Ok, I was having a great Baltimore sports weekend, the Blast won Friday Night, Towson absolutely destroyed New Hampshire at New Hampshire without their best defensive player, and the Ravens were about to play at Pittsburgh in the best rivalry in the NFL…..then I got pissed off to say the least.

How in the world did the FCS selection committee keep the Towson Tigers out of the tournament? They absolutely beat the hell out of New Hampshire, the 7th ranked team in the country, in their own stadium. Not good enough! Towson also scored the most points against LSU, yes that LSU, at Death Valley than any other team has all year! Not good enough, oh Towson also lost to a Kent State team that is currently in the top 25 in the BCS rankings as well, and played them close. Not good enough! I feel bad for the Tigers and WNST’s own Damon Yaffe, you litterally got robbed and those players deserve better.

UMBC played an outstanding game at North Carolina and took them to penalty kicks to decide the game, have to admire that effort and am proud of the Retrievers. UNC is the defending National Champs, not too bad for a school with county in its name!

The University of Maryland announces they are attempting to leave the ACC and head to the Big 10. WHAT?? Good luck with that, I know more goes into that move than just Athletics, but we all know Athletics are your biggest money maker, and its going to be pure embarassment when they join the Big 10. Wooo they have their own TV network, joyous occassion to get beat on TV every week. Maryland was already struggling to bring in big time recruits, don’t see the Terrapins beating out Ohio State and Michigan for top recruits much easier than beating North Carolina and Duke, or even Virginia Tech for that matter…..disappointing.

Ahhh some emotion uplifting, the Ravens beat the Steelers in Pittsburgh, couldn’t be happier, sure the offense could play better and undoubtedly Cam Cameron could have called a better game, but we are 8-2 with a two game lead in the AFC North! Turn on WNST this morning and all I hear is how disappointed fans are with the win?? the win?? Wow, simply stunning. Baltimore is 8-2 right? Sure we have to get better, but what team in week 11 doesn’t say to themselves, “we need to get better before the playoffs”. Zero, listen to the New England Patriots, they are always stating how they have pleanty of things to work on.

Bring on San Diego, and let’s make it 9-2!

The Towson University football program was robbed of a spot in the 2012 FCS Playoffs today.  The selection committee who determines who makes the cut and who doesn’t, is shrouded in mystery.  No one truly knows the criteria in order to make it except that each conference has one automatic bid.

This year, Towson repeated as champions of the CAA (sharing it with four other teams) and finished with a 7-4 overall record and 6-2 in the CAA.  They finished the season with a 4 game win streak knowing that their playoff hopes were on the line.  All five of their conference road games were against ranked opponents.  They won all but one, against James Madison; a game in which they had the lead in the final minutes but lost 13-10.

Towson finished the season ranked 15^th in the Sports Network FCS poll, the poll widely recognized as the definitive poll in FCS play.  They were never unranked at any point.  They were 1-2 in their non conference schedule, beating St. Francis.  Their two losses came against LSU, who are 3^rd in the BCS rankings, and Kent State who had one loss and won the MAC conference.  They put up points against both teams and even lead LSU at one point in the game.

In the FCS playoffs, 10 teams receive an automatic bid for “winning” their conference.  Villanova received the autobid from the CAA even though 4 teams were co-champions.  They received the bid based on combined record against the remaining 3 teams (Towson, New Hampshire, and Richmond).  Towson beat Villanova by 14 on the road.

The remaining 10 spots are “at large” and take into account the teams who didn’t receive their conference’s autobid. They were given to Cal Poly (Big Sky), Appalachian State (Southern), Illinois State (Missouri Valley), Montana State (Big Sky), New Hampshire (CAA), Old Dominion (CAA), Sam Houston State (Southland), South Dakota State (Missouri Valley), Stony Brook (Big South) and Wofford (Southern).

I have no qualms with ODU making it because they beat Towson and are clearly one of the best teams at the FCS level though they are moving to the FBS level Conference USA next season and their non conference schedule includes imposing Duquesne, Hampton and Campbell (sarcasm implied).  I do, however, wonder how New Hampshire made it over Towson even though the Tigers beat them on the road by 29 points. Also, New Hampshire’s out of conference schedule included Holy Cross, Minnesota, and Central Connecticut.  Overwhelming right? Yeah didn’t think so.

I also take issue with the fact that two teams ranked below Towson (Illinois State at 16^th and South Dakota State at 19^th) made it in over them.  Illinois State’s non conference schedule included Dayton, Eastern Michigan, and Eastern Illinois.  While South Dakota State’s included Kansas, South East Louisiana and UC Davis.  How can you penalize Towson for playing a harder schedule than most teams.

