And the Head Coach Clock restarts. Tick-Tock....

Back-to-back PL champs 2016 and 2017.... but need to get back to relevance in the national FCS scene.
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RichH
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Re: And the Head Coach Clock restarts. Tick-Tock....

Post by RichH » Mon Dec 31, 2018 7:31 pm

The 60 schollies are split up into full and partial packages.PL rost cap is 90. NCAA cap on schollie players is 85..
PL has had a restrictive history with WO players. Originally, they all had to be full pay or their aid would count vs schollie limit of 60. Original rule was ALL aid from whatever source counted vs 60 max amount. PL amended by laws to allow 3 WOs who would not count vs aid or roster cap.
This was repealed last year. Only aid to recruited players counts vs 60 max. Unrecruited or true WOs can receive need aid available to all students.
A minor help for coaches.
The current PL restrictions are our major obstacle to competing with CAA and Ivy teams as well as to a needed expansion of football members.
Hiring a good experienced FCS or FBS coach is hard enough with our liw salaries not to mention all the artificial restrictions PL imposes.
Enough preaching :D . We will know our new HC soon enough. Fingers crossed.


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Re: And the Head Coach Clock restarts. Tick-Tock....

Post by RichH » Mon Dec 31, 2018 7:46 pm

Lehigh4Life wrote: Mon Dec 31, 2018 7:29 pm The way I understand it is if the school recruits him at all, he CANNOT receive any financial aid. The 60 scholarships are separate.

If he had an academic scholarship, that was not based on anything from the football program, then he would be fine to walk on. I've been told by many in the program that Lehigh is very careful with that, as they don't want to appear to break the rules.

Also, it appeared someone posted that the PL can now offer financial aid, so that is news to me.

I am a HS coach, and I talked to the past two Lehigh recruiters for my area, as well as had a couple conversations with both Joe and OC Scott Brisson about how hard it is to have practice with the limited roster sizes, and the talent level of the guys they can get to practice with these rules.

This is what I understand it to be.

I also have talked with FCS Scholarship schools around me, mostly public schools, that have much different standards for their academic scholarships.

You also have to remember, if I am recruiting a scholarship kid, that can compete at FCS level, and then my next option, player 61, is a walk-on that is willing to pay full tuition, it's not going to be close to the caliber of player that received a scholarship. This is the issue Lehigh needs to figure out. How to get around this dumb rule that limits the roster size and ability of kids to pay to go to school.
A recruited player can receive need aid. The problem is it counts vs schollie cap. L4L( too lazy to type your whole moniker). The 60 max is a hard cap. No leeway. Remember all $$ to a recruited player counts. Academic schollies are extremely competitive. You cannot count on any recruit getting one.
"Recruited " is a strictly defined category under NCAA rules. For our purposes, it does not include non face to face contact, such as by telephone etc. We do have a number of thise players on the team. WOs and PWOs do contribute on STs and we have gotten an occasional starter. Each year we pick up a few more WOs. They do not nearly provide enough to build roster.
This year we will need 20 at least to just get back to 80.
This past year a our very short roster had to compete with teams with redshirts, 63 to 85 schollies. Ugh.
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Re: And the Head Coach Clock restarts. Tick-Tock....

Post by Lehigh4Life » Mon Dec 31, 2018 8:41 pm

Has the recruited player can receive need aid changed? I understand it to be 60 scholarships, which can be broken up however the school likes. So, they are technically receiving a partial scholarship. HC and Colgate are using fin aid as a means of what they should offer kids, but it is a partial scholarship, like you said, counting against the cap of 60 scholarships.

Sounds like we are saying the same thing.
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Re: And the Head Coach Clock restarts. Tick-Tock....

Post by Lehigh4Life » Mon Dec 31, 2018 8:46 pm

So, I'll take us back to my earlier point ( a week ago), that we need someone as our HC that can recruit kids that have to pay tuition, and find us good players. Cecchini has to do that every day. He does it at half the school that Lehigh is, so imagine him selling walk-on status to Lehigh, when he is getting kids to go play at Valpo. Don't let his record fool you at Valpo, he took over a school that was winless the previous two years and gave them their first winning record in over 16 years.

Kids parents would MUCH rather pay for them to go to Lehigh than a Valpo.

I'm pretty sure that any coach can convince a kid that has a full scholarship offer to Lehigh to come, anyone worth a damn at least. It's those next 20-30 spots that are VITAL to our success in the PL. If we can get 60 FULL scholarship quality kids, and add 20-30 good walk-ons over 4 years, we now have something going to compete outside the PL. Happy New Year everyone.
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Re: And the Head Coach Clock restarts. Tick-Tock....

Post by van » Mon Dec 31, 2018 9:11 pm

never gonna get 20 or 30 walk ons
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Re: And the Head Coach Clock restarts. Tick-Tock....

Post by ngineer » Mon Dec 31, 2018 11:44 pm

It's almost New Years and I'm reading these last few posts and now know where my headache tomorrow a.m. will come from. What insanity. My gut tells me Laughy and 'nell are flies in the ointment on making changes. Colgate, HC , FU and LU likely want to loosen up. G'town a major problem. As far as football is concerned, the PL is killing itself. Seems like the league does reasonably well in a lot of the other sports, but football is such an expensive sport that some kind of new philosophy needs to be formed...IF we as institutions want to compete legitimately at a national level in this sport. Otherwise, can the sport as a PL sport and let the schools who want to be serious about the sport go their own way. Join other conferences, or try and create a new one with a couple other schools.
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Re: And the Head Coach Clock restarts. Tick-Tock....

