PirateCrew: Seton Hall Pirates Football & Basketball Recruiting
The definitive source for all PirateCrew news.
setonhall.rivals.com
Here is part 2 of my Q and A with veteran Seton Hall radio analyst Dave Popkin. In this installment, he talks some more about the difficulties of broadcasting during a pandemic season, how it might influence the business going forward, how Seton Hall is positioned going forward in the transfer market, and about his virtual sports broadcasting camp, which is in its 20th year of existence overall.
J.P. Pelzman: I remember when somebody said we might not be able to have the NCAA Tournament, and I said there is no way college sports can withstand not having it two years in a row.
Dave Popkin: I don’t think so. I don’t see how they could have survived. I do a lot of other (college) sports as well. I just did (America East) swimming. I have (Northeast Conference) softball and baseball coming up. I did (NEC and Big East) men’s soccer (Big East on FS1) and I got to meet some of these coaches and athletes from the Olympic sports and it would be a crushing loss to those individuals and those schools if they had to shut down a lot of those sports because they just can’t afford them.
Now, there’s already been contraction with some sports. And you recently saw Hartford demote themselves from Division I to Division 3 because of the expense. It's an issue, a major issue right now in college sports and I would have been heartbroken for a lot of those quote-unquote other programs with kids training their whole lives to be college athletes and then suddenly being told, oops, sorry your college softball program no longer exists.
JPP: I think you said it very well. (The NCAA tourney) did save college sports as we know it. Were you worried during the season that it wasn’t going to be finished?
DP: No, I thought it was trending in the right direction, and once they got a good handle on testing and vaccines, I had confidence they would be able to get enough teams eligible to play a tournament. I actually thought there would be more teams that would have to opt out because of positive tests. VCU was the only team that couldn’t play out of 68, which is pretty amazing, considering what was going on in the world.
I think the sacrifices the college athletes in all sports, in this case basketball, made were huge ones. What they anticipated would be their college experience was not what happened this year and they soldiered through. I think that fans needed a return to normalcy and to see their teams play and I also think it was good for the kids mentally that they got to play games instead of having to miss another post-season and just train with no carrot at the end of the stick.
JPP: This year has been particularly crazy in terms of the transfer market with the first year of the no sit-out rule. Do you think it will calm down next year? Do you think COVID caused a lot of transfers? How do you see the landscape and how do you see Seton Hall fitting in? Obviously, Kevin Willard inspired a lot of loyalty and he did well in the transfer market this time around.
DP: I think it will be similar next year because you’re always going to have kids that want to go home, kids that didn’t play enough minutes at their school, (players that had) personality conflicts with the coach. For whatever reason there’s always kids that want to leave and some of them didn’t do it before because they didn’t want to sit out a year.
I think (this type of movement) is here to stay and I think Seton Hall is well-positioned for that. Kevin and his staff are good talent evaluators and now they just have a bigger talent pool that they can evaluate. It seems like they got three really good players in the portal so far (Jamir Harris, Kadary Richmond, Alexis Yetna) and I think there are things yet to be determined in this off-season with so many kids still in the portal.
I think Seton Hall has done fine with the transfer dynamic and if there’s a kid like (Shavar) Reynolds that wants to go to Monmouth and be The Man for s year, then good for him. I don’t begrudge him leaving and if there’s somebody like Harris who wants to play with his brother (JaQuan Harris, a 2022 verbal commit) and wants to play at home, why would you not allow a kid to do that?
So I am bullish on Seton Hall regarding the transfer market.
