Otterites! Greetings and felicitations!
Love those pictures Robert. Indeed the game at “Knights Arena” at Freedom Hall was an awesome experience. Super fun. Great crowd of more than 6000 got to see the Knights claim that ASUN title. Great thing about a ball game crowd in this city and state is that it is full of real fans who KNOW the game. And I capitalize KNOW in big Hollywood blockbuster fashion to emphasize that passion. People stayed at their seats, got up and got loud when it was needed and let the refs know they needed to up their game too. I was yelling so loudly I got dizzy from lack of oxygen. Great group of kids, really close knit, and you couldn’t get the smile of Scotty Davenport’s face after that buzzer went off. He stayed in the background while the kids celebrated, letting them be the center of attention. Just awesome.
The only buzzkill was knowing that it was the end. As discussed, because of rules with no real purpose, a school reclassifying into D1 can’t participate in the Championship tournaments. The NCAA could have waived the rule and let Bellarmine into at least the NIT if not the NCAA, and gotten a TON of good press doing it, but no, rules are rules are rules and the bureaucracy must be obeyed. That’s pretty much all the NCAA is now. They claim to be on the side of the student athlete and to be protecting the member schools and the purity of the competition. Instead, they are strictly concerned with what fuels all bureaucracies, the need to perpetuate and be obeyed. If they were strictly just money mercenaries, I could almost get behind that. Money would have dictated letting Bellarmine play.
I feel though that the NCAA’s days are numbered. Football is where the money is, and the NCAA doesn’t get the big slice of that pie like they do for basketball (note that it is the NCAA Men’s (or Women’s) Basketball Championship Tournament, but NCAA doesn’t preface any football bowl game or the football playoffs in D1). The conferences get the big money in football. Eventually the Power 5 conferences will create a new regulatory oversight group for college athletics, or at least for football, and the NCAA will go the way of all flesh. A ton of good will and good press could have been generated by letting Bellarmine play, possibly forestalling the demise. But bureaucrats do what bureaucrats do, and not peep about Bellarmine’s circumstance. Instead, sports shows like PTI embarrassed them repeatedly all week.
Enough downer talk though. Like Robert, I want to celebrate the great accomplishments of CJ, Dylan and the guys. They were a joy to watch and wonderful to get behind. #swordsup
