Camps, Combines, and Commits

Does this guy have any eligibility left?


I'm a little late with this "news" but the summer football camps the coaching staff has been running at the Baker Athletics Complex are expanding to three sessions this summer.

The first one-day session will be June 13th, the second on July 10th and the third on July 11th.

A lot of people have told me these camps have improved our ability to recruit top high school talent. And I can't think spending a day or two in New York City in the summer with your parents hurts recruiting at Columbia in any way!

Speaking of camps and combines, I see that incoming Columbia frosh QB Chris Rapka was the star of a pretty well-regarded combine two years ago.

Obviously these camps and combines can produce results that overrate or underrate certain players, but I like the idea of giving kids a chance to prove themselves against top competition.

That's opposed to these all-star games where kids often get injured, blitzing isn't often allowed, and people get too excited over who "wins" the game or not. NFL fans already know how worthless the Pro Bowl is and the poor ratings for that game pretty much tell the story there.

The lack of blitzing is the deal-breaker for me. Did any readers here see the preseason, no blitzing scrimmage between Columbia and Brown in September of 2009? Brown pretty much cleaned our clocks in that "game," and we all know what the Lions did to the Bears in the real game two months later. Blitzing is a crucial part of the game of football and making any serious overall judgements about teams or key players like QB's without seeing them play with or against the blitz is silly.

Of course, the buzz this winter has been all about incoming Dartmouth frosh Cole Marcoux who impressed the fans at the Army High School all star game in December. Since then, there has been a lot of press about Marcoux jumping ship and signing with a bigger time program.

In my humble opinion, that would be a big mistake for both Marcoux and any BCS school that might be interested.

Another mirage-like event is tomorrow's National Letter of Intent signing day. Even for the big-time schools that issue "binding" letters of intent, these letters aren't really binding and would never hold up that way in court.

The Ivies don't have letters of intent, but some high schools have the Ivy commits sign a blank piece of paper for the photo op.

All I remember about committing as a student to Columbia is all the deposits my parents had to pay!


THANKS!!!

Another month, another dramatic jump in my year-over-year readership on this blog. January's numbers were up 20.3% compared to January of 2009. Thanks for reading!