are some fields where it helps more than others. I'm rational; an exclusive academic institution where the professors push you is generally a path to a great education. But it's not the only path.

Perhaps you believe it is because you paid so much for yours.

Perhaps you simply disagree.

I'm not sure I care anymore. Definitely not engaging in a message board war over it. I'm certainly not going to read a whole bunch of off-topic drivel. Keep your tangent. I spoke my piece, take it or leave it.

[K-Mack]

Whoa, what the heck ... Have you H-SC guys ever heard of Shorty, The Movie. I assume yes. I'd never heard of this. Perhaps my larger D3 role is keeping me out of touch at home.

One Simple Wish. One Extraordinary Man.

Shorty is an inspirational documentary film about Walter "Shorty" Simms, a 55-year-old man with Down Syndrome, and the Hampden-Sydney Tigers football team's #1 fan.
This season in particular is very special to Shorty. His beloved Tiger football squad is poised to make the playoffs for the first time in 26 years, he is being inducted into the Hampden-Sydney College Athletic Hall-of-Fame and he is celebrating his birthday on the day of the final game of the regular season against the Randolph-Macon Yellow Jackets - a 107-year rivalry known simply as "The Game".

The film's climax takes place on November 16th, 2002 at "The Game". The 108th meeting between the oldest archrivals in the South: Hampden-Sydney vs. Randolph-Macon. After weeks of rain the field is in barely playable muddy conditions. After three hard fought quarters, the game is knotted at a zero-zero tie going into the game's final fifteen minutes.

Will the Tigers beat the Yellow Jackets to make Shorty's birthday wish come true?

You had Shorty. We had Dickie Champ.

They always said we were more alike than we cared to admit.

Funny thing is, me and the crew skipped that game because of the rain. I wanted to go, but people didn't want to grill out in the rain or get mud on their Expeditions and Navigators. (rented?)

The DVD is only $9.98. I'm gonna order that joint just to support the rivalry.

I was at that game.  A mudfest.  And the last game I went to that kept me enthralled to the end.

Dickie Champ!

I was hoping you'd catch that ... you might be the only one here who would.

[K-Mack]

I believe it was 1982--even years are always at Death Valley.

They are, aren't they?

We played much worse there in the years I can remember. All the games at Macon went pretty well, right up until the 53-21 game which happened to represent the last one I saw in person.

I thought this chart would show how things have gone better at Day Field, but it really just shows we kicked a lot more ass in the 90s, and have taken it on the chin bad since '03:

Results in Ashland
93 W 17-10 to clinch ODAC title
95 W 35-14
97 W 49-18 to clinch share of ODAC title
99 W 33-7
01 L 38-26
03 L 53-21
05 L 50-17

Results in Farmville area
94 L 24-10
96 W 20-10
98 W 45-42
00 W 26-17
02 L 7-0
04 L 50-16
06 L 46-21

The more glaring stat is the lack of wins over the Tigers in the '00s. 

But thanks for that information!!

      The Tigers have won six in a row but prior to that, the Jackets won six in row. Hopefully, the current trend will continue but I predict these games will get closer and closer. As we have discussed before, it is not good for the rivalry for it to stay lopsided for too long. I just hope that when the Jackets do knock off the Tigers, there isn't an ODAC title or playoff birth on the line.  8)

Yeah, I thought we had a chance to catch up in the series the way the 90s were going.

By the way, I disagreed with Coach Boone's display of class at the time, and given recent results I still do. We led 42-6 my senior year with (I'm guessing) 10 minutes to go in the 3rd quarter. He called off the dogs, I didn't play in the 4th quarter of my final game. (but at least we won)

I thought we should have gone for the margin-of-victory record in the series, which comes from a 62-0 H-SC schellacking way back.

We could've hit 70 easy in '97. No kidding.

Ah well, way to go not running it up. One of the funniest moments of my career though is watching QB Sidney Chappell run down on the last kickoff and make the tackle. You know how QBs never get to do anything but QB.

C.W. Clemmons by the way ... definite Hoss.

