Just When You Thought the 2020 FIDAF DII Schedule Was Set . . .

Thursday, 23 January, 2020

Chaos, at times, can indeed spice up your American football life.

We found out today that said American football life in the 2020 Italian DII American football season hit a small bump that may cause major changes.

All of the 2020 DII teams received

an e-mail today from Fabio Tortosa

who is FIDAF's Commissioner

 Our recently announced three,

seven team Girones or leagues

in DII for the 2020 season had

an unexpected, last minute defector

 The Raiders, based near Pisa,

had just decided not to play in

DII in 2020

This decision would drop the number of DII clubs down to 20 for the upcoming campaign scheduled to open on the 29th of February.

Before the Raiders decision, our three leagues looked like this . . .

The Skorpions were part of

an untouched Girone A

The Raiders were part of

a now six team Girone B

 Girone C was also untouched

by the Raiders decision

The question now is will FIDAF stay the course with two seven team Girones and one of six teams or will they reshuffle the deck?

The consensus among the Skorpions leadership is that FIDAF will indeed restructure quickly into their favored configuration of four leagues consisting of five teams each.

If so, each team in each league would face their four league opponents twice, home and away, to play the usual eight game regular season.

In 2018, FIDAF's DII leagues were made up of only four teams that also played each other twice plus two inter-league games for a total of, again, eight regular season games.

So, either four, five team leagues or five, four team leagues seem like FIDAF'S most logical choices.

Logic?

Italy?

If this is indeed FIDAF's plan then the next question is will they seed the leagues based on projected power rankings as they did in the original 2020 schedule or will they move in a more cost effective, regional configuration?

Either way, FIDAF needs to move quickly as many teams have minimal control over their game day sites usage and will need as much lead time as possible to secure dates and times for their newly scheduled home contests.

Fortunately, the Skorpions are one of the few DII teams that does control its home turf, Skorpions Field, so we will be able to work with whatever home game dates that our new schedule requires.

Stay tuned . . .

 QB Riccardo Crosta about to

let one fly in practice tonight

We are renting a synthetic turf field near Skorpion Field for our practices during the month of January due to the expected inclement weather that is usually a big part of the Varese weather scene this time of year.

It has yet to arrive.

As a result of our renting, our field had already been set aside tonight for a Men's Soccer team's practice. Their practice moved back our starting time to 9:00 p.m. for our scheduled two hour practice tonight.

Still, we had another solid turnout with great effort on the part of the Skorpions.

As a coach, what more could I ask for from our athletes?

Well, I could ask for one more thing . . .

BE ON TIME!

In 2018, we started practices at 8:00 p.m. and 5% of our players would straggle onto the field at 8:10 p.m.

In 2019, we started practices at 8:15 p.m. and 5% of our players would straggle onto the field at 8:25 p.m.

In 2020, we have been starting practice at 8:30 p.m. and 5% of our players still straggle onto the field at 8:30 p.m.

Tonight we started practice at 9:00 p.m. and 5% of our players still straggled out onto the field at 9:10 p.m.

Logic?

Italy?

Reading Is FUNdamental!

A good read in another of

Albom's series of books

about the hereafter

Ciao!