Should He Stay or Shoul He Go Part 2

[Chris '03]

And our recruiting pipelines have clearly changed. We currently have 2 returning players from the BCHL, and our strong years featured about half the roster being from that league. I feel that the entire coaching staff has a responsibility in the recruiting efforts. The Brekke/Russell era brought forth some great talent.

The strengths of the junior leagues change too.  The USHL, to my limited understanding, is a much deeper and stronger league than it was during the Nanaimo Clipper Little Red days.

[RichH]

And our recruiting pipelines have clearly changed. We currently have 2 returning players from the BCHL, and our strong years featured about half the roster being from that league. I feel that the entire coaching staff has a responsibility in the recruiting efforts. The Brekke/Russell era brought forth some great talent.

The strengths of the junior leagues change too.  The USHL, to my limited understanding, is a much deeper and stronger league than it was during the Nanaimo Clipper Little Red days.

Excellent point. I don't claim to be Big Red Puckhead or Bob Norton, and there's HUGE piles of complexity to the art & science of the recruiting process, so I don't know. But I would love to have some great recruiting classes lined up.

[Trotsky]

A point I heard brought up on a recent trip to Ithaca was that the staff may be leaning towards adding a couple slots to the roster to cover injuries.  Cornell has been running with a fairly short roster (15 F, 8 D) recently.  By comparison, Harvard's roster has 17 F, 11 D. Perhaps this has been due to fears that it is harder to recruit to a larger team because prospects fear fighting for ice time.  That doesn't really make sense to me, since the blue chippers would not be on the bubble and the guys who would be are essentially 0 WAR fungibles.

[Jim Hyla]

Although I don't think this team has done well enough in the past 4 years, I don't know if Schafer's replacement would be better.  Casey Jones, as an alum, might be interested but Clarkson had a 39% winning percentage this season (4-year rolling average of 45%).  Maybe Topher will be coach one day, but who knows how good of coach he'd be?  Schafer may be the best option just because he's the "devil we know".

This attitude is precisely how once-great teams die. I am unwilling to settle for mediocre. Even if transition is painful and takes a few tries, I'd rather take a chance on greatness by rolling some weighted dice. The alternative is likely to be more of what we have seen: no offense, and the complete inability to compete against certain styles of offense under modern rules of play.

If Schafer hasn't figured it out by now, I highly doubt he's going to.

That's a fair point. When you say a few tries, do you mean one coach gets a few years to make the team his own, or multiple coaches?

I think there are two scenarios where I'd be convinced that Schafer can't figure it out and we need a coaching change:
1.  We have a sub-.500 season next year.
2.  We don't make it to the NCAAs in the next two years (a repeat of 2014 could be considered a positive step towards greatness or part of the oscillation that we've seen in the past 4 years, hence the requirement for a second year).

Disclaimer: I started watching Cornell hockey in 2007-2008. I think my expectations are rooted in how the team has played since then.  In that sense, I may be biased towards Schafer because I haven't seen his best team, and therefore, I haven't seen the height from which he's fallen.

I think the greatest source of disagreement on this issue is what our expectations are/should be.  We don't actually know what Cornell Hockey can realistically aspire to be, so we have to base our hopes on the evidence that is available to us, and adjust accordingly.  I will quote something I wrote a few months ago:

Schafer apologists' arguments have always been predicated upon the notion that with Cornell's academic and scholarship restrictions, it would be unfair to hold the team to a higher standard than being successful in its own conference and hoping to make noise at the national level. Two things have changed: one, Cornell is no longer especially successful in its own conference; many teams have passed us by. Two, the notion that Cornell cannot be an elite national program due to its restrictions has been proven invalid: Yale won it all and has been nationally competitive for years now, and Harvard is among the best few teams in the nation thus far this year. That is to say, there was nothing truly exceptional about Cornell's success over the past decade or so.

This team is not good. It has not been very good for a number of years. The Lynah atmosphere is nothing like it used to be. I think it's about time to move on.

Can Cornell ever be BC?  Probably not.  Can it be a top 10 team every year, as Schafer himself had hoped?  Maybe.  Can it win the national championship?  Absolutely.  Yale is the new benchmark against which we must measure our success.  They have the same academic and scholarship restrictions we do, and yet their last eight years have been better than Schafer's best eight years.  There is no reason Cornell cannot be that successful.  Can a modern Schafer-coached Cornell team be that successful?  It's looking more and more like the answer is No.  Will a new coach be that successful?  Also probably not, but at least there's a chance...

That's not quite correct. H, Y & P, with their policy on tuition, have a better ability to give students a "free ride" without all the loans that Cornell students may need to take. We try and match them, but I doubt that we always can.

