Remember all the talk during the last days of the Don Devoe era and the early days of this season about how Navy can't compete now that the league allows scholarships? Well apparently those tales of woe are only trotted out when the Mids need to explain a slump.

Now that Navy has apparently turned things around with its second half of the season resurgence, Billy Lange is singing a different tune. In a Baltimore Sun story about first-year college coaches in Maryland, Kent Baker writes:

Lange said he occasionally hears 'a little feedback" about players' reluctance to join Navy because of the five-year military commitment that ensues and the war in Iraq. "But that's not really a detriment."

He said one player at the Naval Academy Prep School might be able to help next season and he has "'five or six commitments" from newcomers.

Name the scholarship program in the league that can bring in five or six (or more, he's still recruiting) players each year, or that can stash folks at a prep school for what amounts to a defacto redshirt season.

O.K., yeah, we know about Joe Knight and the Texas juco. But that is different, especially since Knight did not spend that year polishing his hoops skills and his grades at the same time.

Contrast the Navy Prep scenario with Tom Housenick of the Daily Item's story about what Bucknell's Charles Lee went through as a freshman. When Lee needed to concentrate on his grades, it cost him most of his freshman season. Bucknell, like the rest of the scholarship schools, has no way to season kids for a year while they adjust to the academics.