13 Comments
“Can you guys shut up about f***ball?”
Tonight Capital published an email from PrezBo sent to the football alumni calling for M. Dianne Murphy to commission a review of the f***ball program. Considering the unsurprisingly horrible past season for the team, PrezBo is finally ready to figure out what’s wrong with the program and why we suck. The review is asking former coach Rick Taylor to lead the review. Taylor led a successful review of Dartmouth’s program years ago, so here’s to hoping he can work some magic at Columbia. Further, this review does not call for the resignation of current head coach Peter Mangurian as many would hope as a solution to the failure of the team.
PrezBo’s email to f***ball alumni:
Dear members of the Columbia Football Players Club:
It goes without saying that the results of this football season have been disappointing, not least to our dedicated players who continue to commit so much of themselves to excelling as scholar-athletes.
Many people throughout the University have worked very hard over the past decade to provide every level of support for all Columbia sports. The results for almost all of our sports have been spectacular. Our teams now regularly win championships, vie for Ivy championships, and often compete on the national stage. Columbia Football should be, and must be, competitive within the values of Ivy League athletics. The several obstacles to success that have been noted over the years have now been removed. We have new and renovated facilities, generous support from loyal alumni, an impressive recruiting effort that includes faculty and deans, and thoughtful support on campus for our student-athletes.
Yet the fact remains that no one has yet succeeded in building a sustainable, competitive football program at Columbia in several decades. But you can be sure that as I speak with candidates who might succeed Dianne Murphy as Athletics Director, this is a key topic of conversation. We must, therefore, ask ourselves whether the changes instituted still need time to manifest successes on the field and whether there is still more we can do to help our students be competitive.
To help us answer those questions, I have asked Dianne to commission a review of our football program by respected former coach and athletics director Rick Taylor, who performed a similar review several years ago at Dartmouth as it began its own long-term effort to turn around its football fortunes. Rick coached football as an assistant at Lehigh and Dartmouth and was head coach at Boston University. He served as athletics director at BU and Cincinnati prior to ten years at Northwestern. Importantly for us he was part of demonstrated football improvement at each of those institutions. He will begin immediately to talk to coaches, current and past players, administrators, alumni, and others, as well as working with Coach Pete Mangurian to see if there are steps that can be taken immediately with our current program.
When Pete started as coach, he was candid in saying that it would not be an easy or short process to institute fundamental change in a long-standing culture that had failed to produce success. I know there are some frustrated students, alumni, and fans who understandably feel we should hire a new coach and start yet again. It is my belief, however, that this is a moment when we will benefit most by enlisting a new superb Athletics Director and engaging in serious self-reflection, while maintaining our course in helping an extremely young team grow, recruit top-flight student-athletes to bolster our depth, and ultimately work with the new Athletics Director to do everything we can to make Columbia football every bit as competitive as the rest of our thriving intercollegiate athletics.
Sincerely,
Lee C. Bollinger
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13 Comments
@eh hmmmm Let’s get real for a second. Plain and simple, it takes a special kind of person to recruit into Columbia football. It is well known they are the worst team in d1 history. Why would anybody in their right mind sign up for that? Do they have any clue the damage they are causing mentally and physically that comes with losing so badly for 4 straight years? Maybe it’s the alumni group that’s the culture problem, correct me if I’m wrong, but how many titles did they bring home? Do the alums even know what it was like to win a game? I’m pretty sure they were losers too.
Pretty simple, you have to be a very special kind of person to successfully be recruited into Columbia to play football. You have to be cool with a fan base that is less than 100 people, cool with losing, cool with getting roughed up on the field more than normal, it’s a history that no real football player should really want to be apart of, what kind of recruit gladly signs up knowing the team can’t even make it to the toilet bowl game? No consultant can change the history of the program, this guy is gonna come in, get paid big bucks, and say there is no solution to fixing a century long culture of losing, it would be impossible.
@Not necessarily Gotta take exception to the “we’re doomed, we lose and will continue to lose, it’s institutiinal and can’t be helped” thing.
As a Red Sox fan (yeah, I said it. what?) I know that just isn’t true.
See, I started watching as a kid in the “Curse” era, where even diehards and the team itself had this whole complex about pre-ordained failure. (And attendance so low you couldn’t get recent fans to believe it.)
So I can tell you it’s cultural, but isn’t insurmountable.
(Mind you, not being the biggest f***ball fan, I have no actual _pointers_ on how to fix it. Get the guy to move the ball or …something, do I have to tell you _everything_?!;))
@Rip Van Wilder Because if there’s a longstanding problem in the university community that’s a major thorn in everyone’s side, you know that PrezBo will immediately spring into action…
…the week after someone writes about it in a national newspaper.
@CU_Alum Any chance Rick Taylor (former A.D. at Northwestern, Cincinnati, and B.U.) will take the A.D. job when he’s done with this review? He’d be an amazing hire.
@confuzzled why do we even have a team??? does anyone go to the games??? does anyone actually care??? aren’t we supposed to be good at school?? isn’t that the object of a university?? learning???????????????
@28 "?" marks! Woo! Teasing aside, this is a fair bunch of questions. Here’s a try at answering:
-It’s part of the furniture of being a major university (like a flag and national anthem are part of the furniture of being a country) and donors _love_ giving to The Team. Partly out of ‘loyalty’, partly out of nostalgia, partly because it’s a donation where you can easily see where your money went- partly because the money went to this big sports party you’re invited to come to.
-Yes. I’m sure they’d want more (there are colleges there to support the Foo’ball Program rather than the other way around where they show up like it’s the NK Mass Games.) but a lot of people do.
-Yep.
-I believe we *are* ‘good at school’. But like Bear Bryant said, it’s hard to get a crowd to turn out for exams. So we get stuff like this.
-Yep. Including learning that using TWENNYEI’HT question marks is ungrammatical ;)
@Anonymous Bollinger initially had a hard time understanding what the problem was. After all, he’s used to getting his ass pounded every weekend.
@Anonymous I think we can stop with the f***ball stuff…that joke happened 3 EICs ago.
@Anonymous Yeah. Quit picking on foosball!
@Anonymous Start with firing Murphy and Mangurian.
@Claire Friedman Good catch! Fixed.
@be better lead –> led
@CC '18 I came from a high school that had won something like 2 games in the previous decade, and then one year they hired a new coach and put more emphasis on it and we won our division championships. It was such a miracle that one of the seniors wrote a fucking book about it and called it a “Cinderella Story”
point is, it can happen.