Leading off today: Suspended Buffalo McKinley boys basketball and track coach James Daye insisted to
The Buffalo News that he had no involvement in the dismissal of Michelle Stiles as a volunteer girls basketball coach and that he should be reinstated from paid leave as a teacher and coach.
He alleges Buffalo Public Schools officials made him the scapegoat in the McKinley controversy and said he is in line to be named the school's varsity football coach.
"I’m definitely the victim in this whole situation," Daye told the paper. "They had no one else to pin it on."
Daye said his attorney and the city teachers union are working to gain his reinstatement. However, the paper said Daye refused to discuss the allegation from this past spring that he had sexual relations with a South Carolina high school student while coaching at her school in the early 1990s.
Daye, 44, has been on administrative leave since March 10, when the state Education Department launched an investigation into the South Carolina allegations. He said he has received death threats and racist telephone calls during the controversy and that his mail has been tampered with.
"I’m tired of people walking by and whispering about me," Daye said.
New and improved: I've used this blog to pound on them before, so it's only fair that I give a tip of the hat now to the folks at CalPreps.com, whose computerized football ratings are used on MaxPreps.
I've objected to their methodology in the past, particularly with respect to how they rated Long Island teams. Sections 8 and 11 were not getting proper credit because their members are almost 100 percent isolated from the rest of the state when it comes to scheduling during the regular season and playoffs. With no chance at comparing performances against common opponents and minimal instances in which the opponents of opponents might have had common opponents (wow, try writing that three times fast), Long Island was consistently shorted in the weekly ratings updates.
However, sharp-eyed reader Charles Pearlman noticed recently that CalPreps appears to have gone into its software and adjusted the formula. As a result, the Long Island sections went from have only four schools ranked in New York's top 325 in 2006 to having five clubs in the top 100 for 2007.
The most obvious example is William Floyd, whose undefeated teams were ranked 104th and fourth in 2006 and 2007, respectively.
I still have a few minor quibbles with computerized rankings, which don't take injuries into account and don't properly credit a team for building a 35-0 lead and then winning by a 35-21 final score because they substituted
