ESPN...Katrina Season

[golfnut69]

Steve ... I thought this may merit it's on new topic thread for a day...feel free to move it where you think it fit's best

http://espn.go.com/college-football/sto ... ane-season

[MicMan]

Much better than that puff piece earlier, they gave this one to senior writer Ivan Maisel, whose son died tragically, and he knocked it out of the park.

[mbawavefan12]

Has RD been doing radio and tv appearances to use this time to promote that TU is in a better spot now then pre-Katrina? Promoting that TU is back and better then ever (true or untrue)? Tons of free publicity is available.

[tgibson]

Much better than that puff piece earlier, they gave this one to senior writer Ivan Maisel, whose son died tragically, and he knocked it out of the park.

Are you serious?

This is nothing but a bunch of quotes. Its not an article its an interview transcript.

That "puff" piece was engaging long-form journalism. In fact, I don't think I have ever read an article about Tulane sports that was so well written. It received practically universal acclaim. Its the only Katrina 10 article I've actually enjoyed. It was engaging, in depth, and detailed. I loved it.

But it was by a woman, so I guess it was crap compared to this lazy transcript peiece. Which is exactly what a poster said in the other thread. Its a puff piece, too bad it was written by a woman.

You wouldn't know good journalism if it hit you in the face.

[tgibson]

Has RD been doing radio and tv appearances to use this time to promote that TU is in a better spot now then pre-Katrina? Promoting that TU is back and better then ever (true or untrue)? Tons of free publicity is available.

Yes. Yes they have. They have in the very article you mentioned. They have consistently in the past weeks and months. There are entire events planned around the Katrina class and the progress made. Video interviews have been done. There have been front page articles on ESPN two days in a row now. It will be on their uniforms. I guarantee the TV announcers will go on ad nauseum. Most will probably be tired of hearing about it by Dec., just like Joe Montana cam or "Nico Marely, grandson of..."

I'm not sure what more you want?

[mbawavefan12]

Has RD been doing radio and tv appearances to use this time to promote that TU is in a better spot now then pre-Katrina? Promoting that TU is back and better then ever (true or untrue)? Tons of free publicity is available.

Yes. Yes they have. They have in the very article you mentioned. They have consistently in the past weeks and months. There are entire events planned around the Katrina class and the progress made. Video interviews have been done. There have been front page articles on ESPN two days in a row now. It will be on their uniforms. I guarantee the TV announcers will go on ad nauseum. Most will probably be tired of hearing about it by Dec., just like Joe Montana cam or "Nico Marely, grandson of..."

I'm not sure what more you want?

Those are not pieces that TU had anything to do with producing. I am talking about national spots, national radio appearances, Sportcenter interviews, college football live, gameday.....for all I know they have tried or are doing these things.

I feel like most folks in NOLA have a sort of POV like New Yorkers have for 9/11, we have largely moved forward, could be wrong.

[tgibson]

Has RD been doing radio and tv appearances to use this time to promote that TU is in a better spot now then pre-Katrina? Promoting that TU is back and better then ever (true or untrue)? Tons of free publicity is available.

Yes. Yes they have. They have in the very article you mentioned. They have consistently in the past weeks and months. There are entire events planned around the Katrina class and the progress made. Video interviews have been done. There have been front page articles on ESPN two days in a row now. It will be on their uniforms. I guarantee the TV announcers will go on ad nauseum. Most will probably be tired of hearing about it by Dec., just like Joe Montana cam or "Nico Marely, grandson of..."

I'm not sure what more you want?

Those are not pieces that TU had anything to do with producing. I am talking about national spots, national radio appearances, Sportcenter interviews, college football live, gameday.....for all I know they have tried or are doing these things.

I feel like most folks in NOLA have a sort of POV like New Yorkers have for 9/11, we have largely moved forward, could be wrong.

And you know this how? Because they weren't front and center pounding their chests? ESPN just decided to do this on their own?

Even using Tulane or Green Wave trademarks requires some sort of communication. Tulane was involved.

