May 9 Notebook
May 09, 2006 06:33 PM | General
May 9, 2006
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| Greg Van Zant |
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Excuse West Virginia baseball coach Greg Van Zant if his head is spinning right now. This is what his 12th Mountaineer baseball team has managed to do so far this year:
The Mountaineers (10-11 in Big East play) avoided a sweep at Georgetown last weekend and are currently tied with Rutgers for sixth place in the Big East standings, although Rutgers owns the tiebreaker should both finish with identical records. Also owning tiebreakers over West Virginia are Connecticut and Georgetown.
WVU has series wins against Louisville, Villanova, Pitt and Seton Hall. The 5-16 Pirates are the lone team on the outside looking in with two weeks of regular season play remaining. And the only team to clinch a playoff spot so far is 17-3-1 Notre Dame.
One caveat to this year’s conference race: Connecticut (2), Villanova and St. John’s (1 each) have had conference games canceled this year due to bad weather. That means if Villanova and West Virginia are tied in the win column, the Wildcats will jump the Mountaineers because they will have one less loss. Villanova is presently 8-12 in conference play with Big East games remaining at Louisville and at home against Notre Dame.
West Virginia has a tough three-game series at Cincinnati this weekend before finishing up the regular season at home against South Florida.
Van Zant believes 12 regular season conference victories should be enough to get the Mountaineers to Clearwater, Fla., for the Big East tournament.
Briefly:
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| Kay-Jay Harris |
Although a free agent signee, the Dolphins thought enough of Harris to keep him around last year.
“We never really had an opportunity to move him up,” Miami coach Nick Saban told the Miami Herald. “He’s developed into a very good special teams player, he’s got size, he’s got speed and like you see in a lot of players who struggle maybe to understand concepts in the beginning of their career – new system, learning, being able to perform at a high level and not sure what they’re doing -- you see a tremendous difference between their first year and their second year.”
Harris says the game is beginning to slow down for him.
“I definitely see everything that I’m supposed to do,” he said. “I understand not just my position, but the concept of the routes.
“That’s a big advantage from last year to this year.”
Former West Virginia linebacker BARRETT GREEN is also in Dolphins camp after being released by the New York Giants last winter. Green spent two seasons in New York after playing his first four in Detroit.
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| George Shehl |
In the same paper a day later, Journal-Constitution writer Carter Strickland hypothesized that an expanded regular season schedule could mean more true freshmen seeing playing time due to the grind of a 12-game regular season.
“You are going to have more injuries,” Tennessee coach Phil Fulmer told Strickland. “Everyone on your team – your 85-man roster or your 100-plus walk-ons – has got to be part of the equation.”
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| Steve Slaton |
Necessity forced West Virginia to use true freshman Steve Slaton last year and he was more than up to the challenge, running for a Sugar Bowl record 204 yards against Georgia and finishing the season with 1,128 yards and 17 touchdowns. There are a couple of true freshmen in this year’s recruiting class that are candidates for early playing time, possibly at wide receiver and in the secondary.
Last year, West Virginia did not play Rutgers, St. John’s or DePaul and played home-and-home games against Georgetown, Pitt and Cincinnati.
Also under consideration is a proposed mini Big East-SEC challenge that would match four teams from the SEC against four teams from the Big East. The format would mix marquee teams with lower level teams to give all schools an opportunity to appear in it once during a four-year period.
West Virginia’s 17-sport athletic program was headlined by football beating SEC champion Georgia in the Sugar Bowl and men’s basketball making back-to-back NCAA “Sweet 16” appearances. Both men’s and women’s soccer advanced to NCAA tournament play, and men’s swimming finished 30th at NCAAs.
Yet when you compare the two school’s athletic budgets, the Wildcats spend about $20 million more per year for its 22-sport program than West Virginia does for its 17-sport program. Last year Kentucky’s athletic budget, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal, was $54.225 million. The athletic budget for the 2006-07 academic year approved by Kentucky’s athletic association board is $61.2 million.
According to UK athletic director Mitch Barnhart, $61.2 million places the Wildcats in the middle of the SEC. Barnhart says Florida, LSU, and Tennessee have athletic budgets approaching $70 million.
Only three SEC programs – Mississippi, Mississippi State and Vanderbilt – operate on athletic budgets less than $50 million.
West Virginia’s athletic budget for the 2004-05 academic year was $35.8 million.
Yes, it costs a lot of money to do business in the Southeastern Conference.
Well, according to ESPN.com writer Pat Forde, it took Kentucky athletic director C.M. Newton 73 days from the time Eddie Sutton stepped down on March 19, 1989, until he was able to hire Rick Pitino on May 31, 1989. During that span Newton interviewed only two candidates – Arizona’s Lute Olson and Seton Hall’s P.J. Carlesimo – before making his choice.
Newton managed to conduct his search in a deliberate manner without having to address speculation and conjecture on a daily basis. Today, that is no longer an option for athletic directors with the emergence of talk radio, Internet chat boards and Internet blogs.
Well, after reading on Monday that newspaper circulation fell 2.6 percent in a six-month period ending in March due to the Internet and other media outlets, perhaps the Internet is more ‘mainstream’ than we think.
Have a great week!