How does the 15^th best team in the FCS not make it into a 20 team playoff that should be comprised of the best teams in the nation? Towson not only should have made it over half these teams but also should have hosted a game. I mean they beat two out of the three teams that made it from their own conference!

My first thought was money. As it should be with the NCAA.  However, Towson sold out their playoff game last year against Lehigh so that couldn’t be it, right?

Towson isn’t the only team that got snubbed.  CAA teams, Richmond and JMU should have also received a bid.  It baffles me how the best conference in the FCS, often referred to as the SEC of the FCS, has so many snubs.

The university, the players, the students, and the fans were robbed of one more game with a group of seniors who brought football back to my school and made Saturdays fun again.  I hope the FCS selection committee can sleep at night knowing that their decisions have no integrity or merit after these decisions.

Suddenly, Towson University football is in the spotlight.

In 2011, it was for an upstart season that literally saw the school go from bottom of the barrel to top of the league in one of the most shocking single-season turnarounds ever.

Now, head coach Rob Ambrose is on the hot seat for some alleged non-compliance issues surrounding practice time and a couple of malcontents who suddenly decided they no longer wanted to hear the coach’s foul language while running laps at 6am.

I’ll handle this the way I deal with everything else here at WNST.net.  I’ll give you the truth and the story-behind-the-story.  You won’t find this at The Sun and you most certainly won’t hear this on the FM station in town because most of the people on the air over there wouldn’t know how to get Johnny Unitas Stadium or the Towson Center if you gave them a GPS and a free meal for showing up.

If you’re interested in knowing the truth, here it comes.

First, let me offer a friendly reminder of how sports works.  This isn’t meant to endorse the practices that take place in the locker room or on the field, but it’s just the way things go.  There’s an old saying when guys or gals hop on a plane and head to “Sin City” for a bachelor or bachelorette party — “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”  It’s seedy and dirty and almost comical that the Las Vegas visitor’s bureau markets themselves as a destination to forget about your core values, but that’s what they do and, frankly, it probably works wonders for their revenue stream.

Substitute the word “locker room” in place of “Vegas” and there you have the sports theme.

“What happens in the locker room, stays in the locker room.”  Or, it should.

Think back to the scene in A Few Good Men when Private Santiago reported one of his peers for an illegal fence line shooting.  He was dealt with by the two young Marines on trial because he violated the credo — “what happens in the field, stays in the field.”

It’s the same thing going on at Towson, except no one ordered a code red.

And no one got hurt.

Ever.

The two young men who stepped forward – only one was willing to publish his name, if that matters to you – suggested that Ambrose filed incorrect practice time logs in an effort to hide from the compliance folks that he was “over-practicing” his football team.  They also claimed that Ambrose used inappropriate and foul language, most notably prior to the team’s September 18 home game vs. Saint Frances.

Always remember this:  Just because someone says “this is what happened” doesn’t actually mean that’s what happened.  It might mean that’s what you PERCEIVED happened…but that doesn’t mean it went that way in real-life.  We at WNST – and me, specifically – found that out nearly two years ago when a former media member in town filed a completely baseless and fraudulent lawsuit against the station.  Immediately there were folks in town who said, “Did you hear what those guys at WNST did to xxx-xxxxx?”  Well, as it turned out some 6 months later, we didn’t really “do” anything.  Once of the odor of $800,000 disappeared because there wasn’t any REAL evidence in place to support such a lawsuit, the whole case was suddenly dropped like a Lee Evans touchdown catch in the AFC championship game.  So, I know firsthand about the whole issue of “just because someone says this is what happened doesn’t necessarily mean that’s really what happened.”

Now, these two young men who stepped forward (and there are rumors that others are in the process of perhaps doing the same thing in the next day or two) obviously felt strongly enough about their “case” that it led them to go public with all of it.

Are they wrong for bringing those issues to light?

They’re not wrong, per-se.  Sure, they might have violated the unwritten rule that most college and professional sports abide by which, as I noted above, is to consider things that happen “in the family” need to stay in the family.

But if they felt as if they were in danger, somehow, they had every right to “report” their coach.

The fact of the matter is that at no time were those two players or anyone else ever in danger or was their health ever at risk.

Here’s what I know about Rob Ambrose.  He’s a tough coach.  He wants to win.  And he’s one of the biggest reasons why Towson has been winning over the last 13 months.

I also know he’s loud and over-bearing and very capable of salty language…sort of like the Wyoming coach who lost his mind last weekend when they lost a close game to Air Force.

Is Rob Ambrose capable of lashing out at kids who are late, not paying attention or insubordinate, as one of his star players was just an hour or so prior to last Saturday’s game against Old Dominion?  Absolutely.  Guess what?  Coach K at Duke is not only capable of doing the exact same thing, he wrote Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 in the book on “How to scream at your players and still love them and get the best out of them.”

(Please see next page)