Post by Sundayamqb » Tue Jan 01, 2019 1:15 am

Maybe I've read this all too late on New Year's night ... but can someone provide a link to the schollie rules?

Why do I ask? Based on what I've read in recent posts, the rules as explained are unbelievable. Why? Many DIII schools can offer better packages to more kids through a combination of "academic," "leadership" and need-based aid.

Based on what I've read on this board, given all the potential for academic issues, injuries, increased numbers of ejections, lack of red-shirting, there's no way PL teams can compete outside their own conference. If players 61-90 are non-recruited or are recruited and can't get ANY aid, it's illogical. Almost NO ONE can afford $70K a year. You may be better off trying to fund 100 kids with non-athletic aid.

Many kids who can't qualify for federal grants based on their FAFSA should qualify for LU need-based financial aid grants.
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Re: And the Head Coach Clock restarts. Tick-Tock....

Post by JimLU81 » Tue Jan 01, 2019 8:00 am

We have 60 Scholarships in the Patriot League... Although I’m told Lehigh only gives 58 and not 60... if you are a true walk on (not recruited at all by the coaching staff, including phone calls, texts, HS Visits, Officials Campus visits) than you can receive Financial Aid that does not count against the scholarship count. All other walk ons must pay the full amount of tuition. Most of those kids are obviously not FCS players as if they were they would be on scholarship already.

The financial aid system works for the Ivy Leagues because it’s the Ivy League. The Patriot League is never going to beat Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Penn, or Dartmouth unless on the rare exception where the family is so wealthy they have to pay a substantial amount to go to one of those schools and has a full scholarship from a Patriot. That is just reality and anyone who thinks differently is not living in reality.

The Pioneer League is non scholarship yes but recruiting there and recruiting non scholarship kids to the Patriot League are apples and oranges. In the Pioneer you can recruit any kid who is good enough academically to get into the school regardless of the family financial circumstances because of financial aid. In the Patriot League you must recruit families who are are willing to pay 60+k to for the most part be scout team kids for 4 years. So there is no real correlation. Quite frankly this would be the least of my concerns about DC. Go back and look at some of his wins where they have scored a lot of points over the years... some of the schools are even recognized Varsity sports and are club sports at there schools...

Lasty Lehigh does not need an “offensive” or “defensive” HC. They do not need a HC who will “put” the better athletes on a certain side of the ball. Does anyone understand how ridiculous sounds? We need a leader!
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Re: And the Head Coach Clock restarts. Tick-Tock....

Post by van » Tue Jan 01, 2019 9:34 am

remember, before "football" scholarships we were reported to have about 57 equivalencies based on need or academic merit aid, now we have 60 or maybe 58 as Jim noted, the difference being that we can offer help to a student that might not have qualified for much aid under the old system, on the other hand we are apparently giving more full or near full rides which results in difficulty in filling the roster unless we figure out how to get more "walk on" bodies

roster size would not be a big issue if the 60 guys are all quality starter talent, 15 per class, 30 who are junior/senior, with 22 on the field at any one time, this means we can't have many misses in recruiting the right kids and can't have too many injuries, so far we are not so good at the recruiting (although the last 2 classes are thought to be stronger) and OL injuries bit us last year

so to me, the trick is to use the 15 or so equivalencies efficiently each year, easier said than done, but also note that Villanova (for example) has less than 1 more equivalency per year to give and if they have 5th year guys on scholly, they have less to give

we can complain all we want about PL rules, but bottom line is the staff has to do a better job recruiting and of course coaching too
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Re: And the Head Coach Clock restarts. Tick-Tock....

Post by lfnadmin » Tue Jan 01, 2019 10:20 am

JimLU81 wrote: Tue Jan 01, 2019 8:00 am We have 60 Scholarships in the Patriot League... Although I’m told Lehigh only gives 58 and not 60... if you are a true walk on (not recruited at all by the coaching staff, including phone calls, texts, HS Visits, Officials Campus visits) than you can receive Financial Aid that does not count against the scholarship count. All other walk ons must pay the full amount of tuition. Most of those kids are obviously not FCS players as if they were they would be on scholarship already.
I want to highlight this because this is what the Ivy League has figured out. They can call, visit, text recruits that become, effectively, walk-ons. Do they offer their students scholarships? Yes, but it's no different than the scholarship aid offered to everyone else, so it doesn't "count". Furthermore, the Ivy League doesn't play in the postseason, so they don't care one whit about scholarship limits. Yes, Princeton, Harvard, Yale will win a lot of recruiting battles due to academic reputation alone. But recently, it's been a whole lot more than that.

Now add to this the roster size thing. H-Y-P have roster sizes in the 100s. A good portion of these kids are the same recruited athletes that Lehigh would go after, but now add the "walk-ons" - how many of them are there, 40? Possibly more? Out of that pool, there's a certain percentage that will late-blossom into solid FCS football players and provide depth a really good FCS football team needs.

Remember, many if not most of these IL walk-ons are getting paid to attend the university. Lehigh has to convince the same walk-on to pay $70k a year, minus room and board, to make it through admissions, work hard on the scout team all year (AFTER getting to campus, so AFTER the rest of the football team has gone through camp) and then MAYBE, if they're really, really, good, to earn one of the 60 scholarships. Let's say you find that kid - they exist, even though there aren't many. Princeton could then offer them and win on academic reputation. Heck, they can offer five of them - because they are not constrained by roster sizes anymore.
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