The Atlantic Coast Conference hosted a series of Championships this weekend that provided 33% of Atlantic Coast Conference members an ACC Championship when:
* Florida State won its FIRST men’s golf championship
* Virginia won men’s tennis
* Clemson won the women’s tennis championship
* Duke won women’s golf
Additionally, we haven’t yet taken the opportunity to congratulate Boston College for claiming their National Championship in men’s hockey last week. We had a fantastic conversation about BC’s “Frozen Four” that you should read in this entry. Some great conversation in the comments section.
Relatedly, the following is a list of National Championships won by ACC institutions since 2000, the year Lee Fowler became NC State’s Athletics Director:
(1) Maryland - 6 titles in 5 different sports
(1) UNC-CH - 6 titles in 4 different sports
(3) Duke - 5 titles in 2 different sports
(4) Wake Forest - 4 titles in 2 different sports
(5) Virginia - 3 titles in 2 different sports
(6) Miami - 2 titles in 2 sports
(6) Florida State - 2 titles in 1 sport
(6) Boston College - 2 titles in 1 sport
(9) Clemson - 1 title in 1 sport
(9) Georgia Tech - 1 title in 1 sport
(12) Virginia Tech - 0 titles in 0 sports
(12) NC State - 0 titles in 0 sports
In case you need a reminder of a couple of interesting statistics that BC’s Championship helps bring to light:
(1) Since Lee Fowler has become Athletics Director at NC State, the Wolfpack’s Athletics Department and Virginia Tech are the only ACC programs to have failed to play in at least one National Championship game or won a team National Championship in any sport.
(Note: Virginia Tech played in the BCS National Championship Football game that was played in 2000, just nine months prior to Fowler’s arrival at NC State. Due to expansion, the Hokies, Miami Hurricanes and Boston College Eagles have only been a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference for half of Fowler’s tenure at NC State.
(2) Since Lee Fowler has become Athletics Director at NC State, Virginia - whose overall athletics program ranks near the top of the ACC with extremely strong, broad athletic success - and NC State are the only athletics programs in the ACC who have failed to participate in at least a Frozen Four, a College World Series, a BCS Bowl, or a National Basketball Championship game.
Winning is not everything, but winning occasionally is something.
How can we ever expect to compete with the likes of wake, Clemson, Virginia tech, Georgia tech, etc. We should measure our success against peer metro commuter schools like Virginia commonwealth, old dominion, south Florida, towson state, etc. That seems to be the vision and direction of our leadership in Raleigh, no?
fowler -you suck!
Cue game show sound byte: wah wah waaaaaaahhhh.
I’ve got a request while we’re at it… as someone who grew up around beautiful Lake Gaston and frequent it often… is there anyway we can leave the place out of this discussion. It’s sort of like the argument about guns not killing people. Lake Gaston, in and of itself, did nothing to Wolfpack Nation, and I’m starting to get a bitter feeling in my belly every time I hit the road to head home. Please don’t ruin my fond memories and feelings of “home.”
thank you for your interest and support of wolfpack athletics. we want you to know that despite the records on the field we have the best student athletes in the acc, and they are doing the best they can with the facilities they have. please continue to support the wolfpack even though we do not.
signed
chancellor oblinger
lee fowler
p.s. woops almost forgot, we’re raising the minimum contribution to keep your level in the wolfpack club. feel free to donate even more. thanks
Fowler is pitiful, a disgrace to NCSU.
It’s really not fair to focus all of your frustration on Fowler. After all, there is a Chancellor and a Board of Trustees who obviously accept this performance and a Wolfpack Club who refuse to get involved in any kind of momentum for change despite the desires of their constituency.
I really like Statefans. I’ve been reading the blog for well over a year now. But the incessant whining about Lee Fowler is turning me off. You’re preaching to the choir folks. I don’t know what the stats are, but I’d fathom the majority of the people that visit the site have read more than one post about his ability to be an AD. It’s been said before, nothing is going to change in the near term as long as money is the true metric by which he is measured. We either have to wait it out until he leaves on his own, or until the 2 money sports start faltering hard enough that the money starts going away. It is what it is, no use in pointing it out in every single new entry made related to the matter.
