Norm on the ticket

[ponyboy]

Stop it now. Mike Cavan did an excellent job of recruiting and along with TCU had arguably the two best classes in the WAC in 97 and 98. But we were easy pickins for other coaches after we self reported and self flagellated ourselves over the Malin incident. After that the honeymoon was over. But he was a fine recruiter.

[couch 'em]

I'm really not sure what you mean by go directly to the Marines, everyone goes directly to their branch of service after they graduate. You select your field of service while you are in school.

On the Navy academy website, they have posted the service assignments of this years senior class, the 2008 graduates. Here is how they went:


============================================
Recently, the 1047 members of the Class of 2008 chose the following service and warfare specialties to enter after graduation and commissioning:

* Naval Aviation: Pilot training -- 224 men and 33 women;
Naval Flight Officer training -- 82 men and 16 women.
* Marine Corps Aviation: Pilot training -- 77 men and 6 women;
Flight Officer training -- 2 men.
* Surface Warfare: conventional -- 185 men and 66 women;
Nuclear power -- 23 men and 14 women.
* Marine Corps Ground: 113 men and 19 women.
* Submarine Warfare: 121 men.
*Navy Restricted Line and Staff Corps: 8 men and 1 woman, including midshipmen not physically qualified for the unrestricted line duties above, elected specialization in aviation maintenance duty, cryptology, intelligence, supply corps, civil engineering corps and meteorology/oceanography.
* Medical Corps: 7 men and 3 women.
* Special Warfare (SEAL): 24 men.
* Special Operations (diving, salvage and explosive ordnance disposal): 14 men and 1 woman.
* Interservice commissioning in the U.S. Air Force: 4 women.
* Interservice commissioning in the U.S. Army: 2 women.
* Interservice commissioning in the U.S. Coast Guard: 2 men.

Impressive. I'll stand corrected on this.

[Longtime]

Stop it now. Mike Cavan did an excellent job of recruiting and along with TCU had arguably the two best classes in the WAC in 97 and 98. But we were easy pickins for other coaches after we self reported and self flagellated ourselves over the Malin incident. After that the honeymoon was over. But he was a fine recruiter.

I think it was the rise of TCU under Franchione that did more damage to SMU's recruiting. Fran created a wave of optimism after winning with someone else's players that first year - something I could see a Paul Johnson doing.

The Malin incident and C-USA picking TCU over us were all factors. But the bottom line is the talent level got increasingly worse under Cavan. He had setbacks to deal with, yes, but is that an excuse for the recruiting to absolutely bottom out the way it did? The team Phil Bennett took over was Division I in name only.