[mbawavefan12]

Has RD been doing radio and tv appearances to use this time to promote that TU is in a better spot now then pre-Katrina? Promoting that TU is back and better then ever (true or untrue)? Tons of free publicity is available.

Yes. Yes they have. They have in the very article you mentioned. They have consistently in the past weeks and months. There are entire events planned around the Katrina class and the progress made. Video interviews have been done. There have been front page articles on ESPN two days in a row now. It will be on their uniforms. I guarantee the TV announcers will go on ad nauseum. Most will probably be tired of hearing about it by Dec., just like Joe Montana cam or "Nico Marely, grandson of..."

I'm not sure what more you want?

Those are not pieces that TU had anything to do with producing. I am talking about national spots, national radio appearances, Sportcenter interviews, college football live, gameday.....for all I know they have tried or are doing these things.

I feel like most folks in NOLA have a sort of POV like New Yorkers have for 9/11, we have largely moved forward, could be wrong.

And you know this how? Because they weren't front and center pounding their chests? ESPN just decided to do this on their own?

Even using Tulane or Green Wave trademarks requires some sort of communication. Tulane was involved.

IDK, I have a seen a few sentences from RD, that's it (and some of his statements were bull$hit excuse making). Perhaps my radar is always on negative with TU. The theme should always be rebirth and better than before, I guess I don;t see or feel that with TU's promotion. This was a chance for national publicity, not just participating in one espn.com piece.

[OUG]

This piece from Sports Illustrated is even better than the Grantland article.

https://www.campusrush.com/season-of-th ... 27028.html

It even includes some stuff that is new (to me at least):

Ten years later the weeks the team spent in Ruston have been reduced to a series of buzzwords. It's easier to parse the weirdness of it all that way, to rattle off the list of odd without quite spiraling back into it all. Dorms, for instance: muddy water in the faucets, strange neighbors on the floors below. Louisiana Tech hosted hundreds more evacuees in the same building as the athletes, and though some—like the preteen who followed players around and rapped—became friends of the program, more were nuisances. One man would get drunk and fall asleep in players' beds. Others swiped electronics from behind players' unlocked doors. Sometimes monitors patrolled the stairways to keep groups separate. Other times they didn't.

And then there were the classes. This one gets a laugh: bowling, coaching softball and obscure histories were the norm after Tulane players realized their eligibility was secure. Credits would transfer, but many classes were pass/fail, and some players barely attended at all, taking advantage of the fact that the coaching staff gave them Sundays, Mondays and most of Tuesdays off. Much of the roster used those days to escape, to see family or to spend 48 hours blowing off steam at LSU's bars. In retrospect, players are baffled by the free time. They wonder why they weren't trying to salvage a season they had committed to play. But Scelfo stands by his schedule, constructed just as much for the players' sanity as it was for the coaches, who were equally worn down.

Also, walking: to practice, from it, to Wal-Mart, in the heat. At first, only the lucky few players whose parents delivered their cars had wheels, and even by semester's end the majority of the team was without transportation. The walk from the dorm to the locker room to the field was more than a mile, and most players slogged through the heat in their pads. Kropog, who got his truck out of New Orleans early in the semester, recalls loading down the cab and bed with fully padded players, so heavy the body of the car nearly scraped the ground.

There was obviously no playbook for how to handle this situation and it's hard to fault Scelfo. But this also doesn't surprise me considering his overall approach to the program.

When you look back at it, and you see the impact that Katrina had on recruiting, on high school football in new orleans in particular, and many other issues -- it's not hard to see why we struggled to even field half-way competitive teams for years afterwards. And then of course we hired Bob Toledo.

It does feel like from a talent perspective we are finally returning to where that 2005 team was.

[tpstulane]

This piece from Sports Illustrated is even better than the Grantland article.

https://www.campusrush.com/season-of-th ... 27028.html

It even includes some stuff that is new (to me at least):

Ten years later the weeks the team spent in Ruston have been reduced to a series of buzzwords. It's easier to parse the weirdness of it all that way, to rattle off the list of odd without quite spiraling back into it all. Dorms, for instance: muddy water in the faucets, strange neighbors on the floors below. Louisiana Tech hosted hundreds more evacuees in the same building as the athletes, and though some—like the preteen who followed players around and rapped—became friends of the program, more were nuisances. One man would get drunk and fall asleep in players' beds. Others swiped electronics from behind players' unlocked doors. Sometimes monitors patrolled the stairways to keep groups separate. Other times they didn't.

