Falcons Verbal, Devon McKoy

With a hat tip to Azz.com, we have a new verbal for the Falcons. He is Devon McKoy of Reynoldsburg, OH. He plays two-way but appears to project at CB in college.

Despite my long-standing aversion to rating players on highlights (show me the player without a good highlight reel), here is Devon McKoy's. I'm a hypocrite.



The vitals here show an excellent student (nice!) with strong but not necessarily eye-popping times, all of which are suspect (for all players) until you've verified them.

Welcome to the Falcon, Devon.

New Header for Falcon Blog

Took this Thursday afternoon....thought we needed an off-season motif for the blog during the long summer months.

Ask the AD out this week

The latest Ask the AD is out this week.....this one was a little lighter on news than previously, but here we have it....

He looked at the overall athletic department and evaluated from a number of perspectives, academic, competition, finances. I thought he had an interesting perspective. By and large, I think the academics are strong (department-wide) and the finances are a struggle, but that is largely out of anyone's control. The competition (and he cites Jacoby and Reese as benchmarks) needs to improve.

That being said, I don't think Christopher is doing a bad job at all. Facilities have improved, I think he took a courageous step on Coach Brandon, I believe Coach Orr was a good hire, and I think that keeping Curt Miller (whatever role he had in that) is a huge plus. Managing the finances today is a leak plugging exercise that no one would look good.

I also give him points for openness and transparency, particularly during the hockey controversy.

We still have room to grow, and we are right to expect to see progress competitively in the coming years. But I do think he is doing a good job.

Some news tidbits:

• Football season tickets are on par with last year, despite the addition of a sixth game and the attendant cost increase.
• The key to keeping old facilities usable is to keep making incremental improvements over time. This was not done with AA or the Ice Arena. He noted, to my surprise, that the video board is probably inadequate now at the Doyt. (It was too small from the beginning, in my opinion).
• Hockey season tickets are holding steady.
• Interim Coach Dennis Williams (hockey) will be evaluated at the end of the year. The interim tag is not a signal that the program is on life support and Christopher says he works on the assumption the program will exist into the future.
• In that vein, a lot of attention seems to be on the "Miami plan" in which an endowment is created for hockey that will fund it in perpetuity, removing it from the annual budget struggle. Obviously this is a fine idea which is challenged only by the ability to actually raise the endowment.

LaMonta Stone Honored

Nice honor for LaMonta Stone, who was named one of the top 25 mid major assistants in College basketball. He was the top ranked of only two MAC coaches to be honored in this way. (Collegeinsider.com gave the awards).

He finished #15. I think we probably tend to take him for granted, but he has coached at Ohio State, including at BG and EMU. Perhaps most impressively is that he coached River Rouge in (downriver) Detroit to two state championships and was 126-24 during his stint there.

I'll wager a guess that the number of bad coaches who do that--at any high school--is pretty low.

I would think that Coach Orr would elevate LaMonta to be his top assistant, but he hasn't done it so far, and it would have seemed that you could do that as soon as Coach Jackson left. That may or may not mean anything but given the opening and Coach Stone's ability, I think it would be a great fit.

There were rumors that Coach Stone had some other opportunities, and I would suspect he will eventually find his way to another job. It would seem like the Midwest would be a good fit, given his strong recruiting ties in the Detroit area.

In the meantime, we are lucky to have him here, and I think our team benefits from his ability.

Jermaine Henderson of Miami was the other MAC Coach to make the list.

Steve Merfeld, former BG assistant now at Bradley was #11.

Falcon Verbal #3, Middletown Express Continues to Roll into BG

News here from the Middletown Journal that Caleb Watkins, a highly ranked QB from that school, has made a verbal commitment to Bowling Green. Watkins is 6'4" which seems to be a pretty good fit for the West-Coasty offense we are supposedly putting into place. He has also had some pretty productive seasons, to wit:

As a sophomore, he threw for 2,045 yards and 26 touchdowns. Last season, he threw for 2,089 yards and 22 TDs.

He was reportedly recruited by most of the MAC, so this is a nice get for the Falcons.

Three quick things that occur to me on seeing this.

First, in the current class we one of our top recruits was Matthew Schilz of CA, who was a de-commit from Kansas State. This would appear to give us two strong and tall QBs to compete for the job when Sheehan graduates. There is nothing wrong with depth and competition at QB, especially when you can beat out other conference schools.

Second, to state the obvious, we used to recruit a lot of guys who were QBs and then move them. These guys appear to be pure QBs.

Third, two of his offensive lineman in HS (Chip Robinson and Blaec Walker) are up and coming lineman here at BG.

So, welcome to the Falcons Caleb.

Happy 4th of July

2005 WEBN Fireworks
Originally uploaded by Damon Green

Happy Independence to the Falcon Nation. Enjoy.

Fox Sports Off-Season MAC Hoops Report

Jeff Goodman of Fox took a look at the off-season activities in MAC Hoops. Pretty nice summary in fact. He notes the departures of Graves and Jackson, and then notes a couple things from our non-conference schedule, which has not been released yet.

Non-conference games include at Xavier, Fordham, Towson, Temple and Canisius.

Xavier and Temple are obviously a high-profile game for our program, while the other teams are all teams we have seen on our schedules in the past. This makes me think we will have a full schedule announcement due soon.

In other interesting MAC news.

• CMU lost four players from last year.
• Miami is playing Dayton at home. (In general, Coles is following his normal strategy of playing a brutal non-conference schedule).
• Of the teams listed, 7 are reported to have lost at least one player in the off-season