Can someone post the article thats readable. They finally figured out the Google Chrome trick. I can bring myself to buy this rag...ever.
Down by four with the ball on the 47-yard line and six seconds left on the clock, the diminutive quarterback from a suburban Catholic college took the snap. Pressured by a pass rusher, he scrambled back to his own 37 and heaved a pass down the field that landed in the hands of his roommate for a touchdown and a 47-45 win over the defending national champion.
The suburban Catholic college was Boston College, the quarterback was Doug Flutie, the year was 1984, and a bump in enrollment subsequent to a college's athletic success, similar to the one that B.C. saw after edging Miami on that fall evening, has since been called "the Flutie Effect."
And at Siena College, it would have been called "the Rick Pitino Effect" had the school gone out on a limb and hired the Hall of Fame coach as Jimmy Patsos' replacement.
Pitino, who brought three different colleges to the Final Four and won two national championships (one has since been vacated), would have been a controversial choice to coach the Saints. But for an enchanted few days, the thought that Pitino could be bringing his 646 career wins (and another 123 at Louisville, also vacated) to Loudonville seemed very real and very enticing.
No saint himself, Pitino has been linked to NCAA violations as early as his days as an assistant coach at the University of Hawaii in the 1970s, where he allegedly arranged for airfare to the mainland, used cars, and free food for players -- impermissible benefits all -- long before the scandal that saw him fired from Louisville last year amid allegations of payoffs by sneaker companies to the families of recruits and the procurement of, ahem, adult entertainment for players.
While the FBI continues to investigate the alleged pay-to-play scheme that connected sneaker companies, college coaches, AAU coaches, players, their families and NBA agents, Pitino hasn't been charged, though the specter of the investigation casts a long shadow.
Sitting out a basketball season for the first time in his life, Pitino denied any wrongdoing in several calls to the Times Union last week.
"In the game of college basketball, I've never given a player anything," Pitino told Times Union columnist Chris Churchill. "My conscience is totally clear as far as anything with scandals in college basketball."
Winning sells tickets, and Rick Pitino's teams win a lot of college basketball games. Since Fran McCaffery -- the coach who led the Saints to NCAA first-round wins over Vanderbilt in 2008 and Ohio State in 2009 -- left for Iowa in March 2010, Siena has seen the average attendance for home games at Times Union Center decline from 7,853 in 2009-10, McCaffery's last season, to 5,925 in 2016-17 according to data available from the NCAA.
In McCaffery's final season, Siena enrolled 3,201 students, a number that had fallen 5 percent to 3,060 for the 2015-16 school year, according to statistics kept on the U.S. Department of Education's Equity in Athletics Data Analysis website. Those 3,201 students in 2009-10 represented Siena's highest enrollment in the 14 years (2003 through 2016) for which data is available.
And while that 5 percent drop - 141 enrolled students - doesn't sound like a lot, consider this: When Moody's downgraded the rating on Siena's $42 million in outstanding general obligation bonds in 2015, the rating firm cited "stagnant aggregate net tuition revenue, which makes up 82 percent of operations" as one of the reasons. Moody's also said Siena's bond rating could rise if they got more students to pay the full cost of attendance ... or increased enrollment.
If recent history shows anything, winning on the basketball court can mean winning at the admissions office. Look no further than Butler's 41 percent jump in applications after a run to the 2010 NCAA championship game, or the 20 percent jump in applications at Virginia Commonwealth after their run to the Final Four in 2011.
Siena needs someone like Rick Pitino, and Rick Pitino, a man who lives to coach, is without a team.
Pitino told Churchill, "Right now, I'm a coach that misses his best friend in life, and that's basketball."
No, it wasn't hard to imagine a Pitino-coached Siena team playing in front of crowds of 10,000-plus in downtown Albany, but it was just too big a stretch in the wake of the downfall of Jimmy Patsos and the ongoing FBI investigation into college basketball.
Pitino could have built Siena into a powerhouse in a way no other candidate who has been linked to the job thus far could. He'd have spread the good word about the little school in Loudonville far and wide, and in a few years, perhaps, rode off into the sunset, leaving a foundation upon which the Saints could build successfully for years.
Of course, when you want to build a foundation, sometimes you have to dig into the mud.
Too bad Siena didn't want to risk getting dirty.
