was released form the hospital about a half hour ago. Just enough time to let everyone know I’m all right and to still make tipoff of tonight’s ESPN ACC/Big Ten Challenge match. It’s being broadcast by ESPNU and I will be in my regular seat 5 rows behind the visitors bench – I’m on the aisle on your right.
Ken – remember this?
First a little background:
Dick Harmon of the Deseret News (out there in Ken’s neck of the woods), a voter in the new Harris Poll, which is part of the BCS ranking system, voted PSU the #17 football team in the country this week. That has raised the ire of many PSU football fans (see this Centre Daily Times Blog post), caused numerous rants and rages on PSU internet forums, generated a plethora of emails to Harmon and his superiors, and even inspired this column by a local sportswriter, Dave Jones.
This paragraph by Dave caught my eye (my emphasis added)
Harmon writes for the Deseret News, one of two papers in Salt Lake, is 52 and has been writing about college football for three decades. He also exposes his ballot every Monday on the Deseret News site, deseretnews.com, which is more than you can say for most Harris voters, let alone the opaque coaches who let underlings fill out their ballots every week on the other poll with understood directives never to vote that Son of a Gun from So’n’so State above No. 24.
The underlings line hit home.
Back in 1972, a friend of mine was a sportswriter for a local paper here in State College and was a voting member of the Associated Press Basketball poll (he shall go nameless because he’s still in the business and just might want to regain his AP vote some day). Right around this time of year he was supposed to submit his ballot for the preseason AP poll. Just like this year, PSU was hot in the middle of the football national championship picture (at the time we were 8-1 and 7th ranked – we wound up 10-2 losing to #2 Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl – USC won it all at 12-0). Just to show you some things never change, basketball took a back seat to football and my friend asked me to put together a preseason ballot for him because he was too tied up with football coverage. I quickly agreed.
At the time, the AP’s list was a top twenty and you only voted for the top 15. I quickly dove into my research (if only the internet existed back then I could have been much much more thorough). I came up with fourteen teams without too much trouble but was having a hard time settling on a 15th. Then I had a brainstorm – Ken was going to school at Illinois State and he had told me they had a pretty good team, why not do him a favor and plug them in at #15. So be it. I then called him up and told him that as long as his team kept winning I would guarantee that they would appear in the “among those also receiving votes” category.
Damn, if that little school didn’t keep winning. For the first couple of weeks, my little vote meant that they were at the bottom of the “others” category but, after a while, lo and behold they started getting votes from others. They eventually got to about 11-0 and were getting close to the top twenty when their bubble burst and they lost. I would like to think that my original vote caught the attention of other voters and they started to pay attention to the Redbirds as they maintained their winning streak. If it weren’t for me maybe they wouldn’t have gotten any national exposure that year.
Without that exposure, maybe no one would have noticed their 6’6″ guard that was lighting up the conference, eventually earning him a consensus All-American spot and a first round draft by the Phila 76ers which he parlayed into a long time basketball playing, coaching, and broadcasting career. Yup – if it weren’t for me, Doug Collins wouldn’t be where he is today. He owes it all to me. 
All kidding aside, I actually had a lot of fun watching Illinois State make me proud of that vote that I initially cast for them. That year also gave me an appreciation for how difficult a job it is to be a voter, particularly in those days when there was no way to see most of the teams you actually were voting for. The only thing you could base your vote on were scores that rolled across the wire services. Even finding a game story was extremely difficult then.
It is easier now but it’s a daunting task and I don’t envy the guys that try to do it (that’s why I am a fan of the computer polls – that and because I’m a computer geek to begin with). At least guys like Dick Harmon put their vote out there for all to see (and thus get some feedback). It’s the secret votes that bother me the most. You can also bet that some of those votes, particularly in the preseason, have as much validity as my “my little brother goes to school there” vote.
Now that winter has arrived…
it’s time to shift to my “other job”.
I’m fortunate in that my two passions don’t overlap their seasons. Warm weather months get dedicated to golf – I’m a little off this year with only about 80 rounds played, normally I’d hit over 100 but the asthma knocked me out for a month. Cold weather months see my focus switch to Penn State basketball (practice started 12 days ago).
