PHIL EMERY BRINGS STRENGTH & DEDICATION TO CHICAGO BEARS

For those who follow Navy Football religiously, the name Phil Emery brings back good memories.  From 1991 to 1998, Coach Emery served as the strength & conditioning coach for Navy football.  When his former players think of him, it is the toughness, dedication, and commitment that stand out. The stereotypical strength & conditioning coach is a big man with a no nonsense attitude who pushes players beyond their perceived performance limits. Phil Emery is that and a lot more.  He brought continuity and leadership to the team. LtCol Brian Grana USMC, who played Navy football in the 1990s and trained under Phil Emery, had this to say:

“While we were all still figuring out how to be Midshipmen and future Navy and Marine Corps Officers, Phil “Satan” Emery made us men.  He is easily one of the most influential people I have ever come across – and this is not hyperbole.”

John Feinstein made Phil Emery famous in his 1996 book Army-Navy: A Civil War. Emery earned the nickname Satan by the Navy football players because of his meticulous attention to detail, brutal workouts, and almost superman-like commitment to his duties. [Editor’s note: a quick Google search of “Phil Emery and Satan” yields over 7.7 million hits].  One story from Feinstein’s book really stands out.

One winter morning, an ice storm had completely shut down the eastern seaboard. Since Emery lived outside of Annapolis, the players arrived for their 5:30 AM running and conditioning session fully convinced they would end up with a morning off. But as they walked through the darkness to Ricketts Hall, they saw a lone car sitting in the parking lot waiting for them—Emery’s. Only the devil himself could have made it there before dawn—and taken such pleasure in being there on a totally miserable morning.

After leaving USNA in 1998, Emery’s career continued to flourish.  He scouted a total of 14 seasons for the Bears, Falcons and Chiefs respectively. He earned great admiration and respect around the NFL much the way he did at USNA.

All that hard work led to the job of a lifetime.  On January 28, Phil Emery was named the General Manager for the Chicago Bears.  He has his work cut out for him. The Bears are coming off a disappointing 8-8 season with off the field drama and contract disputes. But if any man is capable of handling such issues, it’s Phil Emery.

I’M SURE THEY’D LOVE TO, BUT…

Andrea Adelson blogged on Friday that the Big East needs to step up its PR game:

At a time when the Big East has lost its automatic qualifying status, it needs somebody to vociferously defend the league, to explain why the league deserves an equal share of the BCS revenue pie as the Big Ten, Big 12, ACC, SEC and Pac-12. Someone to beat the Big East drum; to make every attempt possible to let an entire nation know that the ACC is not better than the Big East when it comes to BCS performance.

Nobody in the Big East has even attempted to make this case. Or to provide a breakdown of how the Big East has done vs. the ACC in the BCS. It should be an absolute outrage that the Big East is teetering on the brink of being left out of the big BCS money. Why? Going back to the first BCS game in 1999, the ACC is 2-13 all-time; The Big East is 8-6.

It’s a nice pep talk for the Big East, which is something of a surprise coming from an ESPN entity. However, it’s hard for the Big East to make the kind of PR push that Adelson is calling for when the future of conference expansion (and by extension, Big East membership) is still unclear. While most conferences seem content at the moment, the Big 12 has a new commissioner and may or may not be looking to get back to 12 teams. Louisville and Cincinnati have been rumored as potential Big 12 targets for a while now, but with the recent $200 million/year agreement that the conference has made with ESPN & Fox , it’s hard to imagine either of those schools adding value to the deal.  It’s not surprising, then, that most rumors have involved the Big 12 poaching the ACC instead, with Florida State, Clemson, and Virginia Tech as the latest targets of wild speculation. And make no mistake– right now it really is just wild speculation. The Big 12 hasn’t made any public indication that it’s looking to expand. At this point the only thing revealed as a result of these rumors is just how dysfunctional the leadership is at Florida State. Even if it’s just speculation at this point, it’s still reason to be nervous; if the ACC is raided, they are sure to respond by poaching the Big East yet again. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that. If TV is the biggest driver in conference realignment, it doesn’t make much sense for ESPN to weaken a conference it owns the rights to while strengthening a conference that it shares with Fox.

If it’s just left alone for once, the new Big East could still put together a very lucrative television deal. It’s just hard to move into the future when the dark cloud of uncertainty is hanging over your head. Pray that the Big 12 is content with its already huge TV deal so that we can move into our own negotiations with what should be a very good football & basketball package.