NOLE HULK PREDICT FSU WIN TWENTY SEVEN GAMES. SIX BOWL GAMES. BIG XII CHAMPIONSHIP. PONDER BECOME KNIGHT. FISHER WIN BRONZE STAR. FSU HAVE SHOT AT WINNING AFC EAST. ALSO DAYTIME EMMY. NOLE HULK KIDDING. BUT NOLE HULK HEAR FSU FANS TALK LIKE THAT. NOLE HULK THINK FSU WIN EIGHT OR NINE GAMES. ALSO BOWL WIN.

NOLE HULK NO ATTEND MUCH GAMES. PEOPLE STARE. RUN FROM HOLE HULK. SMALL CHILDREN CRY. NOLE HULK USUALLY IN MEDIA ROOM ON LEATHER COUCH. WATCH GAME IN HD. NOLE HULK HIGH-TECH. WHEN NOLE HULK ATTEND NOLE HULK USE DIVERSION. LIKE STAND NEXT TO COWGIRLS. PEOPLE NO LOOK AT NOLE HULK. BUSY LOOK AT COWGIRLS. NO RESTROOM. NOLE HULK JUST HOLD IT. NO NOT HOLD IT. HOLD IT IN. BILL KNOW WHAT NOLE HULK MEAN.

NOLE HULK COLLECT BOOKS. RARE AND LEATHER BOUND. NOLE HULK HAVE MANY FINE BOOKS. NOLE HULK TRY EBOOKS BUT NO SMELL LIKE REAL BOOKS. NOLE HULK READ CLASSICS. SOMETIMES BEST SELLERS. NOLE HULK LIKE FAULKNER BUT FAULKNER TOO MELODRAMATIC. NOLE HULK LIKE CORMAC MCCARTHY BUT WISH CORMAC MCCARTHY USE QUOTATION MARKS. NOLE HULK GET CONFUSED –PEOPLE TALKING OR JUST THINK IT? NOLE HULK LIKE JOHN GRISHAM. BUT JOHN GRISHAM AS PREDICTABLE AS GEORGIA TECH OFFENSE. DO SAME THING EVERY BOOK BUT FOR SOME REASON NO ONE SEE IT COMING.

NOLE HULK WRITE LETTER FOR DRUNK HULK INTERVENTION.

DEAR DRUNK HULK.

DRUNK HULK DRINKING AFFECT NOLE HULK FOLLOWING WAYS. NOLE HULK WORRY FOR DRUNK HULK. DRUNK HULK NO PAY BACK NOLE HULK MONEY. DRUNK HULK BLOW CHUNKS IN NOLE HULK CAR. RUIN NOLE HULK LEATHER SEAT. SMELL STILL NOT COME OUT. WILL DRUNK HULK ACCEPT HELP TODAY? IF NOT DRUNK HULK LIFE CHANGE IN FOLLOWING WAYS. NOLE HULK NO LONGER GIVE DRUNK HULK RIDE HOME FROM BAR. NOLE HULK NO LONGER LET DRUNK HULK WATCH FSU GAME ON NOLE HULK HDTV. NOLE HULK NO LONGER LET DRUNK HULK CRASH ON COUCH WHEN DRUNK HULK EVICTED FROM DRUNK HULK APARTMENT. PLEASE DRUNK HULK GET HELP. NOLE HULK NO LOVE DRUNK HULK TO DEATH.

LOVE,

NOLE HULK.

NOLE HULK LIKE WATCH ALL FSU SPORTS ON TV. NOLE HULK LOVE FSU FOOTBALL. NOLE HULK WISH FSU HAD WRESTLING PROGRAM. NOLE HULK NOT SPEND MUCH TIME OUT OF MAGNET LAB. OCCASIONALLY NOLE HULK HANG OUT IN GEOPHYSICAL FLUID DYNAMICS LAB WHEN FEEL LAZY. NOLE HULK LIKE BUFFETS. NOLE HULK NO ALLOWED IN BUFFETS ANYMORE.

And Frazier, a 6-4, 185 pound SG, is a player that FSU fans would really enjoy seeing play at the Civic Center.

