It's A Mailbag! Your Comments, thoughts and questions, 1/6/08

Welcome to 2008 and as you may have noticed, we've shifted the Mailbag back to Sundays for the new year. With football season over, it makes more sense to do them at the end of the week, get you ready for the new one. As always, questions from real readers about almost anything fuel the always-healthy Mailbag, so make sure to leave comments below or e-mail us at mrothstein@jg.net.

We're going to ask for at least a first name this year along with at least a home state (or country for those reading in Belize and Micronesia) for us to answer your questions after this Mailbag. Thanks. Now let's get to it:

We had a lot of comments about the Wizard of Odds' travel breakdown of every team in their non-conference games throughout the last decade. Knowing the Wiz a little bit and finding the project fascinating and interesting, we linked to it. Here are the best responses (our retorts, if any, will be in normal type. Reader type in italics).

This is a bit misleading, as ALL of Notre Dame's games are considered non-conference. I'd like to see it recalculated, taking out annual opponents like USC, Navy, Michigan State, Purdue, Michigan and Stanford. Those games, are, in effect, our conference schedule.
-Neil Waechter
Parts Unknown

The best response was the person that said it is a reflection that more people are packed into the east than in the west and it is farther to grandma's house in Montana than Georgia. It is noted that some high school teams in west Texas travel four to eight hours by bus -- every week -- every year because the nearest high school is four to eight hours away. It's just the way it is with the population. Are they tired? Damn sure. Is it fair? No. What can we do about it? Nothing.
-Sam B.
Texas

Sam,
We agree, but it is still interesting because unlike in high school football where pretty much every team plays an equal number of home and road games, the bigwigs in college football clearly don't.
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The second part of the link from above dealt with Notre Dame lightning-rod Tyrone Willingham, who is in an interesting situation at the University of Washington. But the column we linked to talked about responsibility by coaches, players and universities when coaches leave or are fired. Again, you readers had many responses. Here are some of the best.

Coach/player transfers
Another rule to this should be that a player deciding to leave cannot transfer to the school that the coach is going to. This will eliminate coaches poaching from their former school.
-Tanner
Parts Unknown

Tanner,
We disagree, although maybe a player should not be allowed to practice in the spring if he transfers with a coach including sitting out the mandatory year. That would seem more practical as your suggestion continues to punish the athletes, who are really pawns in all of the coaching movement since they have little or nothing to do with it in most non-firing cases.

Keep the rule as it is right now, with a player having to sit out a year. If you want to compare it to coaches, then have the players pay their scholarship money back if they don't want to sit out. Coaches leaving typically have buyouts of a million $$ or more. Players get 'paid' too, in scholarship terms. To make it an equal comparison, they should repay the scholarship for the right not to sit out a year.
-Pete Roberts
Parts Unknown

Pete,
You bring up some interesting points, although that clearly favors the rich players (Hello, Jimmy Clausen, for instance) versus those who grew up in less-than-wealthy surroundings. That would go against a bunch of tenets of fair play and equality that the NCAA tries to enforce. Plus, there could easily be discrimination lawsuits filed (rich vs. poor example). And again, we believe the athletes are often the pawns in the coaching carousel game.
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Dear Michael,
Without Notre Dame football, things are slow for you. Do you also cover Notre Dame basketball? After the first of the year, the Big East season begins and it should be interesting to see how the Irish do against stronger teams. We could surprise some teams.
-Bill Vita
Long Island, N.Y.

Bill,
Good to hear from you again and glad to see people from our past are reading (for those who don't follow regularly or are new, Bill was my middle school principal and he discovered the blog last year and has been a regular commenter since). Yep, we cover ND basketball, too, and would agree that the Irish will surprise some teams. That said, it'll be harder to sneak up now that Notre Dame is 2-0 in the league and looks like a almost sure bet for the NCAA Tournament.

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Recruiting season is also in its final stages and with Omar Hunter decommitting from Notre Dame earlier this week, it sent some posters into a fury. Recruiting is the dirtiest part of college athletics -- and often can end up being political. Here are some of your better rants and responses to how the recruiting process can change, also coming from when Chris Harper backed off from Kansas State:

The recruiting process is so cut throat. It's almost like dealing with used car salesmen. Each school taking shots at one another. Also, the football coaches do not respect the word commit. To them it just means 'Talk more negative about the school the kid committed to until the 17 or 18 year old is so confused he does not know what he wants.' NCAA needs to step in and keep these low class coaches from messing with the recruits' heads. Or an earlier signing of the national letter of intent.
-Ryan
Florida

