8+ 8 = Winning Season?

Every college team undergoes the tough loss of graduating seniors from year to year. Columbia football will be no exception with the graduation of longtime key stars like Drew Quinn, Jon Rocholl, Jordan Davis, Mike Brune, Ralph DeBernardo, and Phil Mitchell, among others.

But if senior linebacker Corey Cameron gets 5th-year status from the league, then the Lions will be returning an unusually high eight defensive starters and eight offensive starters in 2009. Among those 16 returning starters are four all-Ivy players and several other seniors who have been basically starters since they were freshmen.

The biggest holes to fill will be at middle linebacker, where Drew Quinn has ruled the defensive roost. And Columbia fans learned how dangerous losing a key player at that position can be after Adam Brekke graduated and the Lions struggled to plug up the middle properly in 2007.

It's not clear just how much Columbia will miss Phil Mitchell, who had very strong 2006 and 2007 seasons but seemed to drop off in 2008. I say SEEMED because Mitchell still drew a lot of double teams and clearly freed up other defenders to make plays. But the emergence of Lou Miller and Owen Fraser on the D-line is more than a little encouraging.

Incidentally, Miller is back with the wrestling team this "spring," (I love how we get to call this second semester "spring," when only about two weeks of the semester is actually spring), and he placed third in the Wilkes Open in Pennsylvania.

The entire secondary and all the key reserves in the defensive backfield also return. Critics will point to Columbia's 7th-in-the-Ivies finish in overall pass defense and scoff at that returning squad. But that would be a mistake, because what those stats don't tell you is that the Lions were passed on much more often in 2008 because of the tremendous improvement in Columbia's run defense. Only Brown, Harvard and Yale faced more pass attempts this season than the Lions.

The stats also don't show the incredible talent displayed by corners Calvin Otis and Kalasi Huggins, and backup corner A.J. Maddox.

At safety, Andy Shalbrack had another great season that unfortunately defied what you see in the stats for the most part. Adam Mehrer had something of a breakthrough season.

Columbia's offense did not accomplish the same levels of improvement posted by the defense when it came to scoring points. But the marked improvement in the running game was encouraging. Three of the starting offensive linemen do return as does the entire wide receiving corps and the entire starting backfield with one exception, (Jordan Davis).

I have no idea if the Lions will use the option offense more or less often in 2009, but either way, the team will have more experience when they do use that strategy and that helps a lot.

A bigger question is who will get the most snaps at QB, and that will be something I'm sure we'll be debating here for much of the next nine months.

But the number of returning starters on a team that showed a marked talent improvement, if not a marked improvement in overall wins, is very encouraging right now. Does this put undue pressure on these returning players to perform? Maybe, but that pressure doesn't come from here and probably would never match the pressure these scholar athletes put on themselves every day.

So as much as this part of the year is spent focusing on our incoming recruits, let's not forget that it's our returning players who are more likely to make a difference on the field in 2009.

Luckily for us, that number of returning players is bigger than it has been in many, many years.