Leading off today: Top-ranked Fayetteville-Manlius won its fourth straight Nike Cross Nationals girls cross country championship this morning in Portland, Ore., by easily fending off No. 3 Saratoga Springs.
F-M topped Saratoga by a 74-147 margin, with Queensbury (284) seventh and Shenendehowa (285) eighth in the 22-team field. With Saratoga having captured the title in 2004 and Hilton in 2005, New York schools have won the girls race all six years in the history of the event.
Sophomore Katie Sischo (18:14) paced the Hornets with a 21st-place showing, followed by classmate Molly Malone in 24th as F-M grouped its five scorers within 17 seconds of each other. The performance was so dominating that Hannah Luber, F-M's top finisher at the prestigious Manhattan Invitational in October, was the team's sixth finisher today.
In the boys race, Fayetteville-Manlius placed 10th and Burnt Hills-Ballston Lake 19th.
Scalo selected: Monroe-Woodbury senior QB Dan Scalo has been selected the Gatorade New York football player of the year after leading the Crusaders to their sixth straight sectional Class AA championship.
Scalo recovered from offseason shoulder surgery to lead Section 9 with 1,569 rushing yards and ran for 20 touchdowns. He threw for 1,148 yards and 13 more TDs.
"I knew I was nominated, but I didn't think I would get it," Scalo told The Times Herald-Record. "New York State is pretty big and has a lot of great athletes."
Hofstra drops football: Sports Illustrated writer Jeff Pearlman had an interesting take on news this week from Hofstra University. He calls Hofstra "a school with principle."
However, others call it what it is -- simply a school without football, following the announcement that Hofstra is dropping the sport. And I call it a school that has let down a whole bunch of young men.
Pearlman lauds Stuart Rabinowitz, president of the Long Island school. And to a certain extent he is correct. In announcing that his school would drop football, Rabinowitz noted that Hofstra is proud to have a law school and a medical school, and football has been costing deep into seven figures every year when that money could be used instead to support academic programs. In the current economic climate, his priorities can't really be challenged.
Very few Football Championship Subdivision (i.e., Division I-AA) schools come close to breaking even on their own merit. A few others certainly come close enough to justify offering the sport based on how it contributes to the overall sense of community locally. And others are in the position of reaping substantial alumni donations from people who might not be contributing as much if there was no football team on campus so that the program actually comes close to turning a profit even if it doesn't look like it on the surface.
But Pearlman chooses to throw in a red herring the size of Moby Dick by dragging Charlie Weis ($18 million left on his contract now that Notre Dame has freed up his future), and Nick Saban and Bobby Petrino -- whom Pearlman says (and probably accurately) "reek of past disloyalties and minimal decency."
But what the hell does that have to do with the Hofstra situation? Hofstra is a dollars-and-cents situation, pure and simple, cut and dried, end of discussion. It's not about the coaches, etc. So if Pearlman is going to play the "disloyalties and minimal decency" card, doesn't he have to wonder how long Rabinowitz has been dealing from the bottom of the deck?
Confused by that question? Well, I'm guessing Miguel Maysonet (Riverhead), Zamel Johnson (Port Richmond), Reggie Francklin (Holy Cross), Maalik McVea (Freeport), Elijah Beecham (Lawrence), Anthony Dima (Centereach), Matt McBride (Holy Trinity) and Steven Medard (Amityville) might also be confused. All are freshmen on campus this year, and several were very highly recruited coming out of high school.
They chose Hofstra when they could have gone to any number of other schools. Yeah, I'm sure Hofstra will honor whatever financial aid commitments were made for the duration of their stay at the school (already, Maysonet and former William Floyd star Brock Jacolski are being wooed by Stony Brook). But that doesn't change the fact it was wrong to recruit these young men into the program and then drop the sport. Surely the seeds for this week's announcement were planted at least 18 months ago, and president Rabinowitz almost certainly knew before letter of intent day last February what the score was.
As is also the case with Northeastern, which dropped the sport last month, Rabinowitz could have and should have given a heads-up on his decision at this time a year ago so that those eight New Yorkers (for the record, there are also five redshirt freshmen and 10 sophomores from N.Y. on the roster) and the whole freshman class could have headed elsewhere.
Since few true freshmen make it onto the field, and fewer still play meaningful roles, the loss of that recruiting class would not have severely affected the lame-duck varsity this fall. And virtually everyone else with eligibility would have remained at Hofstra for the finale, if for no other reason that the fact that there would be minimal benefit to leaving immediately.
All Hofstra players this week essentially became free agents eligible to play immediately at a new school next fall. That would not have been the case had they departed while Hofstra was playing its lame-duck season.