[K-Mack]

      The Tigers have won six in a row but prior to that, the Jackets won six in row. Hopefully, the current trend will continue but I predict these games will get closer and closer. As we have discussed before, it is not good for the rivalry for it to stay lopsided for too long. I just hope that when the Jackets do knock off the Tigers, there isn't an ODAC title or playoff birth on the line.  8)

Yeah, I remember our 6 in a row, but to be perfectly frank, I did not enjoy the Culicerto (sp?) era at Hampden-Sydney for that exact reason.  I like a little (well a LOT) of animosity in my rivalry, and it's no fun when one of the teams goes down every year like the Titantic.  The fact that we are now graduating players who have never beaten their archrival in football is kind of unfathomable to me.

I will resist the temptation to launch a rather lengthy and vitriolic diatribe here. 8)

     I completely understand. When you have been a part of this rivalry as long as we have, you get a little taste of it all.  8)

I think the best must have been the years when the winner took the ODAC title.

Hurry up, we need to know more about Bridgewater's fourth-string tailback and W&L's percentage of graduates who go on to earn PhDs.

The Game is taking this board over!

[K-Mack]

Look I just have to call BS on that.  I left Matt's thesis alone because the arguement {sic} was so weak I thought it would be rhetorical to refute it.  But KMack your statement boarders {sic} on idiocy and may be the reason why newspaper readership is in a nosedive, and ad revenues along with it.  There is a reason Jason {sic} Blairs and others are discredited, a lack of professional discipline and integrity.  At the better schools you learn that kind of stuff.

WLU78:

You obviously have no idea about journalism. Why don't you stick to something you know?

The best writer I ever worked with went to Albright. The second-best went to Oswego. The worst went to Syracuse.

Jayson Blair -- note the spelling -- went to a well-respected major university. Stephen Glass, another noted fabricator, went to Penn.

Newspaper readership is dropping because corporate ownership is more interested in squeezing profit margins from 15% up to 30% than producing a robust product, because the newspaper is not a timely enough medium for an increasing number of people. Newspaper Web site readership is on the rise. Who produces those sites? Journalists.

For the record, I hadn't read this reply when I started listing off fields of everyone I could see from my desk.

The state of journalism has little do to with our point anyway. The point is, WLU78 thinks there is inherent value in the name recognition on his diploma and others like his. He also seems to believe there is a better education being offered at more exclusive institutions.

None of us are really arguing that point. But the truth is, there are people at top-notch schools wasting their opportunity, and there are people at other schools who are taking full advantage of theirs. School choice alone does not guarantee or forbid success.

If we can't all agree on that, I'm not really sure what hope there is for this line of discussion.

Allskyyyyyy ... jacketlawyer ... How 'bout that Game, eh?

Have you ever heard some story about a R-MC guy scoring a TD, maybe in the 70s, and doing a backflip?

My late mentor (I guess you'd say) called that his favorite memory from the series.

His favorite R-MC, memory, though, was chaperoning/chauffering Muhammad Ali when he was out of boxing and going around to colleges speaking, and stopped at R-MC.

Not football related, but a great, great story.

[pg04]

Whether you want to admit it or not, there is something to be said for some academic rigor in your undergraduate work.  Learning to read critically, write persuasively (spelling aside Hasa), formulate a thesis and defend it are tantamount to what the was intended by a liberal arts training.  Whether you continue to use those skills after your graduation is up to you, but there is value to mastering those skills beyond being a good person.

All that falls under the "working hard" aspect of what my dad was trying to get across.

A student can find easy courses or easy professors at any college or university (yes, including W&L).

I think there may be a misconception with schools with "high academic reputations."

Schools like W&L will just get high school students who performed really well in the classroom, were active in extracurricular activities, and are good standardized test takers.

Schools like BC will get high school students who performed really well and not so well in the classroom, were active and not active in extracurricular activities, and are good and not so good standardized test takers.

This may be difficult to grasp, but that may be the difference (academically) between a W&L and a BC.  A W&L won't have any kids who barely made it through their HS studies, or the students who couldn't (or didn't want to) be involved in school activities beyond the classroom, or the students who don't take standardized tests well.  A BC will have some of those kids.

But that doesn't affect W&L's and BC's quality of professors or difficulty of courses.  If you think that, you're suggesting a BC professor couldn't get a job at W&L or that W&L's Linear Algebra is more rigorous than BC's Linear Algebra.

Hats off to the BCs of the world that give kids another chance who, intentionally or not, faulted in an area or two.

I tend to agree with Barnhart more than WL78 here.

