Fresno State Baseball
Fresno State Baseball
Congrats to the Bulldogs on an unbelievable title run. From 90th in the RPI to national champs.
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Falconfreak90
- Rubber City Falcon
- Posts: 18522
- Joined: Fri Jul 23, 2004 9:28 am
- Location: Green, OH
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The terms "Cindarella" or "Upset" don't even begin to tell this story. What the Fresno State baseball team has done isn't even improbable, it's incomprehensible. It's a 14 seed winning the NCAA Basketball tournament, Villanova beating Georgetown, the USA Hockey team beating the Soviets, the Giants beating the Patriots, Appalachain State beating Michigan and the BG Women's B-Ball team beating Vanderbilt all rolled into one.
It will never get that level of credit because college baseball just isn't a national sport, but this is an unreal run.
It will never get that level of credit because college baseball just isn't a national sport, but this is an unreal run.
It was great to see Fresno win, simply because of how remarkable a story it was for a team seeded that low to pull it off.
The whole BCS thing doesn't really apply to baseball, especially in the South and West Coast. Rice won it five years ago, CS Fullerton a year or two after that and then you have other powers such as Long Beach St., San Diego, UC Irvine and Wichita St. that are very good. Those schools can still get great recruits because they are either traditional powers or they are up and coming programs. The landscape of college baseball is nothing like football or basketball. It's more similar to hockey where you have schools like Colorado College, Denver, New Hampshire, Maine, and North Dakota that are all national powers.
The whole BCS thing doesn't really apply to baseball, especially in the South and West Coast. Rice won it five years ago, CS Fullerton a year or two after that and then you have other powers such as Long Beach St., San Diego, UC Irvine and Wichita St. that are very good. Those schools can still get great recruits because they are either traditional powers or they are up and coming programs. The landscape of college baseball is nothing like football or basketball. It's more similar to hockey where you have schools like Colorado College, Denver, New Hampshire, Maine, and North Dakota that are all national powers.
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Dayons_Den
- aka Joe Bair's Lair
- Posts: 5015
- Joined: Fri Jul 23, 2004 2:58 pm
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If you like stories on improbable National Champions check out this story on my alma mater- the smallest school to ever win an NCAA National Title and interestingly, the first school from the state of Iowa to win a national title in wrestling:NY-BG-FAN wrote:The terms "Cindarella" or "Upset" don't even begin to tell this story. What the Fresno State baseball team has done isn't even improbable, it's incomprehensible. It's a 14 seed winning the NCAA Basketball tournament, Villanova beating Georgetown, the USA Hockey team beating the Soviets, the Giants beating the Patriots, Appalachain State beating Michigan and the BG Women's B-Ball team beating Vanderbilt all rolled into one.
It will never get that level of credit because college baseball just isn't a national sport, but this is an unreal run.
http://revwrestling.com/articles/2917/R ... ll-College
We are DIII now but at the time there was just one division so they were up against all the national powerhouses.
I love this excerpt:
Arguably the biggest dual of the trip was taking on Lehigh in their home gym. According to Cornell wrestler Richard Small: "Two Cornell guys had ear problems, so Scott asked (Lehigh coach Billy) Sheridan if they could wear headgear. Sheridan said no. Scott then said, ‘We'll show those sons of bitches!'" (Back then, headgear was not mandatory, and, in fact, was a rather rare sight in college wrestling.)
Show them they did. The Purple wrestlers were not cowed by Lehigh's reputation -- or their 3,000 fans. In fact, Cornell handed Sheridan his worst defeat in 36 years of coaching with a 36-0 shut-out, with pins scored by Hauser, Thomsen, Lowell Lange, Snook, Dexter and Partin. (Listening to an audio recording of the Lehigh radio broadcast of the dual captured by Gordon "Rick" Meredith, Cornell's student manager, it's incredible to hear the Lehigh crowd grow progressively quieter as their men fell one-by-one to the visitors from Mt. Vernon, Iowa.)
In their wake, the Cornell team left some believers back east. Fred Nonnemacher, sports editor of the Bethlehem (Pennsylvania) Globe-Times said, "The best team in my 26 years of watching the man top teams of the east and west, and every NCAA meet but one during that time. One Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State) team of the mid-thirties might compare but Cornell has more finesse than any I recall, and there is not a weak link in the entire outfit." West Point coach Lloyd Appleton -- a wrestling teammate of Scott's at Cornell College -- declared, "Probably the greatest team ever to hit the east."
Fans and the media back in Mt. Vernon were also believers in the power of the Purple. The Cornellian provided extensive coverage of each dual meet (rivaling that of other winter sports), and of the wrestlers themselves. All that ink helped fuel fan interest, too. According to coach Paul Scott, "Students would start camping out in front of the gym at noon and build fires on the sidewalk to keep warm. The gym seated about 1,000 but it would be packed all the way to the very top. They hung from the rafters, literally."
On the road or at home, the Cornell wrestlers must have been an impressive sight even before they stepped out onto the mat. They entered the gym in what The Cornellian described as "purple boxing robes." For their wrestling matches, they wore purple tights with a white stripe on the side of each leg, running from waist to foot, with white shorts that fit snugly over the tights. Normally, the Purple grapplers wrestled stripped to the waist, as wrestlers at many college programs in the Midwest did in the 1940s. (Shirtless wrestling was legal under NCAA rules up to the mid 1960s; today's singlets did not become common in college wrestling until the 1970s.)
all bowling green
