Washington Post articles from the weekend -- Washington Capitals; Wake Forest and Jim Grobe

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Here are my two newest articles for The Washington Post which ran on over the weekend --- 'Washington Capital's time for raising little banners is over' and 'Wake Forest's Jim Grobe achieves beyond the numbers.' ---

Shortly before they began their 38th season, the Washington Capitals unfurled a banner in the rafters of Verizon Center. It was another little one, the eighth among the nine they have raised that is a tribute to a regular-season accomplishment. The exception to the rule is the one that celebrates their Eastern Conference championship in 1998, the one year they have reached the Stanley Cup Finals.

The time for hanging little banners is over. Although opening night was hardly exultant, with the Caps pulling out a 4-3 overtime victory against the middling Carolina Hurricanes, this is a season that shouldn’t end until mid-June.

Win another Southeast Division title? Fine. A Presidents’ Trophy for the best regular-season record? Okay. But General Manager George McPhee didn’t go out this summer and add Tomas Vokoun, Roman Hamrlik, Jeff Halpern, Joel Ward and Troy Brouwer in order to win another division title or try to advance another round in the playoffs.

“I think if people think we’re good enough to win the Stanley Cup, we should embrace that idea,” McPhee said a few minutes before Saturday night’s game. “That’s where you want to be, in that handful of teams that’s good enough to win the Cup.

“That doesn’t mean you don’t go through the process of trying to do things right the entire season. But you do that to get to the point where you can be at your best in the playoffs.”

Click here for the rest of the column: Washington Capital's time for raising little banners is over

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When the time comes for Jim Grobe to retire, the chances that he will be voted into the College Football Hall of Fame are probably somewhere between slim and none with slim having little chance of prevailing. Almost halfway through his 17th season as a head coach Grobe has an overall record of 99-94-1.

And yet, if any of those voting were to take a close look at Grobe’s accomplishments he might be voted in by acclamation.

Consider — for starters — some numbers.

Grobe is in his 11th season at Wake Forest. After his team’s 35-30 victory Saturday over Florida State, the Demon Deacons are 4-1 and Grobe is now 66-61 at Wake. That record might not sound overwhelming until you consider that he is the first Wake Forest coach to have a winning record since D.C. “Peahead” Walker retired in 1950 with a record of 77-51-6. The last four coaches prior to Grobe’s arrival combined to go 95-159-2 in 23 years. Those four — John Mackovic, Al Groh, Bill Dooley and Jim Caldwell — weren’t exactly hacks. All but Dooley went on to become head coaches in the NFL and Dooley had a record of 132-91-3 in 20 years at North Carolina and Virginia Tech.

 

Grobe’s first job was at Ohio University where he was 33-33-1 in six years. Again, hardly Hall of Fame numbers. But if you consider that in the 10 years prior to Grobe’s arrival Ohio had four separate losing streaks of at least 12 games, that record becomes a lot more impressive.

Click here for the rest of the column: Wake Forest's Jim Grobe achieves beyond the numbers

“How did the other team feel?”

Among the many great ‘Peanuts,’ strip drawn by the immortal Charles Schulz, one of my favorites is the one in which Linus is telling Charlie Brown about the ending of a football game. I’m paraphrasing, but he says something like: “It was amazing Charlie Brown, our team was behind with one second left in the game and we were on the one-yard line and the quarterback threw a pass all the way down the field and the receiver caught it and ran in for a touchdown. Everyone was screaming and yelling and celebrating. You should have seen it!”

At that point Charlie Brown looks at Linus and says: “How did the other team feel?”

That strip ran through my head right after the final play of Navy’s 28-27 victory over Wake Forest in Winston-Salem on Saturday night. Needless to say I was thrilled for Navy and enjoyed watching the players and coaches pour onto the field to celebrate after Wake’s final pass had fallen incomplete ending a wildly entertaining (and, for the record, poorly officiated) football game.

Then I looked at the Wake players, some sitting on the field in shock, others walking slowly across the field to congratulate the Midshipmen. I felt it even more when the Demon Deacons followed the Mids to the far corner of the field to stand at attention for the playing of the Navy alma mater. Wake’s always been a class school and Jim Grobe is a class coach. My guess is his players are the same way. This was their second consecutive loss when the opponent scored in the game’s last 30 seconds.

And so I thought of Linus and Charlie Brown.

Of course endings like that take place in sports all the time. For every Mookie Wilson, there’s a Bill Buckner and for every Bobby Thompson, there’s a Ralph Branca. You feel it more acutely though for non-pros—which might eliminate some big-time college football and basketball programs from the mix. I certainly felt it in Indianapolis last April when Gordon Hayward’s last second shot rolled off the rim and Butler missed beating Duke in the national championship game by exactly that much.

Sure, I was happy for my alma mater and happier for Mike Krzyzewski—my feelings about my alma mater as most people know are decidedly mixed—but watching the Butler players and thinking about what a victory for them would have meant in the basketball and sports pantheon, I couldn’t help but feel some disappointment.