A friend of mine, Tim Beidel, runs a website, PennStateHoops.com, dedicated to the Nittany Lion basketball program. Tim resides in Portland Maine and started the site years ago as a way of remotely keeping up with the basketball program. He was frustrated that he had a really hard time finding information anywhere about Penn State basketball team and realized that others must be in the same boat so he started the site.
I started buying season basketball tickets when the school built our basketball arena, the Bryce Jordan Center in 1995. Like Tim, I lived in New England and couldn’t find any info on PSU basketball. I started trolling around the web and stumbled onto his site then. It was a godsend for those of us looking for PSU BB info. I started hanging around the site then, occassionally posting to the site forum.
A few years down the road, I met Tim and we hit it off (90%+ of the people on these boards I wouldn’t want anything to do with but Tim is an exception). We’ve been able to get together once or twice a year since then, either for a summer golf tournament, fall football game, or winter basketball game. Despite Tim being a married non-drinker and me the polar opposite we get along quite well (in addition to sharing a common perspective on Penn State basketball, our political and social views seem to jibe 100%).
Tim runs the website as a hobby and it’s become quite popular among the PSU hoops community. Fortunately, Tim has been able to keep the lunatic fringe often found on internet boards at bay (he even got some nice props in a story by a Harrisburg sportswriter). Penn State has numerous former players playing professional ball in Europe who use the site to keep up to date with the team. We also have recently been recruiting heavily in Europe – we have three players on the squad from overseas – and their friends and families use the board to keep track of their hometown heroes.
Over the years my contribution to the board has grown. In addition to regularly posting on the aforementioned forum, I have assumed responsibility for tracking our recruiting efforts by maintaining the “UncleLar Recruiting Matrix”. The matrix is a compilation of published reports of whom Penn State is targeting with their recruiting.
By NCAA rule, a school’s coaching staff can’t comment on anyone that they are recruiting. That creates a huge void which is filled by numerous internet recruiting services (for both football and basketball). The two biggest are the Rivals Network and the Scout Network. Each of these networks is a conglomeration of individual school sites which are run by local professionals. Blue White Illustrated runs the Penn State site on the Rivals Network while Fight On State is the Scout Networks Penn State site. Both of those websites are run by local professionals who also publish local magazines.
However, this area is so football oriented that staffs of BWI and FOS give short shrift to basketball, even during basketball season. That has opened up a niche within a niche for Tim’s board and he is able to put together a better product as a hobby than either of the professional organizations can. As evidence,
Tim’s board receives 10 times the traffic that either the BWI basketball board or the FOS basketball forum does and my recruiting matrix is also more complete that either the BWI recruiting table or the FOS table.
With basketball season just around the corner (we have an exhibition game next Thursday), basketball recruiting activities will pick up and I can settle into my “second job” just as my golf “job” winds down.
Fans in Europe
Day One in Munchen. At that time Larry, one was proud to wear a Utah Football shirt.
Earlier at the Paris Airport, just after the NBA finals.
Nice work if you can get it
When I was out last night I ran into a friend, Pete Lisicky, who is a former Penn State basketball player and is now playing professionally in Europe. With Pete was another former PSU player Calvin Booth. Calvin has been playing in the NBA for six years, usually averaging about 10 minutes per game. Calvin and Pete are in town for the football game today.
Calvin is in a unique situation. The NBA and their players association recently renegotiated their collective bargaining agreement. A new provision of the agreement was the amnesty player. This was a one-time deal where an NBA team could cut one player from their team without the player’s salary counting against the team’s salary cap – that was the team’s benefit. The team still had to pay the player the remaining money on his contract and the player became an immediate free agent – that’s the player’s benefit.
Calvin was the Milwaukee Bucks amnesty player. He then went on to sign a contract with the Washington Wizards for this upcoming season. That means that Calvin will be getting two paychecks this year. Now I don’t know what his contract with the Wizards is but I do know that the Milwaukee Bucks owe him $13 million over the next two years – not bad for about 10 minutes work 50-70 times a year.
That’s nice work if you can get it.