The statistics alone tell you why. Michael is a deadly rangy shooter averaging 26.7 ppg last season and was the first 10^th grader in Hillsborough County history to score more than 1,000 points in a season. In addition he added 7.8 rpg to go along with 40 steals.

Frazier is clearly not just an offensive player.

But more than his statistics is his work ethic. Frazier is notorious for his early morning (we’re talking 6 AM) thirty minute workouts every day of the week. It’s a fast paced 200 plus shooting workout that covers the various types of shots a well rounded shooter needs to have in his arsenal.

Add in the weight training he does three times a week.

And this is all fit into his schedule while maintaining a 4.0 GPA at what is known as one of the better public high schools educationally in the country. Academics will never be an issue for Frazier.

His play is very reminiscent of a former Seminole that everyone should recall, James Collins. Michael can hit the three pointer but also put it on the floor and attack the rim vigorously in a manner that reminds one of Collins’ days in the garnet and gold.

What will be the challenge for Frazier is how he handles the next two seasons. He is no secret weapon anymore and opponents will be looking to stop him. This will be even more of a challenge as Frazier is clearly the best player on the Panthers and on a scrappy but definitely not a powerhouse team.

Despite the lengthy involvement with Frazier, Florida State will have its work cut out them if they hope to sign him as the competition for his services is growing.

Numerous schools have already made verbal offers to him.

Among the better known programs according to his coach, Mike Phillips, there is Virginia Tech, Miami, Indiana, Michigan, Oregon, UCF, USF, many of the SEC such as Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Ole Miss, South Carolina, and most recently Florida just offered him. Even Harvard has shown a great deal of interest in him.

Compounding Florida State’s efforts will be several factors.

One, Phillips is an Indiana grad. Obviously Phillips has been pitching the Hoosiers and Tom Crean is a notable coach who can probably turn the program around from the Kelvin Sampson debacle before Frazier arrives for his freshman year.

The bigger obstacles however are that Frazier is originally from Gainesville having been born there and has mentioned that he has always been a fan of the Gators. Lately the Gators have been recruiting him the hardest according to Frazier.

Assistant coach Richard Pitino reportedly was in attendance at several of his Florida Elite AAU games recently.

But Frazier also adds that he has no personal favorites right now and that he is just working on his game every day and not concerning himself with the recruiting process. He will have a lot of time later to make a decision.

The four star player is rated as the 8^th best player at his position among the class of 2012 in the country according to Scout. Given his work ethic and talent that ranking will probably move higher.

• Random photo posts – From time to time I see a shirt that is just too ugly to carry the Garnet and Gold or a weird item at a store or a weird fan. I’ve just never had a good way to grab my cell phone and post a picture. Tumblr lets me do that easily. So if I have a random photo I’d like to share with you guys, I’ll post it to the Tumblr site.
• Audio posts – I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do yet with my audio posts. Perhaps I’ll introduce you to the 1 minute or less pregame and postgame thoughts.
• Other random crap that I don’t want to save for a full post – There are plenty of times that I read a quote or see a clip of something that I’d like to share with my FSU friends, but it never fit my vision for a post here on the site. Tumblr is how I plan to do that too.

Bookmark that Tumblr link above (it’s integrated with the site here) or feel free to check in at http://scalpem.tumblr.com/ more often as we head into the 2010 FSU Football season.

