Clan Wars » turn out to be just fine, in terms of win rate,

BETHLEHEM, Pa. (STATS) -- New Fordham football coach Andrew Breiner was admiring what he saw across the room at Patriot League media day on Tuesday.Look at Julien Davenport, he said, noting Bucknells All-America left tackle.Look at (Kyle) Diener, he continued about the Colgate linebacker and the leagues preseason defensive player of the year.Look at our guys.And then Breiner concluded: Were getting different football players.Its not surprising the Patriot League is filled with standout seniors. This is the fourth year that the league has been offering football scholarships, so as theyve reached the senior class, the talent is arguably stronger than ever.The seven-team league could very well top its memorable 2015 season. Colgate won mostly close games en route to claiming the Patriot title and then advanced twice in the FCS playoff to reach the quarterfinals. Fordham joined the Raiders in the postseason, giving the league two qualifiers for only the second time in 10 years.Colgate, with Diener among its 17 returning starters, grabbed the favorites role in the leagues preseason poll. Fordham, which boasts junior running back and preseason offensive player of the year Chase Edmonds as one of 18 returning starters, was picked second while Holy Cross and Lehigh tied for third followed by Bucknell, Lafayette and Georgetown, the only school not to be offering football scholarships.Every team has at least 14 returning starters. All but Georgetown is returning its starting quarterback, with Holy Cross senior Peter Pujals gaining the preseason honor at the position.This is going to be the year that I think can really put the Patriot League on a national map, said Breiner, who served as Fordhams offensive coordinator before succeeding Joe Moorhead as head coach last December.Colgate beat CAA Football powers New Hampshire and James Madison on the road in last years playoffs. The Raiders had lost to New Hampshire during the regular season, but the difference that the building scholarship classes were making was evident in that game as in the playoff victory.The first time we played New Hampshire, second-year coach Dan Hunt said, they beat us, and they beat us pretty soundly. But I remember coming off the field and I felt fairly positive, that they beat us because we didnt play well. It wasnt like physically we couldnt match up with them. In years past, thats what it was.The Patriot League is deep enough that five different schools have won league titles in the last seven years.Fourteen players on this years 29-player preseason team made the all-league first team last season and another 12 were on the second team. Bucknell, though picked fifth, had the most preseason selections with seven.The scholarships have made the leagues recruiting makeup more national, and the coaching staffs are seemingly winning more head-to-head recruiting battles with the rival Ivy League. The scholarships havent decreased the strong academic/athletic mix, either, as over 200 players achieved at least a 3.2 grade-point average last academic year.Weve had talented players pre-scholarship, weve had talented players post-scholarship, Hunt said. To a group, I think these kids are much more focused on what they have to do.I think weve had great players in the league for a long, long time, Holy Cross coach Tom Gilmore said. And we certainly have great players this year.That includes Davenport, the fourth-year starter from Bucknell who is a cousin to NBA player Michael Kidd-Gilchrist. At 6-foot-7, 318 pounds, everybody in the room was looking up to Davenport in amazement Tuesday.Well, almost everyone. Fordhams all-league tight end, Phazahn Odom, is an inch taller.No doubt the scholarships are supplying the Patriot League in a big way.---=PATRIOT LEAGUE FOOTBALL PRESEASON POLL=Head Coaches and Sports Information Directors Poll1. Colgate (10 first-place votes), 70 points2. Fordham (3), 633. (tie) Holy Cross (1), 473. (tie) Lehigh, 475. Bucknell, 316. Lafayette, 197. Georgetown, 17---=PATRIOT LEAGUE FOOTBALL PRESEASON TEAM=Offensive Player of the Year -- Chase Edmonds, RB, FordhamDefensive Player of the Year -- Kyle Diener, LB, ColgateOffenseQB -- Peter Pujals, Holy Cross, Sr.RB -- Chase Edmonds, Fordham, Jr.RB -- James Holland, Colgate, Jr.FB/HB -- Matt Buckman, Georgetown, Sr.WR -- Will Carter, Bucknell, Sr.WR -- Brendan Flaherty, Holy Cross, Sr.WR -- Troy Pelletier, Lehigh, Jr.TE -- Phazahn Odom, Fordham, GradOL -- Anthony Coyle, Fordham, Jr.OL -- Jordi Dalmau, Colgate, Sr.OL -- Julien Davenport, Bucknell, Sr.OL -- Zach Duffy, Lehigh, Sr.OL -- Tim OHara, Lehigh, Jr.DefenseDL -- Pat Afriyie, Colgate, Jr.DL -- Abdullah Anderson, Bucknell, Jr.DL -- Dewayne Cameron, Holy Cross, Sr.DL -- Ben Schumacher, Bucknell, Sr.LB -- Colton Caslow, Lehigh, Sr.LB -- Kyle Diener, Colgate, Sr.LB -- Mark Pyles, Bucknell, Jr.LB -- Ben Richard, Bucknell, Jr.LB -- Niko Thorpe, Fordham, Jr.DB -- Luke Ford, Holy Cross, Sr.DB -- Chris Morgan, Colgate, Sr.DB -- Alim Muhammad, Holy Cross, Jr.DB -- Jihaad Pretlow, Fordham, Sr.Special TeamsPK -- Henry Darmstadter, Georgetown, Sr.P -- Alex Pechin, Bucknell, So.RS -- Jihaad Pretlow, Fordham, Sr.Non-Specialist Player -- Jethro Francois, Georgetown, So. 