We’re looking for new authors to help us round out our stable and keep the site fresh and dynamic. Please send your entries to us at statefans@gmail.com and we will be happy to post ones that deserve attention on the site. Thanks
MrP
We are beginning the long offseason. The 2 revenue sports are history until the fall, and all other sports sans baseball are winding down. As such, it’s a good time to move on from the evaluation of individual sports and start looking at the athletic department and school as a whole.
You won’t see the stats noted above when the N&O talks about what a great communicatory Lee Fowler is. You won’t see the stats noted above when Oblinger is giving Fowler a lifetime achievement award.
Statefans is building a case - and they are trying to do so w/ facts - not emotions (which can often suppress logic.)
Are they banging the drum loudly? Yes. Are they banging it too loud? No way, not if you want change in Raleigh.
Thanks for the comments, choppack
MORE TO COME!!!
I think what MrP is trying to get across is that most of us came to this site, and many made it our daily ritual to frequent here, because of the awesome content and analysis of NC State Athletics being provided by top-notch authors.
Sadly it seems we’ve turned from StateFansNation to StateHatersNation as I’ve seen exactly zero positive or even constructive posts on this blog in weeks. I say we because, like it or not, the popularity of this board comes from both the fantastic authors but also the well thought and reasoned responses of the commentors.
Yes, I realize your response is simply going to be “if you don’t like it go elseware” or “we’ll post your articles if you’d bother to write them” - but that doesn’t change the fact that the mood, the attitude, of this blog has declined drastically as of late.
Am I upset that NCSU athletics have declined in recent years, of course I am, was I happy that HWSNBN left, absolutely-o-freak’n-lootly - but is it perhaps possible to intersperse just a *litte* informational news on NC State Athletics mixed in with all the hate? Or could we continue our cause to remove Lee Fowler on a different venue, fireleefowler.com for example, and leave this blog to the fans who genuinely love and support NC State (like the ones who actually attended the Red & White game in support of our team)?
Sigh. Maybe I’m way off, and this whole thing is just a case of a downright lack of any good news to post, instead of a OCD based obsession with one man’s single-handed destruction of NC State Athletics. Call me crazy.
SFN: So, the topic of how NC State Athletics and how it is being manageed is NOT a topic that a blog focused on NC State athletics should be focusing on? Gotcha!
AGAIN, we invite ANYONE who has an opinion of what SHOULD be on the site to please forward us your entries so that we can run them on the site. We would much rather see you spend your time typing things that add value here as opposed to typing your personal opinions of what should be run here.
Tried to edit my post, doesn’t seem to be working (keep getting the white screen)
I take some of that post back, the O’Brian Keeps Pack on Track entry was only a week and a half ago with a few other good entries right before that - maybe it just feels like forever ya know?
Mafpack, you are right. There have only been a few positive posts because, quite frankly, there is very little going on in our athletics department or administration that is positive. We have O’Brien and baseball.
SFN: Correct. If we were WINNING then people would say that we are ‘positive’. I posit that disucssing the TRUTH is neither ‘positive’ or ‘negative’.
It is all about PERSPECTIVE. What is positive to one is negative to another.
If you were an ECU fan, you would say that these are all GREAT pieces of information that are ‘positive’ to you.
I can only hope that one day enough is going right to feel positive about the Wolfpack’s future.
With revenue sports leaving very little if anything to talk about(except m/b the spring game which was covered), and the non revenue sports mired in a fuzzy mediocrity, what else is there to talk about? Perhaps a discussion on why we are stuck with nothing left to discuss… is this not it?
Throw in a baseball post every now and then and I have zero problem with building a plethora of information against the “leadership” at NCSU.
Right now, the positive NC State story would be our baseball team. But guess what, like college basketball, the taste in your mouth for this sport isn’t determined in the regular season, but the ACC and NCAA tournaments. You’ll have to lump me in w/ the Statefans writers if I don’t get terribly excited about Wolfpack baseball until we do something special in the post season. The last few years, we’ve been solid, but not spectacular. Meanwhile, the Heels have appeared in consecutive CWS’s.
I thought about offering up an entry on the spring game. However, much of my article would deal w/ the frustation at how poorly this game is presented to the public - and Russel Wilson’s inability to seperate himself from Burke and Beck.