And then there were the classes. This one gets a laugh: bowling, coaching softball and obscure histories were the norm after Tulane players realized their eligibility was secure. Credits would transfer, but many classes were pass/fail, and some players barely attended at all, taking advantage of the fact that the coaching staff gave them Sundays, Mondays and most of Tuesdays off. Much of the roster used those days to escape, to see family or to spend 48 hours blowing off steam at LSU's bars. In retrospect, players are baffled by the free time. They wonder why they weren't trying to salvage a season they had committed to play. But Scelfo stands by his schedule, constructed just as much for the players' sanity as it was for the coaches, who were equally worn down.

Also, walking: to practice, from it, to Wal-Mart, in the heat. At first, only the lucky few players whose parents delivered their cars had wheels, and even by semester's end the majority of the team was without transportation. The walk from the dorm to the locker room to the field was more than a mile, and most players slogged through the heat in their pads. Kropog, who got his truck out of New Orleans early in the semester, recalls loading down the cab and bed with fully padded players, so heavy the body of the car nearly scraped the ground.

There was obviously no playbook for how to handle this situation and it's hard to fault Scelfo. But this also doesn't surprise me considering his overall approach to the program.

When you look back at it, and you see the impact that Katrina had on recruiting, on high school football in new orleans in particular, and many other issues -- it's not hard to see why we struggled to even field half-way competitive teams for years afterwards. And then of course we hired Bob Toledo.

It does feel like from a talent perspective we are finally returning to where that 2005 team was.

Baseball recruiting took a huge hit as well. We never seemed to recover from it. We had a top 5 class committed but we lost most of it because the players never started school with the storm.

[OUG]

http://sports.espn.go.com/college-footb ... ane-season

Another fascinating Katrina piece on ESPN, this time an interview with Mason, Cannon, Ricard, Traina, and Scelfo:

Mason: We could have easily thrown in the towel, and said, 'Hey, this is unlike anything that has ever happened in college football to a team. Tulane can't play this season. We're going to find a place to stay, we're going to find a school to take us in, but it's just too traumatic an experience for a team to play a full football season and all the demands that go along with training, class, family life.' But dudes got it together. We were at, 'Do you guys want to do this? Hell, yeah. This is what we are. We're football players. ... We spent all this summer getting ready for a championship season. We're going to do that.'

Ricard: It wasn't the coaches' fault. They weren't in their comfort zone. Neither were we. A lot of guys felt, 'How much do these coaches really care what's going on?' Maybe it was fictional and maybe it was fact. It was tough. Because, for instance, I'll ask you a question. Scelfo probably said if he had to do it over again, he wouldn't have played that season. Am I right or wrong?

Scelfo: At the time, I thought it was a good idea (to play). In retrospect, I wish we wouldn't have. I wish that season would have just been a season of letting those guys (recover), and I think the NCAA would have done whatever we asked them to.

Ricard: So many other guys knew that. That makes us feel like crap. You know what I mean? We knew that. We knew that he felt that way. There's no such thing, no matter what the circumstances, that you don't play that season. ... To say we shouldn't have done it? That goes against all my moral values. That goes against the dignity and integrity of who I am as a person.

Scelfo: There were so many individual battles that guys were trying to fight amongst themselves. All of the New Orleans kids had their own issues. Everybody's issues were different. So at the end of the five months, everybody had had to take care of themselves. When you have a team, it's one goal. I mean, everybody from the National Football League to peewee football, it's one goal. Our team that fall, everybody's goals were different from the beginning to the end. At the beginning, we had to find family members. We had to find the damage done to our stuff. What did we lose? How do we replace it? How do I get this? What's going to happen now? So everyone was going in their own directions, and rightfully so.