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From filmmaker Nanette Burstein (On the Ropes), The Price of Gold revisits the saga that rocked the figure skating world ahead of the 1994 Lillehammer Olympic Winter Games: the assault on Nancy Kerrigan, and the plot that led its way back to her rival Tonya Harding. One thing collectible/trading card games require over the long haul is a sense of change. Once the most powerful interactions and combinations in a particular set of cards have been studied and refined over weeks or months, the competitive environment becomes increasingly stale and repetitive. Blizzards latest expansion pack, One Night in Karazhan, will shake up the meta in still-unknown ways, but while the shape of the heap remains unknown, the class that appears to remain at the bottom of it is Priest. The weakest class in Hearthstone at the moment, Priest is in need of a major overhaul, one that is more necessary than any class at any time in the games brief history.Yes, this time is differentBy the peculiar demands of logic, one class has to be the worst. Its a metaphysical impossibility for every class to be above average, but what makes Priest so different this time? In the past, there have been weak classes, such as Shaman prior to League of Explorers, Rogue in those initial dark, confusing days after the Gadgetzan Auctioneer nerf, or Hunter before everyone figured out that a mediocre class became a solid one when you have Call of the Wild in the deck.What made those situations different is that those classes had wide-enough design spaces that the spirit of experimentation never got completely drained from the pros and the hardcore players. Shaman was in a rut, but one that still encouraged testing and refining of Mech Shaman or Malygos Shaman or Murloc Shaman. Lock and Load Hunter and Mech Rogue turned out not to be competitive -- at least not at the initial stages for the former -- but you at least had to try out some of these archetypes and there was some surprise value at times.Priest, however, essentially plays like a weaker version of Priest from two years ago. Ive reviewed the deck lists for about a hundred players for this weekends Hearthstone Championship Tour European Summer preliminaries and theres not a Priest to be seen, a common situation since the Old Gods meta solidified in May.Dawid Zetalot Skalski, very possibly the Hearthstone pro that has played the most Priest games and is known for varied Priest builds on ladder, spent much of July just trying to get to legend. When youve lost Anduin-fan Jason Amaz Chan, you know Priest is in a weak place.Blizzards Team 5, the gang behind Hearthstone, are not unaware of the straits the class finds itself in. I think one of the messages to get across is that we love Priest and we want to see Priest succeed as much as the Priest players do, said Dean Ayala, talking to ESPN.com in a phone interview. A lot of people are playing Dragon Priest and that deck isnt necessarily all the way there, but were trying add more pieces like Book Wyrm to increase the power level of that deck.Karazhan cant save priestWith the opportunity a new cardset brings, Priest did not get any tools that can flip this script. Priest of the Feast, looked at in isolation, is a very solid card, a 3/6 with an effect for four-mana. But Priest has a lot of four-mana cards, with interesting effects, but none have been cards to build a deck around, simply because none of them get Priest out of the rut of falling behind early, struggling to stay on board during the mid-game, and either running out of removal when the opponents big threats come into play or getting crushed by burst damage.Priests offerings were so weak that one of the three new class cards, the much-panned Purify, was actually removed from Arena, the first time a card has ever been shut out of the Arena format simply for being weak (CThun cards are also not in Arena, but because of the synergy with the CThun card that you wouldnt be able to reliably draft).Priest is a reactive class in a tempo worldWhen discussing Hearthstone and many other similar types of games, the concept of tempo, or time, is very important. While Hearthstone doesnt have an actual clock, time is still a key factor in the sense that mana resources are limited and you want to get your plan in motion before the opponent gets theirs. What made Secret Paladin such an imposing deck pre-Standard was the ability to play powerful card after powerful card with efficient mana use and the Mysterious Challenger and the secrets forcing the opponent off the