But that’s what makes sports so compelling. We all feel terrible for Brooks Conrad—even a San Francisco Giants fan has to feel badly for him even if he’s happy his team won on Sunday—but the way Conrad got to that moment is a dramatic story in itself. Almost every day and certainly ever week, stories play out across the country and the world that we should care about even if no one involved is going to any Hall of Fame. Athletes who are worthy of our attention, our support and, in some cases, our sympathy when they come up just short, compete because they love to compete; because they want to win but also because they understand that losing may hurt but it isn’t—shouldn’t be—the end of the world.

Maybe that’s why I get so angry at the rich and famous who never take responsibility for their actions—on or off the playing fields. I’m a sucker for underdogs and for those who try like hell even when they know they have virtually no chance of winning. We all are to some degree. Even in Masters swimming, when one of the older swimmers comes chugging in at the end of a long race well behind everyone else, everyone in the pool gives them a round of applause.

Many swimmers call it, ‘the dreaded sympathy clap.’ I got one the first time I tried to swim a 200 butterfly as a Masters swimmer. I almost didn’t finish. My stroke was so bad the final length of the pool that a friend of mine, seeing the stroke and turn judge eyeing me closely said, “he’s still legal.” The stroke and turn judge said to him, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to DQ him, he’s already suffered enough.”

God knows that was true.

So please don’t ask me to lose any sleep over the fact that the SEC might not get a team to the national championship game this year. I might feel some sympathy for the players, but certainly not for the coaches, the administrators or the fans. I don’t feel a lot of sympathy for any of the so-called big-time schools. Alabama losing to South Carolina isn’t a whole lot different than the choking dog Green Bay Packers losing to the Washington Redskins. (Am I bitter? You bet).

Other than the celebrity photos from each of the six Bruce Edwards Celebrity Golf Classics, I have one photo in my office with an athlete in it. It’s from the 1995 Army-Navy game. That was the year that I researched ‘A Civil War,’ and it was taken right after the playing of the two alma maters. In the photo, Andrew Thompson, Navy’s defensive captain that year, is crying on my shoulder. A few minutes later, he cried on the shoulder of Jim Cantelupe—who was Army’s defensive captain that year.

Just in case you think that Thompson wasn’t a tough guy because he shed a lot of tears after Army drove 99 yards to win that game, 14-13, you should know that he is currently a major in The Marine Corps who has served in Iraq. Believe me, you’d want him on your side in any sort of fight. You would also be proud to call him a friend.

My point is this: We all celebrate victories—our own and those of individuals we root for and teams we root for. God knows I will celebrate if the Islanders ever win another Stanley Cup or the Mets ever win another World Series. (Not holding my breath on either). But when we celebrate—especially when the competition involves kids—we should all pause to think about what Charlie Brown said to Linus. On Saturday night, as happy as I was for Navy, I couldn't help but wonder how the other team felt.

Selection Sunday; teams with complaints were mediocre

And so, the Self-Righteous Ten have spoken for another year.

As anyone who has ever read anything I’ve written knows, there are few days I enjoy more than Selection Sunday and I dread what it will be like next year. But one part of Selection Sunday I can’t stand is hearing the chairman—Dan Guerrero of UCLA this year—droning on about the purity of the selection process.

Oh please. These guys are human like the rest of us. They have biases and agendas. I’m not here to tell you they don’t try to do a good job but they need to quit claiming their purity while at the same time insisting on conducting their decision-making process in absolute secret. Guerrero won’t even answer the simple question: who was the last team in and the last team out. What is this, the CIA?

If it is all so above-board and pure and wonderful why not let at least one pool reporter—my suggestion has always been the U.S. Basketball Writers President, a job that changes yearly, or Bill Brill, who knows more about the selection process than all 10 committee members combined—sit in the room to explain exactly how the field was picked and seeded.

I’ve been suggesting this for most of 20 years now. The answer I get back, regardless of who is on the committee, is usually pretty direct: No. The reason given is also the same: Because we said so. The only committee member who was willing to even consider it was George Washington Athletic Director Jack Kvancz who actually brought it up in a meeting one year. He was shouted down quickly. He also got passed over the next year when he should have been chairman. I wonder if that was a coincidence.

The last few years the committee and Greg Shaheen, the NCAA staff member who runs the tournament from the NCAA side (and is very much behind the move to 96), have come up with one of the great bogus creations of our time: the mock bracket. The NCAA invites media members to Indianapolis—or in some cases to other cities for the media’s ‘convenience,’--and sets them up for a couple of days to pretend they are the committee. Ostensibly this is done so we in the media can, ‘better understand the process.’

What a bunch of garbage. It is done so that guys in my business will feel more important and think they really do know how hard it is to put the field together. Let me say this one more time: IT IS NOT THAT HARD. Eric Prisbell of The Washington Post had exactly one team different than the committee in his bracket in Sunday’s paper and missed on a few seeds by one spot. He did this ALONE without all sorts of staff members scurrying in and out, without free satellite TV all season, without first class airfare and without a five-star hotel. He’s also a lot less pretentious about it than The Self-Righteous Ten.

