JStew was a positive role model/leader. Not sure anyone will be left to do that, and it's an important job for team morale.
Thanks Jordan! He was a cool guy and had a couple of decent years. But it's time for him to hang up his MLS boots. Good luck to him
One of my favorite players. A great influence on the team, super competitor, solid defender and pure class...big shoes to fill as far as leadership...he really set the tone. We need a lot more players with his determination and character...absolute nails...he's the benchmark. Wish him the very best...
bye. don't care at all. nothing against the guy personally but his arrival led to our team short-sightedly getting rid of morrow and we missed the playoffs every season he was here. re-signing him for 2016 was a stupid jobs-for-boys move that hurt us.
Yeah, he may be nice and funny and a role model, but his job is to perform as a professional athlete, we're not going out for a beer with the guy... In fact that's one of the problems with the Quakes, that they even think about such nonsense... remember this article? CenterLine Report: Quakes draft picks exemplify club character “Many people like to say that it is an advantage to forego college and become a pro,” continued Doyle, “but when you get a chance to interview the kids at the MLS Combine that went to school for four years, you sense their maturity. And even though there is a learning curve for them once they do join MLS, they are mentally and physically prepared for it.” ... “It might sound corny,” said Doyle, “but they are really good kids, and you’d be proud to call them your own.” When is Robert Jonas going to write the follow-up article about how much JJ Koval, Joe Sofia, and A.J. Corrado have actually contributed to the Earthquakes on the field? What is the Quakes' club character that they exemplify, "lower division" ?
While you may have a point with the while "college kids are nice kids" thing I think what Stewart brought to the team could be thought of more in terms of team chemistry. I may be wrong, but he seemed to be this very sociable guy who seemed to help bring all the guys into the fold. Even when Tommy joined the team at 18 years old, you could see the banter on twitter between Stewart and Tommy. That counts for something IMO, and can be positively reflected by what happens on the field. Not easily quantifiable though, of course, so it is all conjecture.
Is your argument that college players who turn pro can't contribute to MLS teams, or what exactly? I don't think taking the maturity that comes with college experience into account when selecting players is unreasonable. That sentiment isn't invalidated simply because Doyle wasn't very good at selecting players (though I'd argue the bigger problem is actually figuring out how to use them moreso than the players themselves, in many cases).
If by building chemistry you mean ruining what we had in 2012, by jettisoning Morrow - remember they chose Stewart to start over Morrow - then it was a good move. (Sarcasm)
Well that's not Jordan's fault. That's the FO. Would you prefer he came in with a bad attitude? That would have just made a bad situation worse.
I did not say that. I think there are plenty of good players coming through college via the draft. Did you even bother to read the article I linked to? I'm talking about all the "you'd be proud to call them your own" and "got good grades at Stanford"... "community outreach"... "3.95 cumulative GPA that was the highest of all UCLA student-athletes"... shall I quote more of it? What matters is soccer ability, a guy's GPA is totally f*cking irrelevant if he's not good enough to play in MLS. Character is often qualified as an intangible when it comes to rating players, but it no doubt deserves its place in the list of qualities that makes for a great professional. For collegiate players, character takes its place alongside community, classroom, and competition as the four prized attributes recognized by the annual CLASS awards given to an exclusive group of senior NCAA Division I scholar-athletes. And in no coincidence to the factors that go into the Earthquakes draft day decisions, Koval, Sofia, and Corrado were among the 30 NCAA men’s soccer players nominated for the award last year. In voting results announced at the College Cup, Sofia was named to the CLASS first team and Corrado to the CLASS second team. The recognition received by all three Quakes rookies only bolstered their credentials as potential professional players. Glad they're at least "CLASS" off the field because they certainly weren't on it!
You didn't really specify outside of the quoted section what you were referring to with regard to "remember this article", so I assumed you were criticizing the quoted part, which made it sound like you didn't think there was value to considering college experience when evaluating players. I'm not going to defend Doyle's player selection ability, but one could argue that GPA suggests that these guys were good students and therefore teachable. Not sure how far I would go with that argument, but there's a logic to it and is at least worth considering rather than brushing off as nonsense. For instance, do college players with higher GPAs end up making better pros than college players with lower GPAs? That might be worth investigating, is all I'm saying. I also reiterate that a bigger part of the problem than even player selection was complete lack of being able to improve players they acquired or use said players appropriately. So even if Koval was a totally coachable player, Doyle and Kinnear didn't have anything to teach them so it didn't really matter.
Almost all the best soccer players in the world don't even have college GPAs because they didn't go to college. What was Messi's GPA in college? Is he not "teachable"? You know what makes for better pros? How good a player is at soccer. It's when you don't draft high quality soccer players that you have to play up s*** that is totally irrelevant to soccer ability like the "CLASS awards".... So to bring it back to this thread, Jordan Stewart is a great guy by all accounts, whereas a guy like Zlatan may be a huge jerk... which one would you rather have on your soccer team?