I'm a strong proponent of the 'what you get out of it is what you put into it' theory. There are a lot of people (myself included at times) who learned early how to beat the system, master the answers they want you to master by paying attention during lectures and completing your assignments. While those are also useful skills in the real world, along with being able to follow directions, it's not necessarily the same thing as being engaged in a topic and having a passion for learning. Furthermore, in college, there is certainly learning that goes on beyond the textbooks and tests, and outside the confines of academia.

In some sense, there are probably people at W&L and other more highly-regarded schools who are just getting by by beating the system, so to speak, and there are people who are at Bridgewater and other places who are fully engaged in the process of educating themselves and will be better off for it.

I disagree with Barnhart on the point that more highly-regarded schools have the same quality of faculty as other schools ... but we could also disagree on what makes a quality faculty. Good credentials or the ability to push students, or connect with them. We had a Harvard grad at R-MC in the English Dept., and he was really a prick about his class ... in the end though, I really appreciated him for pushing me, as I would have done whatever it took to get by. So by demanding a lot, I did a lot ... and the people who were just trying to coast through his class, he wasn't having that.

I'm guessing, generally speaking, there are more professors like that at highly-regarded schools than less-highly-regarded schools ... but there's more than one way to get through to students. Some teachers encourage freedom and exploration and challenging thought, not just gobs of busy work.

One other point that may have been lost the first time around. There are fields, journalism being one, in which your degree generally means very little. Now, if you go to Columbia or Missouri or Syracuse, chances are they pushed you harder or had more resources to better prepare you, and you may come out into the real world more qualified for that first job than a guy from Gulf Coast Community College.

But the bottom line is, especially after your first job in the field, they don't care whether you had a 3.4 GPA at Washington & Lee or earned a Master's at Columbia or did two years at Camden County College ... the person with the best clips and the strongest references (i.e. the person the interviewer believes is going to be the best journalist for the open position) is probably going to get the job.

So in that sense, it doesn't matter where you go as much as it matters what you got out of wherever it is you went.

Look I just have to call BS on that.  I left Matt's thesis alone because the arguement was so weak I thought it would be rhetorical to refute it.  But KMack your statement boarders on idiocy and may be the reason why newspaper readership is in a nosedive, and ad revenues along with it.  There is a reason Jason Blairs and others are discredited, a lack of professional discipline and integrity.  At the better schools you learn that kind of stuff.

It does matter because the better schools have stronger programs.  Period, that is how they got to be the "better academic schools", and the kids that don't screw around, who are disciplined enough to make the good grades, have the extracurriculars, etc will generally outperform those that "didn't" have it.  Put this same thesis on the football field and I will show you a 2-8 team, or worse. 

If any of you would saunter over to the future of DIII thread you would see most of my statements have been in line with guys that have thousands of posts and have forgotten more about DIII than I will ever learn.

But don't come on here and tell me that Camden Community college is as good as W&L after one job.  It really makes your RMC degree look like a piece of paper.

A quick disclaimer, KMack your statements could very well be true and accurate in the world of the minimum wage earners, I confess I am unfamiliar with that world.

It's fine if you don't agree.

There is a very solid point to our theory, and if you choose to ignore it and go with insults and name-calling, then it's no longer a discussion, and no longer anything I need to be a part of. I'm not going to beat you over the head if your mind's made up.

I'm in this business, and I know whereof I speak. I work with people from Kentucky, Tennssee, Florida, Colgate, another guy who did a year at R-MC then went to Florida, Hampton (after year at Missouri), Iowa, Fresno State, George Washington, George Mason and a bunch of other people who I'm not sure where they went. And formerly one from Catholic. Al Neuharth, who started this paper, went to the Universtiy of South Dakota (just in case you don't think businessmen and CEOs can come from non-fancy-pants places).

That just a snapshot, obviously, but the point is you don't need an expensive degree to do well for yourself or to be good at what you do, in this particular field or many others. It doesn't hurt, but it's not required. There are some fields where it helps more than others. I'm rational; an exclusive academic institution where the professors push you is generally a path to a great education. But it's not the only path.

Perhaps you believe it is because you paid so much for yours.

Perhaps you simply disagree.

I'm not sure I care anymore. Definitely not engaging in a message board war over it. I'm certainly not going to read a whole bunch of off-topic drivel. Keep your tangent. I spoke my piece, take it or leave it.

Well said Matt and K-mack.  I would like to think that even though I went to a state school that people make fun of for being a jock school that I have done pretty well for myself.