Driving in the car this morning hearing the two ESPN morning commercial- readers repeatedly saying, “the committee did a very good job,” I can’t help but giggle. What good job? I’ll give them credit for giving a couple of mid-major conference champions who lost in conference tournaments at-large bids. Fine. For once they did the right thing. Should Mississippi State have gotten in over Minnesota? Yes. The Gophers beat a hobbled Purdue team on Saturday and got killed by Ohio State on Sunday. Mississippi State gave Kentucky everything it could have wanted and beat two tournament teams over the weekend prior to that.

Should Virginia Tech have gotten in over Wake Forest in my opinion? Yes. But I can see the argument going the other way too based on top-50 wins and strength-of-schedule. Seth Greenberg, who is a friend, knew he had a weak schedule in the fall. Penn State turned out to be lousy when people thought they would be decent, but every other team on his schedule turned out about the way people knew they would. All of that said, Virginia Tech finished ahead of Wake Forest in the conference; beat the Deacons head-to-head and did NOT get embarrassed in the ACC Tournament. Wake’s performance against Miami was just completely god-awful.

What’s more, Wake’s AD Ron Wellman was on the committee. PLEASE do not give me the speech about committee members recusing themselves and leaving the room when their team is being discussed. Do you think the other nine guys don’t know how the guy outside the room feels? Committee members talk all the time about how close they become working under such great pressure. Well? Put it this way: every single time a bubble team has had its AD on the committee in my memory, the team has gotten in. That doesn’t mean the committee didn’t get it right—they certainly did with George Mason and Tom O’Connor in 2006—but it happens WITHOUT FAIL.

Having said all that, Guerrero’s not-so-subtle little pitch about how there was SO MANY teams they had to consider for the last few spots, rings pretty hollow. The only reason for that is that none of those last few teams could create any solid reason to get picked. Minnesota, a loser by 29 on Sunday? Florida, which lost to Mississippi State on Friday? Wake Forest? (see above). Texas—which hasn’t won a game since the end of football season? (Oh wait, it didn’t win that game either). California, which couldn’t even win the tournament in the miserable Pac-10?

Did these teams deserve to be in the tournament? Probably—because Mississippi State, Virginia Tech, Illinois and Rhode Island, were just about as mediocre overall. You could put those four in and take four of the above-mentioned out and you’d have essentially the same tournament. (For the record, NONE of these teams deserved to be seeded ahead of Cornell—check out Cornell’s schedule.)

Guerrero is clearly trying to set up the move to 96 by saying SO many teams were deserving. Hogwash. Worst-case scenario you expand to 68 teams, send the last eight at-larges to Dayton to play for the last four spots and there is just about no one who has ANY complaint at all.

Gary Williams claimed to me the other night that there are more good teams today than in 1985 when the tournament expanded to 64 teams. With all due respect, he’s flat out wrong. In 1985, Villanova, a No. 8 seed WON the tournament. In 1988, Kansas a No. 6 seed WON the tournament. IN 1986, a Maryland team led by Len Bias finished SIXTH in the ACC. There were more teams in big conferences with juniors and seniors back then, there was more depth because of that and the quality of basketball was better at all levels than it is today.

Back to the committee. The matchup that screams to be screamed at—among all of them—is Temple-Cornell. Both teams are under-seeded. And, when the committee tries to tell you this game is a coincidence, make sure you have a firm grip on your wallet. Temple is coached by Fran Dunphy; Cornell by Steve Donahue. Guess who was Dunphy’s No. 1 assistant at Penn for 10 years? If you guessed Steve Donahue you win my place at next year’s mock bracket. You win two spots at the mock bracket if you guess the committee guys will claim, ‘gee we never thought of that.’

Uh-huh. These guys are supposed to be hoops experts, right? They watch all these games, study all these computer printouts, read up on the conferences they’re assigned to study. Nah, how would they know about the Dunphy-Donahue connection or think it would make a great first round story for their ‘partners,’ from CBS. Just like Duke and Louisville—and thus Mike Krzyzewski and Rick Pitino—is a likely second round matchup. Absolute coincidence. Heck, they might not even know where Krzyzewski and Pitino are coaching these days.

Someone get me a shovel.

I don’t mind that the committee does this stuff every year, I mind that they claim it is all by accident and they are all Caesar’s wife. If so, then why not let Dick Jerardi (this year’s USBWA president) or Brill, who has been putting brackets together since about 1952, observe this brilliant and totally above-board process. (For those of you who want to write, ‘oh Feinstein you just want to get in the room,” I seriously don’t want to get in the room. I’d rather watch basketball than sit in a room with those guys for four days. But someone should be doing it).

Anyway, that’s my rant for today. Tomorrow we’ll start to deal with who is playing whom and which games should be the most fun this weekend. I’ll leave you with this for today: I’m glad Wake Forest is playing Texas because I like Dino Gaudio and Rick Barnes and this is probably the only way that one of them will have a chance to win at least one game.

Good job, Self-Righteous Ten.