Slept in this morning?
Didn’t set your DVR?
Just watch last year’s game.

I did a Q&A with the Notre Dame blog One Foot Down. You can read it here.

Yes, the hibernation has ended (for now).

I am the worst blogger ever. I’m not even a blogger, really. Instead of providing running commentary on the various happenings that involve my chosen subject, I emerge every once in a while to drop some way-too-wordy essay on here before fading away for another few months, or the next time my inspiration outweighs my laziness. Not gonna lie, that’s probably not going to change this year. Nevertheless, I feel guilty letting this dormant blog take up valuable space in the tubes while football season is about to start, so for now I’ll let guilt be that inspiration.

It seems like everyone is grateful that real football is about to start, since the offseason was so… eventful. Honestly, I’m not all that jazzed up about it (like I said, I’m the worst blogger ever). Nevertheless, time, tide, and football season aren’t going to wait for me to be ready. At least the Mids’ first game is interesting. That game, of course, is in Dublin against Notre Dame. The fact that it’s in Ireland just adds to the hoopla surrounding a game that is already a highlight of the Navy football season every year. There’s more to it than that, though.  This year’s game against the Irish is of particular interest to this Navy team. Unlike last year’s rope-a-dopes against Delaware and Western Kentucky, we’ll know right away if Navy has made any improvement going into the 2012 campaign. It can be argued that the Notre Dame game was Navy’s worst performance on both sides of the ball in 2011.

Continue reading “Game Week (Ireland Edition): Notre Dame” →

July was a relatively quiet month in Navy Sports. But with camp starting this past week, there’s official buzz about the 2012 football season. Unfortunately, it’s not all good news. Here’s what’s been fit to print:

– Bo Snelson and Brye French were stripped of their captain stripes by the Academy. According to Niumatalolo, it was for off-the-field transgressions, going on to say “They’re still our leaders. They may not have the military stripes, but when those two guys speak, people listen. I think those guys set a great tone.” Navy will be going with game captains this season, giving others the responsibility of representing the team at the coin flip.

– In the same article as that bomb came the news that three other players, CB Albrey Felder, WR Brandon Turner, and OLB Josh Tate, were all sent home from camp for not passing the PRT when they came back from their summer blocks. As Bill Wagner points out, this isn’t the first time players have failed the PRT when coming back to camp. But in the past they have stayed on the yard to get in shape and continue with practice. This puts the three of them, two of whom projected as starters, behind the eight ball for the start of the season.

Opinion: As someone who stood plenty of days of restriction at the academy (and still proudly displays his tape ball from the musters), I’m well aware of the downside of trying to rate what one can skate. While it is extremely disappointing to see the captains of the football team screw up in such a manner, they have owned up to it (as evidenced by them weathering a storm of questions at Media Day this weekend) and will move on. I also failed the PRT while I was a mid (hey, say what you want about me, but don’t forget McCain was low in his class, too!) and know those repercussions, too. Navy’s motto for this year is “It’s Not About Me” (INAM) – building on the thought that there were too many uncharacteristic mistakes last year and a need for renewed intensity in the offseason. These punishments, while a blight at the start of the season, are necessary and indicative of a program trying to turn around the errors that lead to Navy’s first losing season in nearly a decade.

– In Big East news, Big East Coast Bias related an article in the New York Daily News that sources close to NBC have stated that NBC would make an offer to the Big East of $10M a year for football-only schools and $4M a year for basketball schools, with full members like Rutgers and UConn getting the full $14M – just $3M less than what the ACC got from its latest look-in renegotiation with ESPN. While the biggest conferences get much more than that, it certainly puts the Big East closer to the traditional “BCS Conferences” and further distances themselves from the likes of the MWC and CUSA. Remember, in 2012, the MWC is paying out a paltry $800,000 to member schools.

Opinion: It takes courage and mettle to play in a conference that makes that little from TV.

– In extraordinarily sad news, Midshipman 1/C Austin Zalik was killed this past Friday in an accident in Pennsylvania. Zalik had been selected as the captain of the gymnastics team for this upcoming season. Our thoughts go out to his family and friends.

Well, it is June and there is not much to talk about right now. The Mids are doing summer cruises, Marine Corps training (hoorah!), taking some leave or taking summer classes. So news out of “The Yard” is pretty slow. Even Scott Strasemeier, Navy’s Sports Information Director, was rumored to have been pacing Ricketts Hall muttering “I hope something happens this month or else I’ll be forced to take leave!” Unfortunately, there still isn’t much happening. But we do have an ESPN article that is sort of related to our world.

Yesterday, Mitch Sherman posted an ESPN article on the Cost of Recruiting. It’s a short piece but it’s worth reading. Overall, it’s pretty much what you’d expect. With a few exceptions (e.g., Boise State), the biggest baddest FBS schools generally spend the most on recruiting. No shock there.