• For quite a while I’ve thought about closing up shop here for various reasons. The last year of my life vastly changed my outlook about what is important to me and what isn’t important. With that said, I always love the Seminoles so following my school will always have some level of importance in my life.
• So what’s happening? I’m not putting the site into archive mode. However, there will not be as ambitious of a posting schedule here as there was in the past. This is likely the last year that I will be a season ticket holder for FSU football and I’d like to enjoy it with out my own imposed feeling of obligation to upload photos and immediately write about the game. I just want to be a fan and watch the games without lugging the camera or taking notes.
• I’m focusing on quality over quantity. Tomahawk Nation does it particularly well (although they have a ton of quick hitting quantity too, but it’s segregated nicely), in the sense that they aren’t always first but they are almost always the most thorough. They don’t take part in the two paragraph crap out there that I see too often in sports blogging. Sure,I can be the 8th guy to weigh in on something, but I’d rather not be a part of the noise.
• As for that senseless stuff there’s a great forum for that called Twitter. You can follow me on Twitter where I’ll post some of the off the wall short thoughts I have about the Noles.
• This will continue to be a place that is dedicated to talking about Seminole Softball. I had high hopes for the Tallahassee Democrat, but now that they’ve moved to a subscription model the free sources of news about the team are once again very limited.
• I thank you all for reading and I hope that you continue to check in a couple of times per week, especially when the season gets rolling, the Jimbotron Fan Confidence Meter polls weekly and On The Warpath makes the occasional return.

• First up, congratulations to “Meat.” Even if he doesn’t get the job, the fact that he’s being interviewed is great and shows that other schools know he’s doing a good job coaching up the FSU bats.
• Ultimately, I think Jr. leaving FSU hurts the Noles at the plate for the foreseeable future. Why? Unless another coach thinks that Mike Martin is bailing out soon and being an assistant on staff would leapfrog them into the HC position, I don’t see top assistants wanting the job.
• Another problem with assistants is the carousel situation, which can be bad on hitter development. It’s not fun to have 3 different hitting coaches and styles over 4 years. I think that’s a distinct possibility at FSU if Jr. is hired by South Alabama.
• For Mike Martin, Jr.’s career this is a great move. Not only would he gain head coaching experience elsewhere, but if he’s successful it will open up much larger jobs for him, including FSU.
• In fact, successes elsewhere would give him a better chance at being the Head Coach for the Noles down the road. If he doesn’t leave, there will be a ton of groaning about Jr. getting the job only because he’s Sr.’s son.
• If Jr. gets the job, he’ll beat out the likes of Rod Delmonico, Mark Calvi and a host of other excellent coaching prospects. That’s pretty awesome.

I’m curious, how do readers feel about that? Does it change your view of the article at all? How do you feel about it vs. regular advertising?

Me? I’ve been offered similar types of posts and avoided them, however, I don’t have a problem with it especially when a site spells out the fact that it’s a sponsored post. From Tomahawk Nation’s post Where I Come From:

This post is sponsored by EA Sports NCAA Football 2011.Happy Independence Day Weekend! This is our first post of NCAA Football 11 sponsored posts throughout the week. During the series, we value your input greatly.

To me, that’s a good way to handle things. Up front, the reader knows that EA is guiding a topic through sponsorship. From the various SB Nation blogs that I read, it also appears that while the posts are sponsored the content is just as honest, funny or asinine as normal. Carolina March is another that comes to mind for handling the week well and being up front with readers.

Let me know how you feel about sponsored posts in a comment.

• Summer doldrums arrived. This is the absolute worst time of the year to be a college anything fan. The summer reminds us that there’s still a long haul until the beginning of the college football season. I think that affects fan confidence as attentions are turned to distractions like baseball.
• Stale news is boring. Newspapers, bloggers, whatever. This is the time of year where I feel like, “Man, I’ve read all this before.” Right or wrong, that affects my enthusiasm until the beginning of August, when there are fresh stories to report about the team.
• Realistic expectations are setting in. Sure there was plenty of afterglow knowing that FSU won the Gator Bowl and a new era debuts in 2010, but a peek at the FSU football schedule, coupled with tepid season ticket sales and bad news (Gulf oil spill, still crappy economy) has at Debbie Downer affect on general opinion. Maybe that spills over into the confidence poll too.

Granted, the poll is a tiny sample size of the FSU fan base. But, what I find most interesting about it is that I have a consistent bunch of voters. That means that a relatively similar sample over time is losing confidence in the 2010 season.  What does that mean? Who knows. I leave it opened ended for the fun of it. Perhaps some expectations were over the top to begin with and a corresponding decline in confidence means that poll voters are in line with an 8 win season instead of 10. Either way, I think the August 1 poll will be relatively flat, and then we’ll see where it goes from there.

