Ruden Sports News

FCIAC

Commentary: This Year’s FCIAC Football Final — Likely The Last — Comes With Melancholy

Dave Ruden

11.20.2014

New Canaan's seniors celebrate last year's FCIAC championship win over St. Joseph. (Photo: Mark Conrad)

New Canaan’s seniors celebrate last year’s FCIAC championship win over St. Joseph. (Photo: Mark Conrad)

The FCIAC held its initial football championship game in 1966 at Boyle Stadium. Rick Robustelli was the quarterback for Stamford Catholic, which upset Rippowam, 32-6, a team led by a star running back whose first professional baseball contract was negotiated with advice from Robustelli’s NFL Hall of Fame father Andy. The player was Bobby Valentine.

It remains the most attended final and still one of the most talked-about events in Stamford sports lore.

“I will always remember the first one,” said John Kuczo, the league’s executive secretary. “I was there. “We had a paid attendance of 11,000 people, but there were 3,000 people in the stadium before we even set up to sell tickets. It was an exciting game.”

This Thanksgiving morning, after six years housed elsewhere, the FCIAC championship returns to the venerable stadium on the Stamford High School campus. The game features the league’s top current rivalry in the sport, the teams from the neighboring towns of Darien and New Canaan.

It is the perfect matchup at the perfect venue, but the excitement comes with a dose of melancholy. Without a Hail Mary pass that would be completed in a boardroom, the 49th league final will also be the last.

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And though the football landscape has shifted, especially in the last decade, this is a sad thing for the league.

“If this is it, it would be a shame,” said Staples’ Marce Petroccio, who has coached in the title game seven times, with five wins. “We had this going before the state championship.”

The FCIAC final actually predates CIAC championships by a decade, and for a long while was considered the more coveted trophy.

A confluence of events peaked last winter, when some teams played as many as 15 games, a snowstorm delayed the final state championship until Dec. 19, and safety concerns about proper concussion protocols were addressed.

The end result was a multi-faceted agreement that included a strict adherence to a 10-game regular season schedule beginning next year. An FCIAC championship would count as one of the games, and thus becomes unviable.

Kuczo said the league has had two appeals to the CIAC for an exemption rejected. There have been a number of workarounds discussed. There is no sensible way to maintain the game.

“We can’t do it,” Kuczo said. “Ten games is 10 games. It’s too bad.”

Today’s players weren’t born when the FCIAC final was the lone game played on Thanksgiving, a holiday tradition that saw fans converge at Boyle. In 1994 the league established rivalry games on the holiday. The final was played on the previous weekend unless two scheduled Thanksgiving rivals qualified for the game.

With the realization this week that the final is likely to become extinct, there has been debate over the current import of the game. A 19-team league, unbalanced schedules and a point system together have been at best an imperfect way for determining the finalists.

New Canaan's Frank Cognetta, who rushed for 176 yards in last year's FCIAC final, will be back with the Rams on Thursday. (Photo: Mark Conrad)

New Canaan’s Frank Cognetta, who rushed for 176 yards in last year’s FCIAC final, will be back with the Rams on Thursday. (Photo: Mark Conrad)

Then there has been the dominance by several powers; Greenwich (6), Staples (5), New Canaan (4) and Darien (2) have won every title since 1996, save for 2005, when Trumbull interrupted the cycle. Danbury, Bridgeport Central, Norwalk and St. Joseph — a combined seven times — are the only other schools that have reached the final in that stretch.

Critics contend that the FCIAC final has been diminished in stature. This is not the parochial view.

“It might be true for people not involved with the FCIAC,” Petroccio said. “People in this league know a lot about the importance. They say you don’t know you will miss something until it is gone. We’re going to miss it.”

The first argument here is a basic one: if you are going to have a league, there should be a league champion. The regular season should not solely be about state playoff qualifying. The two are not mutually exclusive.

There is too much tradition that cannot be dismissed so easily. There were the three great Stamford-New Canaan finals from 1969-71; Darien shutting out a Steve Young-led Greenwich team in 1979; the Cardinals becoming the only school to ever win three straight titles, from 1981-83; New Canaan defeating Greenwich for the second successive season, a 21-20 nailbiter in 2000; to the first New Canaan-Darien final six years ago, a 28-20 Rams win and the second-most attended FCIAC final.

“The paid attendance was 9,998,” Kuczo said. “There are a lot of fond memories.”

They appear headed to the scrapbook, at least for the foreseeable future. Colleges have been adding conference championships, with great success.

But these points are really idealistic musings because there is nothing to argue. As Petroccio said, leagues that want to hold a title game have been put into a box. Given the changes for next season, there really isn’t a rational argument for keeping the game that wouldn’t create a bigger problem elsewhere.

So lets savor having Darien and New Canaan playing at Boyle Stadium Thursday morning. In 2014, it is the right game at the right venue. It is probably too late, but maybe the league could somehow get a few of the past stars of Thanksgiving to come out to the hallowed turf at halftime for a final bow.

Asked what he would like for the last final game, Kuczo paused.

“I hope it’s a tie,” he said. “I’m politically correct.”

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