You've created an either/or scenario that does not exist. I did in no way suggest other players weren't teachable because they didn't have college GPAs. I posited the question whether college players with higher GPAs made better professionals than those with lower or not. You are mostly addressing Doyle's poor ability to identify talent. I also think he was not good at this. However, let's say you have several players who all are deemed to be roughly equivalent in ability. How do you then determine which of them might make the best player from there? I certainly don't think things like GPA or awards would be first on my list of criteria, but they could be useful additional bits of information. Considering they do not play the same position, you could have both. What I think is that you are exaggerating how influential these kinds of things were in the FO's roster decision making. There are tons of players the Quakes signed that were either foreign or otherwise had no collegiate record from which to draw. It isn't as if the entire roster was made up of Stanford grads from the honor role and nothing else. And I do think there is something to the idea of players who are more apt to working together. Since team's need cohesion, it isn't exactly wise to fill it up with ultra talented guys who have no interest in doing anything other than what they want to do. Now, with relation to Stewart, I think it's pretty safe to say he didn't offer as much to the team as Morrow did, at least not if you look at their career trajectories. Due to age, it was clear that one would be declining while the other could still be on the climb. That's proved true. However, I will say that I don't think Stewart, on his own, was really a negative for the team as a whole, at least not until his injury. Francis outperformed more often than not, yet Stewart continued to get minutes. I think that's because the Quakes knew they weren't going to re-sign him and wanted to get their money's worth. That falls on Kinnear, most likely.
Apparently Totti admits to only having read one book in his life (The Little Prince)... He was not the best student — “he was only good for one thing, and that was football,” one teacher said ... ''Totti's library burned to the ground; it had two books.'' Totti is desperate: ''I hadn't finished coloring in the second one.'' I don't believe two players can be "roughly equivalent" to the extent that college GPA becomes a relevant consideration... can you even give an example of such a situation, forget about the handful of players in the draft and what positions a team needs to fill, but spanning the globe and history? Koval may have had a decent GPA and been one of 30 finalists for that "CLASS award" but I said at the time that I would have drafted Patrick Mullins over him... not because of any awards, although at least "two-time Hermann Trophy winner" is soccer related!
I don't think it's your intent, but this commentary is starting to feel something like contempt for the educated. I will say it yet again, Doyle was not very good at assessing talent. That does not, by itself, invalidate some of the things he may have used to determine readiness for professional life. There are obvious issues with the way many college players develop in the US, but since MLS uses a draft of college players as part of its selection pool, don't you think it makes sense to at least examine as many of the parameters that goes into turning college players into what they are as you can? Do you not think general intelligence might have a possible correlation with game intelligence as well? It's worth exploring. That's all I'm saying. I personally don't know if GPA has any relevance at all toward whether it helps make players more suitable as pros are not. I suggested it would be an interesting and perhaps worthwhile study to see if GPA was a meaningful predictor for collegiate athletes in terms of pro success. That's all.
Lol my parents are both university professors with PhDs from UC Berkeley, and I also have a doctoral degree... which is why I'm at least smart enough to know that drafting based on education makes no sense in professional sports. Also the best player I have ever seen play for my A's would be Rickey Henderson: 3) In the early 1980s, the Oakland A’s accounting department was freaking out. The books were off $1 million. After an investigation, it was determined Rickey was the reason why. The GM asked him about a $1 million bonus he had received and Rickey said instead of cashing it, he framed it and hung it on a wall at his house. 4) In 1996, Henderson’s first season with San Diego, he boarded the team bus and was looking for a seat. Steve Finley said, “You have tenure, sit wherever you want.” Henderson looked at Finley and said, “Ten years? Ricky’s been playing at least 16, 17 years.” 10) A reporter asked Henderson if Ken Caminiti’s estimate that 50 percent of Major League players were taking steroids was accurate. His response was, “Well, Rickey’s not one of them, so that’s 49 percent right there.”
So what you are saying is you aren't interested in investigating the possibility of whether or not academic aptitude has any predictive use for college players turning pro. That's unfortunate. Also, you don't own the A's.
Well, he could actually be technically right on this one. If Ricky were considered to be in Caminiti's 50 percent "taking", and according to him, he is not taking, then the percentage must be lower than 50%, and if you are using a "step function" for rounding, where you need to reach the next plateau to hit the number, then the new number must be 49%.
1) No I am not, I will leave that to you and look forward to reading all about your groundbreaking research into the subject. 2) How do you know?
Robert Jonas may be a nice guy but he is a tool. He operates like a wing of the team rather than an independent journalist who should be critical of the team, not apologetic for them.