Ricard: As a competitor, I want to compete. I don't care if I'm getting my brains beat in. ... I know we struggled. But the fact that people talked about us. You came and wrote about us. The fact that we were on ESPN. That means I had to represent Tulane University. That meant the world to me, because that said Tulane is not dying. We're still alive. We're going to go show them, we might be down today but we're going to come back better than ever. That's my mentality. That was so many of my other teammates' mentality. When you hear we shouldn't have played that season, that kind of gets you where we were.

I would love for Ricard to be brought in to address the team prior to the Duke game. He has a passion for Tulane and football that would be contagious -- our current players need to understand and appreciate it. IMO.

And RIP Brandon Spincer.

[DrBox]

sad.
I had him figured out in Seotember of 1999

[OUG]

Hypothetically, if we "took a year off" in 2005 to recover, I'd bet that football and D-1A athletics never would have been played again at Tulane. I sincerely believe that the reason athletics did not get caught up in the "restructuring" that took place in 2006 was because you couldn't screw these kids over after you what they went through, and after you called them the face, the name, the torch, etc.

These guys saved Tulane football and probably Tulane athletics. One can say all one wants about Dickson, and I'll join them on much of it. But we wouldn't even be having the debates about Yulman, coaching choices, etc., if these players didn't suffer through that struggle.

[jonathanjoseph]

Hypothetically, if we "took a year off" in 2005 to recover, I'd bet that football and D-1A athletics never would have been played again at Tulane. I sincerely believe that the reason athletics did not get caught up in the "restructuring" that took place in 2006 was because you couldn't screw these kids over after you what they went through, and after you called them the face, the name, the torch, etc.

These guys saved Tulane football and probably Tulane athletics. One can say all one wants about Dickson, and I'll join them on much of it. But we wouldn't even be having the debates about Yulman, coaching choices, etc., if these players didn't suffer through that struggle.

I agree that not playing in 2005 would have been a problem of epic proportions for the program, but this seems to reflect more on Scelfo than anyone or anything else.

And just a good time to remind everyone that Scott Cowen decided to screw Rich Rod and Sandy Barbour in order to hire Scelfo. Where are RR, Sandy and Scelfo today?

[DfromCT]

Hypothetically, if we "took a year off" in 2005 to recover, I'd bet that football and D-1A athletics never would have been played again at Tulane. I sincerely believe that the reason athletics did not get caught up in the "restructuring" that took place in 2006 was because you couldn't screw these kids over after you what they went through, and after you called them the face, the name, the torch, etc.

These guys saved Tulane football and probably Tulane athletics. One can say all one wants about Dickson, and I'll join them on much of it. But we wouldn't even be having the debates about Yulman, coaching choices, etc., if these players didn't suffer through that struggle.

I agree wholeheartedly. As an outspoken critic of RD, there's two things that I think he handled not only well, but professionally and compassionately: Athletics in the wake of Katrina, and the tragic injury to Devin Walker. Qudo's due where they're warranted, and in these instances they certainly were warranted.

[winwave]

I have always believed it was a huge mistake to make the decision to play all the games in different stadiums. Shreveport offered us Independence Stadium rent free all season. Part of the stadium consist of steel stands from Tulane Stadium. That should have been made home and I believe it would have made a positive difference in the outcome of that season.

[DfromCT]

By the way, this story was discussed in a thread started by golfnut yesterday.

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7798

[Profoundwizard]

Nice to hear that from Ricard. I always liked him, he's a good guy.

[TURVS71]

Hell, it WAS the right thing to do!
Marshall fielded a team the very next season after a plane crash wiped out the team, coaches, etc.

[greenphantom]

I have always believed it was a huge mistake to make the decision to play all the games in different stadiums. Shreveport offered us Independence Stadium rent free all season. Part of the stadium consist of steel stands from Tulane Stadium. That should have been made home and I believe it would have made a positive difference in the outcome of that season.

+1. We still would have stunk but we would have at least played better. People give too much credit to Tulane just for fielding another bad team. Not to mention, they used Katrina as an excuse for years.

[OUG]

Nice to hear that from Ricard. I always liked him, he's a good guy.

Coaching at Hahnville now. Hopefully he can steer some guys our way!