What might shock the average college football fan is the amount Army ($512,000) and Air Force ($336,000) spent on recruiting. Navy did not provide a number. That’s some pretty hefty spending on first glance. Of course, what many people don’t realize is that the service academies are recruiting nationwide. Take a look at the big school on any given Saturday and you’ll see that their teams are stocked with local kids. Georgia has a lot of kids from Georgia; LSU has a lot of kids from Louisiana; Florida has a lot of kids from Florida. You get the point. The service academies don’t have a regional focus and they shouldn’t; but nationwide recruiting costs a lot of money if you want to do a good job and fight for a limited pool of athletes that are interested in playing FBS football and also serve as military officers. Travel expenses are a major factor. Many service members who read this blog know that a two week cross country temporary additional duty (TAD) trip can cost $5,000 when you include airfare, hotels, rental car, per diem, et al. Now, start applying these costs to multiple football coaches and multiple trips and you can see how costly recruiting can get.  That’s just the travel budget.  We’re not even talking about all the other expenses like those shiny brochures.

Two other things jumped out at me:

-Tennessee is spending almost $1.5 million on recruiting. That’s $500K more than Alabama and it leads all other programs that submitted data. Wow. That’s saying something. What that’s saying is anyone’s guess. Tennessee has had a difficult time since Phil Fulmer stepped down as head coach in 2008. So you’d expect some type of recruiting emphasis, but I don’t know how you justify that recruiting budget given that Tennessee’s season ticket sales are slumping along with the football team.

-Georgia Tech is spending $883K on recruiting, which is $260K more than its arch rival Georgia. I have no idea what accounts for this, but I have a feeling Coach Paul Johnson is spending more money to look for the type of players that fit his spread option offense. Perhaps our Rambling Wreck readers can comment below.

In case you missed the news, Phase IV of the renovations to NMCMS is scheduled to begin this year and be completed by 2015. These renovations include HD video boards, a new media center, new locker rooms, club level seating (more on that in another post), and a new recruiting center. But what I want to concentrate on first and foremost is this:

We’re going to see a capacity increase to 40,000 by 2015

According to the 2003 media guide, NMCMS had a seating capacity of 30,000. That was expanded to 34,000 for the 2004 season. With the 40,000 seats by 2015, that means we’ll have seen a 33% increase in seating, not to mention the other significant upgrades around the facility

First, I’d like to address the notion that this is in order to meet some sort of minimum the Big East has. This is incorrect as such a minimum does not exist. But we certainly are on the small size of the current and future members

SDSU	70,561	Qualcomm Stadium
Temple	68,532	Lincoln Financial Field
USF	65,857	Raymond James Stadium
Memphis	62,380
Louisville	56,000
Rutgers	52,454
UCF	45,301
Connecticut	40,000
Boise	37,000
Cincinnati	35,097
Navy	34,000	Expanding to 40,000 by 2015
Houston	32,000	New 40k Stadium in 2014
SMU	32,000

Adding another 6,000 seats to NMCMS would put Navy on pretty even terms with the conference average. Three of the schools on the list play in pro stadiums, so we really can’t look at them as a part of the average. Houston is building a new stadium that will seat 40,000 when it’s finished in 2014. So if we exclude the former and adjust for the latter, the average capacity of members of the Big East in 2015 is going to be just a hair over 44,000.

Since the 2004 renovations, the lowest attended game was in 2004 against Northeastern. Just 25,115 people showed up to watch the second game of what was bound to be a wonderful 10-2 season. All told, that was one of only 6 games since 2004 that failed to break the 30k mark.

By comparison, there have been SEVENTEEN games at NMCMS where we have been above capacity. The record was set in the 2008 season when Pitt came to town. 37,970 people jammed in that day, putting attendance at 112% of capacity. Air Force routinely brings massive crowds, averaging 109% capacity. Rutgers, a future Big East foe, has brought an average of 36,118 to the three games they’ve played at NMCMS (106%).

Across all 42 games played at NMCMS since expansion, Navy has averaged 33,109 people per game, which is 97% of full capacity. In 2011, Navy was #9 in the country for attendance by percent of capacity with 101.8%. Air Force, ECU, and Delaware were all over-capacity sellouts while Troy and Southern Miss each fell just a few hundred tickets shy of capacity, both having 98% attendance.

To put it relative to the greater college football universe, the following schools had higher capacity attendance in 2011 than Navy:

1. Oregon
2. TCU
3. Nebraska
4. Texas A&M
5. Oklahoma
6. Texas Tech
7. Ohio State
8. Michigan

That’s it. Not bad company to keep.

Just to parse the attendance a little more, since 2004 Navy’s had:

• 17 games over capacity. That’s 40% of all games.
• 9 games in the 95-100% range. Yep – 62% of all games have been over 95% full.
• 7 more in the 90-95% range. That’s 79% of games with at least 30,600 people attending.

So the demand has been there. But it’s not just as easy as adding seats and watching the dough roll in. In part 2, we’ll look at the challenges of getting those attendance numbers as well as the finances behind them.