[BearLover]

Although I don't think this team has done well enough in the past 4 years, I don't know if Schafer's replacement would be better.  Casey Jones, as an alum, might be interested but Clarkson had a 39% winning percentage this season (4-year rolling average of 45%).  Maybe Topher will be coach one day, but who knows how good of coach he'd be?  Schafer may be the best option just because he's the "devil we know".

This attitude is precisely how once-great teams die. I am unwilling to settle for mediocre. Even if transition is painful and takes a few tries, I'd rather take a chance on greatness by rolling some weighted dice. The alternative is likely to be more of what we have seen: no offense, and the complete inability to compete against certain styles of offense under modern rules of play.

If Schafer hasn't figured it out by now, I highly doubt he's going to.

That's a fair point. When you say a few tries, do you mean one coach gets a few years to make the team his own, or multiple coaches?

I think there are two scenarios where I'd be convinced that Schafer can't figure it out and we need a coaching change:
1.  We have a sub-.500 season next year.
2.  We don't make it to the NCAAs in the next two years (a repeat of 2014 could be considered a positive step towards greatness or part of the oscillation that we've seen in the past 4 years, hence the requirement for a second year).

Disclaimer: I started watching Cornell hockey in 2007-2008. I think my expectations are rooted in how the team has played since then.  In that sense, I may be biased towards Schafer because I haven't seen his best team, and therefore, I haven't seen the height from which he's fallen.

I think the greatest source of disagreement on this issue is what our expectations are/should be.  We don't actually know what Cornell Hockey can realistically aspire to be, so we have to base our hopes on the evidence that is available to us, and adjust accordingly.  I will quote something I wrote a few months ago:

Schafer apologists' arguments have always been predicated upon the notion that with Cornell's academic and scholarship restrictions, it would be unfair to hold the team to a higher standard than being successful in its own conference and hoping to make noise at the national level. Two things have changed: one, Cornell is no longer especially successful in its own conference; many teams have passed us by. Two, the notion that Cornell cannot be an elite national program due to its restrictions has been proven invalid: Yale won it all and has been nationally competitive for years now, and Harvard is among the best few teams in the nation thus far this year. That is to say, there was nothing truly exceptional about Cornell's success over the past decade or so.

This team is not good. It has not been very good for a number of years. The Lynah atmosphere is nothing like it used to be. I think it's about time to move on.

Can Cornell ever be BC?  Probably not.  Can it be a top 10 team every year, as Schafer himself had hoped?  Maybe.  Can it win the national championship?  Absolutely.  Yale is the new benchmark against which we must measure our success.  They have the same academic and scholarship restrictions we do, and yet their last eight years have been better than Schafer's best eight years.  There is no reason Cornell cannot be that successful.  Can a modern Schafer-coached Cornell team be that successful?  It's looking more and more like the answer is No.  Will a new coach be that successful?  Also probably not, but at least there's a chance...

That's not quite correct. H, Y & P, with their policy on tuition, have a better ability to give students a "free ride" without all the loans that Cornell students may need to take. We try and match them, but I doubt that we always can.

I thought we changed that a few years ago?  H, Y, and P also have slightly higher academic requirements.

[pfibiger]

A point I heard brought up on a recent trip to Ithaca was that the staff may be leaning towards adding a couple slots to the roster to cover injuries.  Cornell has been running with a fairly short roster (15 F, 8 D) recently.  By comparison, Harvard's roster has 17 F, 11 D. Perhaps this has been due to fears that it is harder to recruit to a larger team because prospects fear fighting for ice time.  That doesn't really make sense to me, since the blue chippers would not be on the bubble and the guys who would be are essentially 0 WAR fungibles.

Be interesting to see how that works out. We've had recruited guys leave or disappear (Kevin Cole, Jarred Seymour, Mathieu Brisson) over what I can only imagine was total lack of visibility to any PT. I wonder how we'll do with kids even further down the chart? Maybe there'll be some kids recruited with a high AI who have an understanding, like a 3rd goalie, that the only opportunity they'll have is in an injury crisis.

[Swampy]

Although I don't think this team has done well enough in the past 4 years, I don't know if Schafer's replacement would be better.  Casey Jones, as an alum, might be interested but Clarkson had a 39% winning percentage this season (4-year rolling average of 45%).  Maybe Topher will be coach one day, but who knows how good of coach he'd be?  Schafer may be the best option just because he's the "devil we know".

This attitude is precisely how once-great teams die. I am unwilling to settle for mediocre. Even if transition is painful and takes a few tries, I'd rather take a chance on greatness by rolling some weighted dice. The alternative is likely to be more of what we have seen: no offense, and the complete inability to compete against certain styles of offense under modern rules of play.

If Schafer hasn't figured it out by now, I highly doubt he's going to.