We have the largest spring game in North Carolina, but when you see the clips on the news, the general lack of publicity for this game, and the refusal to try and turn this game into something truly special.
Why not play up this game? Have a 5k that morning and give out “Spring Football 5K” or “Spring Tailgate 5K” t-shirts. Have some bands post or pregame. Once inside the stadium, they are doing some good things. They’ve got merchandise for sale and they even had a grill they were cooking brats on.I wonder if sometimes our leaders wonder, we better not play this up or we’ll awake that sleeping giant to our West, and they’ll just put us in our place. And that’s a very real possibility. However, if we really want to be a special university, these are chances we have to take.
^ We talked about baseball just the other day. We are excited about baseball. I can’t make the news.
Maybe we should swap places with ECU.
I mean, we can join Conference USA and they could join the ACC. The ACC would not know any difference from a standings perpective, but maybe we could show greater achievement in Conference USA. ECU would be happy. Lee Fowler would be happy.
I conference USA? So we can get trounced by Louisville, Memphis, UAB, and Cincinnati? No thanks. I think the big south is more commensurate with our current competitive situation and on par with our administrations standards.
“Are they banging the drum loudly? Yes. Are they banging it too loud? No way, not if you want change in Raleigh.”
You can bang the proverbial drum as louldy as you want, but the fact of the matter is the Athletic Department, of which Lee Fowler is the leader, is raising a tremendous amount of money for the university. Bang away, but it will do nothing to change the bottom line, which is all that seems to matter these days.
So what does and athletic director do anyway?
Here is a quick and intersesting read including the coments from a Washington Huskys blogger with reference to Todd Turner.
http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/huskyfootball/2008/01/so_whats_an_athletic_director_1.html
I guess Lee Fowler would be the second with a fire.com after his name! And just think, Todd Turner proably had more overall success than Lee Fowler has had here.
SFN: I definitely know and understand. I was just saying that right now, aside from a few baseball posts (which I didn’t add that they were there when appropriate) that nothing is left to discuss but an overall look at perhaps why we are in this mess. I love the new baseball posts!
I think everyone should read the following article on Arizona State University and note the actions of the AD
http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=3347660
“You can bang the proverbial drum as louldy as you want, but the fact of the matter is the fans are donating a tremendous amount of money to the athletics department for the university.”
Fixed that for you!
^Right. And if you are looking at it from above, the problem is??? That’s our catch-22. Things are going well for us, just not on the ball fields.
Has the decline of NC State atheletics over the past two decades caused a correlary increase in its academic reputation on a national level?
I understand that NCSU does in fact offer an amazing academic education. But do the kids know that? Some do yes, thats why I’m here. But how many kids apply to UNC and use State as a back up school because “carolina is harder to get into.”? I can think of 15 kids that went to my high school off the top of my head who went to carolina strictly because it was harder to get into. That is the answer I got when I asked why they weren’t going to State even though they were going to school for something that would’ve been more suited for what State can offer.
I’m not talking about stupid kids either, all 15 of these were top 20% in the senior class.
N.C.STATE + LEE FOULUP= 0 CHAMPIONSHIPS—–EXACTLY!
N.C.STATE - LEE FOULUP= CAN’T GET ANY WORSE—-EXACTLY!
PLAIN AN SIMPLE
From ^CaliWolf’s post above:
“If sports are a front porch of a university,…”
It’s not even a full sentence, just nine little words, but it makes my mind start spinning all over the place. I could type for hours about what that short string of words says to me.
“If sports are a front porch of a university,…”
Then our front porch would be tainted with rotted wood. But those homeowners sure seem to be eating well, taking extravagant vacations and driving snazzy cars…
how many national championships were won under the two previous ADs at State?
OK, I had a chance to reflect on my previous question. By my recollection, State won zero national championships under the our two previous ADs, from 1990-2000. Before that, there have been only 4, ever.
What impact does not ever having much success in national championships have with a chancellor or board of trustees? Does it become something nice to have, but not required? Let’s focus on our Centennial Campus instead?
SFN: I do get tired of hearing about how Lee Fowler is screwing up our athletic programs. But I have to ask myself, is this the broken record effect or is it because I don’t like hearing our athletic programs suck? Mostly the second one, it’s time to fix our athletics.