Signings should start in August and be allowed to go until whenever. If these kids signed in August, then it would allow them to focus more attention on school and their senior seasons. My brother went to high school with Trent Edwards and he couldn't walk from one class to another without someone asking where he was going, especially after (Willingham) left Stanford for Notre Dame.
I'm sure coaches would still contact the players after they signed in August, but it's gotta help.
-John
Parts Unkown

John,
We agree to an extent, although our only issue with it is what happens if a coach gets fired, resigns, takes another job, after the season is over. It is giving more power to the schools and less to the prospects, which we aren't in favor of. Now if there was a hybrid rule, such as "This letter is binding unless a coach leaves the school, then a commit can re-open the process," we'd be in favor of that. It could also hurt the school because if a prospect slacks academically his senior year, he may not become eligible and it could decimate recruiting classes and programs. It's a tough sell.
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Assist-to-turnover ratio doesn't need to have a plus in front. You can't really have negative of either.
-Matt M.
Parts Unknown

Matt,
You can have a negative stat in this category. If a team has more turnovers than assists, it would be negative because assists  are the positive number and turnovers are the negative number. You don't hear much from those teams, though, because generally they are the bottom feeders of college basketball.
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With 2007 coming to a close, we mentioned our Top 10 moments we'll remember a long time from now and asked for yours as well. Here are some you think we forgot:

Notre Dame and its fans all over the world ate humble pie in large measure this past season and that is a good thing. What will we all learn from this? Time will tell.
-Terry
Parts Unknown

The Robert Hughes touchdown run the week after his brother was shot and killed was also a very memorable moment.
-TC

Mike,
Thanks for the Top 10 and your work in 2007. As I e-mailed you back in September, you are one of the few objective reporters.
In the Unfinished Business category, in the dead of the offseason, I think you should still look into the awful replay call on (David) Grimes' catch in the Stanford game. It could have made the difference in the ballgame, and while this year was a bust, a call like that in '08 or '09 could cost us the season. The NCAA should eliminate conference affiliations among referees. If 2007 taught us anything, it's that referees are human and subject to bias.
Thanks,
-Steve Bracci
Naples, Fla.

We agree Hughes was a great moment, but it just didn't make the cut because we cover so much stuff and it did get lost in the shuffle of a horrendous season a little bit. We'd say it would have been next, though. As for Steve, did you notice the Grimes non-catch on ESPN's Top Plays of the Year. We found that funny. And the reason why most aren't looking into it -- the South Bend Tribune did briefly -- is because in the end, it made no difference in the game and no difference in the endgame of the season. That said, we're all for the nationalization of officials. It'll definitely help.
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Just watched the All-American game or should it be called the Notre Dame recruitment game. All that talent is on its way to Notre Dame. Charlie Weis did his job and should be commended.
You might want to stand back for the Irish are on the way. After the 2007 season, we might be hungry.
-Daniel O.
Parts Unknown

Daniel,
We would agree that one of Weis' only positive football efforts this season came in recruiting. The Irish have a bunch of talent coming in 2008, as evidenced by the plays made in Saturday's All-Star games. But the rule of thumb we go by -- and told to us by a colleague -- is that one-third of the players in these All-Star games will be busts, one third will be good players and one third will be stars. Keep that in mind.
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And today's final words...
Michael,
I was showing my dad the YouTube video of our flag football team championship game in Notre Dame Stadium and saw you mentioned it on your blog. My name is Sean Walsh and I was the quarterback who threw the last-second pass. The guy with the amazing hands is Ryan Vershay. We are both third-year law students at Notre Dame. What makes that throw interesting is I had actually broken my thumb on my throwing hand (left hand) on our first offensive play and played pretty bad up till that last throw, I threw two picks. Our defense won that game for us by giving us three seconds left to try a miracle.
-Sean Walsh

Sean,
Heck of an effort -- and for those not knowing what we're talking about, Sean was referencing our last Mailbag, when we showed his miraculous, Flutie-like, play. And here it is again, as the end to our Mailbag this week.

Keep those questions, comments and if you have them, miraculous plays immortalized on the Tube coming.



-By Michael Rothstein of The Journal Gazette

Comments

[Mister]

Players commit to a program, not specifically to a coach. The idea that players should be able to transfer without reprocussions just because of a coaching change is absurd.

[Craig]

An assist to turnover *ratio* will never be negative, because neither counting stat is ever negative. If there's a plus/minus sign involved, it's not a *ratio*. (If you use a difference, then I'd probably call it a differential, even though that's not exactly right mathematically.)