prhoya
Blue & Gray (over 10,000 posts)
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Post by prhoya on Dec 24, 2021 16:06:03 GMT -5
DFW, do you know how many football alumni GU has? If you have it, please tell us the same for baseball. I imagine those are the two biggest sports rosters at GU.
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DFW HOYA
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Post by DFW HOYA on Dec 24, 2021 16:54:08 GMT -5
DFW, do you know how many football alumni GU has? If you have it, please tell us the same for baseball. I imagine those are the two biggest sports rosters at GU. Football: The list I have from 1963-2021 is 1,700. Some smaller number of those are deceased, transfers, etc. Some played one season and graduated, some played all four. That's consistent with 70 recruiting classes of approx. 24 players each. Baseball: A baseball roster is 35 players or roughly a third that of football. Given that baseball tends to recruit slightly fewer players (i.e., they play closer to four years), the living alumni base is probably 500. Football probably has the largest alumni base but rowing would not be far behind, followed by track.
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prhoya
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Post by prhoya on Dec 24, 2021 17:24:00 GMT -5
Thanks for the info.
Is there a DFW for football and baseball? Who is the historian for each sport? Where can we learn more about those GU sports? It feels like those sports have remained the same since the 90s.
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DFW HOYA
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Post by DFW HOYA on Dec 24, 2021 17:25:15 GMT -5
Thanks for the info. Is there a DFW for football and baseball? Who is the historian for each sport? Where can we learn more about those GU sports? It feels like those sports have remained the same since the 90s. Not sure about baseball, but the football history site is at www.hoyafootball.com
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RusskyHoya
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Post by RusskyHoya on Jan 8, 2022 19:52:31 GMT -5
It's a great trip down the annals of history (or, for older folks, memory lane), but I'm not sure it sheds all that much light on why Georgetown football is where and what it is. Certainly your explanation of the emergence of the tiering system for intercollegiate sports is a vital piece of that, but there are many aspects unique to football that help explain why it ended up in the tier that it did... and, even within that tier, in the odd situation of being something like a junior associate member of its conference, largely shut out of vying even for a conference title, to say nothing of national competitiveness. The football story is also impossible to understand absent the larger context of why almost all of the major Catholic schools discontinued their programs at mid-century, and only a minority ever brought them back. That context is mostly a thing of a past... but it does also shed some light on the present and possible futures as well.
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DFW HOYA
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Post by DFW HOYA on Jan 8, 2022 21:19:52 GMT -5
Thanks for the kind words on the article. The focus was on basketball and the football point was secondary to the direction Georgetown took. Frank Rienzo was skeptical of football's place in the Georgetown firmament and was protective of the two bell cows of the men's athletic department; namely, basketball and track. Not having a conference for the first 29 years of modern era football didn't help, nor a basic facility where it could cover its expenses.
The Catholic schools which dropped football did not do it for academic reasons, much as they would liked to have taken credit as such. Three factors contributed heavily to this:
1. Schools without on-campus facilities of their own withered and died. Major programs such as Georgetown, Fordham, San Francisco, Santa Clara, Duquesne, etc. could not justify renting pro stadiums given declining gates in the TV era. So too were the fate of private school renters like NYU, George Washington, Denver, and Pepperdine.
So who survived? Notre Dame...with Notre Dame Stadium Boston College... with Alumni Stadium Holy Cross... with Fitton Field Villanova... with Villanova Stadium
2. Schools that had to compete with an early NFL franchise usually fared poorly by comparison. Those schools named above all had NFL teams to capture the public (and more importantly, newspaper) interest. It eventually doomed Marquette (vs. the Packers), Detroit (vs. the Lions) and Xavier (versus the Bengals) and almost doomed Miami (versus the Dolphins).
3. Excepting Notre Dame, schools without conferences struggled. While television didn't control the game as it does now, conference play tended to centralize power in five or six main conferences: Big 10, SEC, PCAA/Pac-8, Southwest, ACC, Ivy. Schools like Northwestern or Stanford are here today because they were protected in a major conference--I'm not sure they could have thrived as an independent. How many Ivies would have survived outside the Ancient Eight?
Of course, this is tangential to the problems Georgetown football has in 2022: some of it under its own control, some not. Scholarships aside, for 20 years football fans were sold on the idea that the MSF/Cooper Field would unlock doors in recruiting to be more competitive. Not sure that the half-a-house of Hoya football is unlocking much of it.
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