initiative.Priests card set doesnt allow any deck archetypes that can do similar. Museum Curator, a two-mana 1/2 that allows you to Discover a Deathrattle card, is a source of value, but it puts you at an instant board disadvantage against most of the popular two-drops in the game. Shifting Shade serves as pseudo-card draw, but its 4/3 body is easily removed by most classes, including many two-mana cards.dddddddddddd The Darkshire Alchemists five-health Battlecry has utility, but its 4/5 body is quite weak for the five mana it costs; even four-mana 4/5s only really see constructed play if they have a significant effect above-and-beyond their statline.Ayala feels that Priest being a reactive class doesnt necessarily restrict the design potential. We dont have a problem giving Priest proactive cards. I think a lot of their kit right now, such as Cabal Shadow Priest, Shadow Madness, and Holy Nova, you could say those are reactive cards. A lot of those pieces are really cool and fit Priests flavor but I dont think this really restricts us. Were not thinking when were sitting around that we can only make reactive cards. The Priests core is reactive, but the meta will define whether that is strong or not.Priests comeback cards are extremely situationalPriest does have removal cards, an absolute necessity when frequently playing-from-behind, but theyre generally extremely situational, many with quite onerous demands to trigger. Cards like Shadow Word: Pain and Shadow Word: Death, need the target to have specific attack ranges, Shadow Word: Horror only removes minions with 2 or less attack, and Excavated Evil requires you to destroy your own board as well. Other combinations, like Auchenai Soulpriest/Circle of Healing, require a very specific card combo. Priest does have Entomb for six mana, but by that point, its very often too little, too late.Now compare these to the removal of the other classes that tend towards control-builds. Warrior has a one-mana Execute that works on any damaged minion. Mage has multiple spells that attack all minions. Paladins Consecration is useful against aggro decks and with Equality, against control decks, no conditions attached.A class that usually plays from behind and doesnt have a lot of burst needs powerful, versatile comeback mechanisms. Priest doesnt.The standard format makes priests problems long-termBy using the Basic/Classic set as the set of cards that will persist rather than a tailored set of core cards that work for a wide variety of archetypes means that even if you fix Priest in this expansion or the next one and make it into a top-tier class, as soon as those cards rotate out of the format, Priests structural problems remain. What this means is that if Blizzard manages to fix the Priest issues, Blizzard essentially has to fix them again every few expansions because once the powerful cards rotate out, Priest goes right back to being a reactive class with underpowered cards.The loss of the Goblins vs. Gnomes card highlight this effect. What was keeping the Priest control decks relevant prior to the card rotation was an array of cards like Zombie Chow, Dark Cultist, Velens Chosen, and Lightbomb, that all furthered Priests win condition: getting a foothold on the board so that the late game cards actually mattered. And when Priest lost those cards, nothing replaced their role. Other classes lost key cards as well, but all of them got new cards that either served as worthy successors or opened up the class in a new direction.Ayala shared an optimistic note on this issue, noting that many times, its only taken a few cards to change the trajectory on a class. Youd be very surprised, in terms of how very few cards it takes. Usually you can put a couple of cards in the right places in a particular class and they turn out to be just fine, in terms of win rate, said Ayala.In terms of the deck being fun and people actually wanting to play them is a different and more difficult challenge. But for Priest right now, I enjoy playing the class and dont feel too design-restricted in terms of being able to give them certain cards.Theres still hopeDespite all this doom-and-gloom, theres no structural reason that the Priest class needs to forever be at the bottom of the ranks. For one, Blizzard is aware that the classs power level right now is weak and they have a vested interest in a dynamic game in which all nine classes are at least competitive. And none of the rules are set in stone; while Im not a lawyer, Im not aware of any federal law that compels them to leave Standard exactly as it currently is or figure out a new direction for the class to go.Blizzards Team 5 has already show themselves to be quite nimble in card development, adding new keywords and not being afraid to introduce new cards with novel effects on the way decks are built. Better days may be ahead for Hearthstones Priests, but today is still a bit murky. ' ' '