You seem to be jumping on a couple of points that I made somewhat out of context. The "typical" NDCL season comment was in reference to the fact that they have a track record of flaming out in the NCL schedule. We hear every year that this is the season they really break out and put it all together then go 1-4 in conference.
Week 1 was a winnable game if not for all the nonsense. St. John's probably isn't even as good as Cleveland Heights.
The wins are what they are at this point. CCC and Holy Name were games that we should have won and did easily. We beat Benedictine in a down year. We gave away what would have been our best win of the year versus Cleveland Heights and forfeited what could have been another signature win. The Hoban game is what it is this year. Nobody in the NCL was competing with them unless you were a legitimate state contender. Mooney game was disappointingly uncompetitive.
We seem to talk a lot about the "good old days". We seem to forget that LC had a pretty easy schedule back in those days for the most part with seven or eight NCL games that included Chanel, CCC, Trinity, Holy Name, EC, Padua and NDCL. I don't remember if VA-SJ games were conference or non-conference games at that point. Generally, only Holy Name or Padua were going to be good games in any given year. At best, we'd have one or two big time out of conference games per year. That's a lot different than the schedule we've had for the last decade that has featured 2-3 big out of conference games plus a far harder 5-game NCL schedule with the additions of Bennies, Hoban and Walsh (even with Walsh going through what I imagine some of the same things Lake is going through).
Overall, I don't see the talent we had over the 20-plus year stretch we had from the mid-80s to about 2010. The question is why, and it's probably a whole lot of factors. I feel the most likely answer is Lake County and Eastern Cuyahoga County doesn't have the parochial school system it used to have. We've still got St. Mary's and St. Gabe's but Lake's best teams were drawing a lot of great players from Euclid and Western Lake County. Those schools are almost all gone or exist as merged, diminished versions of themselves. There's also a fair amount of kids electing to go with their home public district that have had more success than they used to (clearly Mentor, Kirtland and to a lesser extent South). NDCL has also made more inroads into the St. Gabe's community that they didn't have a decade or two ago.
So, what's the answer? Should we be getting more out of the talent we have and do a better job of developing our guys (remember when we produced quarterback after quarterback and quarterback) and win a few games that we shouldn't have based purely on coaching and effort? Probably, but that's only going to take you so far. It's the difference between 5-5 and 7-3. Isn't going to make you a state contender with the inputs we currently have. So, how do we get more talent coming in? That's a harder question to answer and the past doesn't offer us a lot of applicable help. In the "good old days", the parochial to Lake pipeline was easy and you were surrounded by less competitive public options. Lake certainly wasn't "recruiting" during the Gibbons years in any way comparable to what you see schools having to do today. As much as I swear by my time playing for LC during the Gibbons years, let's just face the reality that the entire landscape of private high schools and high school football itself is completely different than it was back then.
If we sweep that last three games, I'd feel ok going into next year. This entire season could have gone pretty sideways with the way things started off both on and off the field. If it's 0-3 or 1-2 down the stretch then it's certainly time for some self-evaluation of the program.
From a larger sports program perspective, I get worried when schools the size of LC start trying to be too many things to too many people. We have a lot of sports programs we didn't have before between hockey in the 1990s and now lacrosse and rugby more recently. That's a lot more opportunities with the same number of kids.
And, of course, it's worth discussing what the impact of both the administration and the current coaching staff has had on all of this.
Lot's of factors without a lot of really clear solutions from my perspective.
Over dramatic? How am I being over dramatic? So since your "in the know", what is the feeling around LC? I speak facts. You say "we are all frustrated". Who's we? Frustrated is not the word. It's quite obvious you've only been to 1 game. You really have no clue. You're correct that a Cleveland Heights win would of put us in better shape. However, week 1 we would've never won, hence the reason why the forfeit. That was all BS saying we didn't have enough kids to field a team. You know we could of played week 1. Have plenty of kids.
You still dodged the questions as usual. What do you think of wins so far this year? You also said this was OD's make or break year on the LC thread. Is a 5-5 record and another year of missing the playoffs good in your book? Another "typical" season I guess?
Send me a PM lc, I would love to meet you tonight.