Happy 4th of July! Go Noles!

That number is exactly the same as last year.

It’s not all doom and gloom as you can read in the article linked above. The renewal rate is improved and the decline of sales stopped, but all of the hype out there in the FSU media and blogging worlds (myself included) talks about renewed energy in the program and how many things look rosy headed into the season. Evidently that’s not translated to the paying fan.

So what does that tell us? I’m not sure, but I have a couple of theories.

• First, the economy continues to be unsteady and the unemployment rate remains high. Many Noles have to travel to Tallahassee for the games which requires hotel stays and food purchases. Basically, the total cost to attend games is much higher than the cost of the season tickets for many fans. Until the economy improves a boost in sales won’t occur unless the Noles have tangible results on the field.
• Second, I think there are many fans that are pissed about how the Bobby Bowden era ended. Winning and time will fix those opinions. I’ll never know how anybody thinks anybody else is entitled to anything, but Bowden apologists think he was entitled to completely run the program into the ground like a kid that destroys his Lego castle. That’s wrong and what happened last year is ultimately for the better, but it doesn’t mean that there are probably some fans that are holding back their money.
• Third, value is beginning to be a problem. I blame HDTV and more than 6 home games. Years ago my seat provided a much better view of the game than my 32″ inch standard definition Sony at home. Years ago there were mostly 6 home games at $35 per game. Going to see the Noles, a 10 win team at that price was a steal for your entertainment dollar. Now at $50 per game (or more with booster contributions) and Jimbo’s desire to have 7 or 8 home games each season AND three 7-6 seasons over the last four years AND HDTV the value of attending a game doesn’t seem as high as it used to be.
• Fourth, there is a lot more ticket package variety. Because of weaker ticket sales, FSU is offering 3 game packages, discounted Family Zone tickets and plenty of single game tickets. During the late 90′s when there were 46,000 season ticket holders I remember feeling so lucky that I had my tickets to a Miami or Florida game. Now it seems like it wouldn’t be a big deal to find some reasonably priced tickets for a game like that.
• Finally, I think the overall feel of games is starting to drive the average fan away. Years ago, I was a NASCAR fan before it was overly corporate. It was fun to watch a race, enjoy the “Average Joe” crowd and take it all in. Eventually it went too corporate and I lost my taste for it. When I went to my first FSU football game I had the same feeling. The stadium was still being renovated, we still had a Lite Brite scoreboard and there were a lot of regular fans. Thirteen years later the crowds have changed, much like the cars driving around campus. With that a new attitude has arrived and I can see some people might not enjoy that and decide to follow the Noles away from Doak Campbell Stadium.

Now it comes out from the Tallahassee Democrat that Solomon was diagnosed with a rare medical condition (that is not life threatening thankfully) in the pre-draft physical exams which was shared with all NBA teams.

That obviously had an affect as to where he was drafted with teams shying away from him coupled with his leg injury two years ago. How much this condition affected his game we don’t know. It sure didn’t help.

So this helps to explain why he went so late. I can assure you that Leonard Hamilton and Stan Jones work very hard for their potential NBA players prior to the draft to get a good idea where players are likely to go in the draft. It was difficult to believe they could be so wrong.

Solomon just can’t catch a break. But here’s hoping he can stay on with Toronto or some other NBA team. He was confident he was going in the first round when he declared last April.

In other FSU basketball draft news, Ryan Reid was a surprise pick going 57th to Indiana (later traded to Oklahoma). Ryan as early as early April had workouts scheduled with NBA teams and obviously someone liked with what they saw with his physical play and his willingness to do the dirty work.  Will he stick in the NBA, who knows? But I will tell you this, Ryan is going to be missed by FSU fans more than they know come next season.

On a side note, Ryan in his senior year in high school went head to head against Stanley Robinson of UConn. Ryan had his hands full in that game and Robinson did get the better of him with Ryan eventually fouling out. Robinson garnered a good deal of attention while at UConn. Certainly more than Ryan did in his college career. Turns out Robinson was selected 59th two slots behind Ryan. I consider that a small piece of payback for that game six years ago.