That's a fair point. When you say a few tries, do you mean one coach gets a few years to make the team his own, or multiple coaches?

I think there are two scenarios where I'd be convinced that Schafer can't figure it out and we need a coaching change:
1.  We have a sub-.500 season next year.
2.  We don't make it to the NCAAs in the next two years (a repeat of 2014 could be considered a positive step towards greatness or part of the oscillation that we've seen in the past 4 years, hence the requirement for a second year).

Disclaimer: I started watching Cornell hockey in 2007-2008. I think my expectations are rooted in how the team has played since then.  In that sense, I may be biased towards Schafer because I haven't seen his best team, and therefore, I haven't seen the height from which he's fallen.

I think the greatest source of disagreement on this issue is what our expectations are/should be.  We don't actually know what Cornell Hockey can realistically aspire to be, so we have to base our hopes on the evidence that is available to us, and adjust accordingly.  I will quote something I wrote a few months ago:

Schafer apologists' arguments have always been predicated upon the notion that with Cornell's academic and scholarship restrictions, it would be unfair to hold the team to a higher standard than being successful in its own conference and hoping to make noise at the national level. Two things have changed: one, Cornell is no longer especially successful in its own conference; many teams have passed us by. Two, the notion that Cornell cannot be an elite national program due to its restrictions has been proven invalid: Yale won it all and has been nationally competitive for years now, and Harvard is among the best few teams in the nation thus far this year. That is to say, there was nothing truly exceptional about Cornell's success over the past decade or so.

This team is not good. It has not been very good for a number of years. The Lynah atmosphere is nothing like it used to be. I think it's about time to move on.

Can Cornell ever be BC?  Probably not.  Can it be a top 10 team every year, as Schafer himself had hoped?  Maybe.  Can it win the national championship?  Absolutely.  Yale is the new benchmark against which we must measure our success.  They have the same academic and scholarship restrictions we do, and yet their last eight years have been better than Schafer's best eight years.  There is no reason Cornell cannot be that successful.  Can a modern Schafer-coached Cornell team be that successful?  It's looking more and more like the answer is No.  Will a new coach be that successful?  Also probably not, but at least there's a chance...

That's not quite correct. H, Y & P, with their policy on tuition, have a better ability to give students a "free ride" without all the loans that Cornell students may need to take. We try and match them, but I doubt that we always can.

I thought we changed that a few years ago?  H, Y, and P also have slightly higher academic requirements.

Yeah, and they also have slightly better reputations and slightly better lifetime earnings expectations.

Look, within the Ivies, Cornell's main "structural" recruiting advantages are its tradition, its broad diversity of educational opportunities, its demographic composition (Schafer once said he pitches Cornell's demographics because they're much closer to the national profile), and for some recruits its location. [Ithaca is a lot more like Saskatchewan or Alberta than Boston is.]

Schafer did a great job reviving Cornell's tradition and Lynah's reputation as the toughest home advantage, but the last several years have severely hurt this advantage. How many potential recruits come to Lynah these days and immediately sign up because they're so impressed by the fans' enthusiasm?

As Rich's link to GoCrimson illustrates, I'd also point out that being located in New England means a HC can draw assistants from numerous places without requiring them to uproot their families. Besides Boston, Harvard can draw from New Hampshire, Providence, and maybe even Hartford or Amherst. Yale can draw from New Haven, Providence, Hartford, and maybe Amherst. Etc. This too is an advantage in terms of both hiring assistants and recruiting player who want to play in front of their friends and families.

There's also the "see the world factor." Andy Isles may have wanted to stay in little Ithaca, but Dustin Brown did not. A player from Massachusetts could play at Yale and be far away from home to "get away," while still being close enough to have the family drop in to watch home games (and several away games) or run into Manhattan for an evening during the off-season. You can do this in Ithaca too, but with much greater difficulty.

Unfortunately, the days when being that much closer to Canada was a big advantage are over.

[Swampy]

I think a big problem the past few years has been lack of balance. We've had a bunch of draft picks, but even more guys who aren't particularly fast or who just aren't scoring threats.

I think that sums it up and it isn't going to change. Schafer seems to dislike fast guys who can score, otherwise he'd be recruiting them instead of loading up on power forwards. Our draft picks are defenders and power forwards and will continue to be as long as Schafer is the coach. The two drafted forwards are 6-4 and 6-5 and one them missed nearly the entire season with injury. There are a couple of smaller forwards coming in who will be converted into grinder/nats (not that there's anything wrong with having some of those guys on the squad). Hopefully some of these guys will surprise me and make me eat cold Cayuga crow.

I find Schafer's most recent comments to be depressing and have convinced me he needs to go after his contract expires (actually sooner, but Cornell doesn't like to eat contracts). I'm glad he recognized the need to increase scoring and chose to tweak his approach. To hear him then say that it failed and he was returning to the very approach that had led him to conclude he needed to increase scoring in the first place is cause for surrender (not my tickets, just my hope for his remaining tenure).

Chris Heisenberg lists Angelo, our highest ranked USHL player, as 56th in the USHL. Yale has the 27th & 49th ahead of us, and Harvard has the 53rd. Interestingly, Heisenberg lists Beau Starrett as also playing in the USHL, but I can't find him on Heisenberg's USHL page. OTOH, this page reinforces what Ithacat said.

[ithacat]

There's also the "see the world factor." Andy Isles may have wanted to stay in little Ithaca, but Dustin Brown did not.

I take your point, however, this isn't the best example...they each left Ithaca after their Freshman year. They just chose different paths. If Andy had been 6-2 or 6-3 I'm not sure he would have chosen the collegiate path. Additionally, he was very close to going to Harvard.

[billhoward]

[Schafer] could give a rats ass about what any of us think as he goes about doing whatever it is he is going to do to try and change things.

+1

[ithacat]

I guess I just don't get it.  Schafer's teams were pretty consistently good over the first 19 years, he made a change in the 20th years and it failed to produce the desired results in a historic way.  So the man wants to go back to what had always been successful and everybody is going ape shit. I say good decision and hopefully the team will reap the benefits.

What hasn't been mentioned is that the decline in the number of wins is directly related to the assistant coach turnover over the last 10 years.  The assistant coaches are in many ways more crucial to the development and on ice performance than the head coach.  Maybe a change is needed in that area to revitalize the program ?

Bottom line, it's Schafer's program and he will do what he feels necessary to fix the problem.  If it works, great for Cornell, if it doesn't the University has a decision to make.  In either case Mike has proved to be one the very best Cornell has ever had behind the bench.

His teams are almost always good defensively. That's not the issue. In the last six seasons we've made the NCAAs twice. Those two trips to the tourney were the only times during those six years that the offense ranked in the top 25 nationally. The other four years saw his offense rank outside the top 40. From 2009-2010 the team has gone from averaging 3.15 gpg (19th) to 1.84 (54th) and it's been a steady decline.

You raise a fair point about the assistants. Maybe...

[BearLover]

Cornell has also been unlucky with recruits in the past few years--M. McCarron, De Jong, and Hudson all decommitted/couldn't get in (and maybe some others I'm forgetting).  All three went on to be drafted, McCarron in the first round.  We've also had players leave at inopportune times (Hudon (5th round pick), Brisson, Lewis).  If they had come/stayed, our fortunes may have been different.  To be fair, though, I'm sure things like this have happened in past years too.

EDIT: Added Hudon

[Trotsky]

Cornell has also been unlucky with recruits in the past few years--M. McCarron, De Jong, and Hudson all decommitted/couldn't get in (and maybe some others I'm forgetting).

Matt Cimetta, Philipe Hudon and Stephen Miller were also commits who disappeared.

Not counting M. McCarron, that's five guys over a very short period who decommitted.  Would love to know whether they were just using Cornell as a safety in some other career plan, or whether something happened to turn them away.

They've had varying success since:

Nolan De Jong (Michigan)

Woody Hudson (SLU)

Matt Cimetta (seems to have left hockey)

Philippe Hudon (Concordia)

Stephen Miller (Canisius)

[BearLover]

Cornell has also been unlucky with recruits in the past few years--M. McCarron, De Jong, and Hudson all decommitted/couldn't get in (and maybe some others I'm forgetting).

Matt Cimetta, Philipe Hudon and Stephen Miller were also commits who disappeared.

Not counting M. McCarron, that's five guys over a very short period who decommitted.  Would love to know whether they were just using Cornell as a safety in some other career plan, or whether something happened to turn them away.

They've had varying success since:

Nolan De Jong (Michigan)

Woody Hudson (SLU)

Matt Cimetta (Sarnia)

Philippe Hudon (Concordia)

Stephen Miller (Canisius)

Wow, completely forgot about Hudon, who was also drafted, and was on campus for a few months before he left for personal reasons.

[scoop85]

Cornell has also been unlucky with recruits in the past few years--M. McCarron, De Jong, and Hudson all decommitted/couldn't get in (and maybe some others I'm forgetting).  All three went on to be drafted, McCarron in the first round.  We've also had players leave at inopportune times (Hudon (5th round pick), Brisson, Lewis).  If they had come/stayed, our fortunes may have been different.  To be fair, though, I'm sure things like this have happened in past years too.

EDIT: Added Hudon

Another fairly recent decommit was Mark Scheifele, who became a 1st round draft choice of the Winnipeg Jets