Christen Press is just fine without Babe Ruth

The year after the Yankees and Babe Ruth parted ways, Lou Gehrig had one of the least productive seasons of his career. That 1935 campaign was still a fantastic season by any other player’s standards — 30 home runs, 119 RBI and a 1.049 OPS — but it wasn’t up to his standards, particularly coming off one of the most productive season of his career the year before in 1934. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Yankees failed to win at least 90 games for the first time in five seasons.

The downturn didn’t last; Gehrig rebounded by winning AL MVP in 1936 and reeled off back-to-back monster seasons before the effects of the disease that now bears his name brought his playing career to an end by the close of the decade. But the first season sans Ruth was a challenge.

Fast forward seven decades and compare apples to apples, and we need only look at how Casey Nogueira, Whitney Engen, Tobin Heath and North Carolina fared the season after Heather O’Reilly graduated — the lull in the middle of three national championships for the former trio’s class — for another example of the same phenomenon. O’Reilly graduated, the Tar Heels, by their standards, stopped scoring and the season ended short of the College Cup.

It’s not easy to replace a legend, even for someone bound to earn their own place in the history of a sport.

As her senior season begins, Stanford’s Christen Press doesn’t have the luxury of an adjustment period. She gets one crack at replacing Kelley O’Hara as the face and pulse of the Cardinal before some WPS teams presumably happily scoops her up for the next decade.

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Previewing No. 2 Stanford at No. 7 Boston College

We know a lot about both No. 2 Stanford and No. 7 Boston College, teams that return most of the starting lineups that took the field when the teams met in the quarterfinals of last year’s NCAA tournament.

Friday at the Newton Soccer Complex, one of the underrated places nationwide to watch a game, we start to learn what we don’t know.

Both the Cardinal and Eagles lost significant offensive presences to graduation and WPS — Stanford to the greater degree with Hermann Trophy winner Kelley O’Hara, but Boston College with Gina DiMartino. But as blasphemous as it seems to suggest replacing a Hermann winner isn’t automatically the most pressing issue confronting a team, offense seems unlikely to prove a millstone around either team’s neck.

If you have Christen Press, Lindsay Taylor, Teresa Noyola and others — or Kristie Mewis, Vicki DiMartino, Julia Bouchelle and others — goals are going to come at a rate that ought to keep two teams ranked in the top 20 nationally in scoring last season on similar ground.

On the other hand, Kelly Henderson, Alicia Jenkins and Ali Riley didn’t get quite the same amount of attention as their goal-scoring counterparts (although Riley certainly managed to carve out a niche in the soccer-watching consciousness in showing off the skills at outside back that are making her an immediate WPS standout). But replacing those three, Henderson for Boston College and Jenkins and Riley for Stanford, offers perhaps the greatest peril for both teams Friday.

Enter Hannah Cerrone, Courtney Verloo and Camille Levin.

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Preseason questions roll on …

No. 4 What teams might not be getting the love they deserve?
To win the title: Texas A&M
The College Cup is in Cary, N.C., so Murphy’s Law suggests this will be the year the Aggies, so familiar with hosting championships in College Station, make it to the season’s final weekend, right? Not that any of G. Guerrieri’s crew would be complaining about the hardship of checking bags in early December.

Perhaps the best program never to reach the College Cup (or at least the best of the last decade, having reached the quarterfinals in 2001, 2002, 2006 and 2008), Texas A&M has the talent to not only get there this season but win two games once on site in North Carolina. The Aggies return 11 players who were regular starters last season on a team that went 15-7-3 and advanced to the Sweet 16. They also add two impact players who won’t have to deal with any freshman learning curve in senior Amber Gnatzig, a familiar face who missed last season with an injury, and junior Merritt Mathias, who contributed to championships the last two seasons with North Carolina.

Put Rachel Shipley, Whitney Hooper, Bri Young, Alyssa Mautz, Gnatzig and Mathias up against any collection of attacking talent in the country, including all the usual College Cup suspects, and you have a fair fight. A starter in A&M’s preseason exhibition against Rice, Mathias need all of nine minutes (8:59, if you’re counting) to get on the scoresheet with a goal. This is a team with the potential to get back over the 70-goal mark that the Aggies regularly surpassed earlier in the millennium. And with three returning defensive starters and two senior keepers, the other end of the field is hardly a wasteland.
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Week 1 Schedule Highlights

Must-See Friday Games
No. 1 North Carolina at No. 8 Texas A&M
No. 2 Stanford at No. 7 Boston College
Minnesota at No. 4 Notre Dame
No. 6 Florida State at No. 21 Washington State
No. 9 Santa Clara at San Diego State
Miami at No. 11 Florida
No. 12 South Carolina at Boston University
No. 13 Penn State at No. 24 West Virginia
Loyola Marymount at No. 14 California
RV San Diego at No. 19 USC
Oklahoma at No. 22 Oklahoma State
Duke at RV Georgia
Milwaukee at RV Ohio State
St. John’s vs. RV Michigan State
Montana at New Mexico

Must-See Sunday Games
No. 1 North Carolina vs. Michigan State
No. 2 Stanford at Boston University
Milwaukee at No. 4 Notre Dame
St. John’s at No. 8 Texas A&M
No. 11 Florida at No. 25 Central Florida
No. 12 South Carolina at Northeastern
RV Marquette at RV Ohio State

Answer me these preseason questions three (five, sir)

With the start of the women’s college soccer season just five days away, what better time to ponder five questions for the upcoming season? Like an advent calendar with lots and lots of words in place of gifts, we’ll take it one question per day.

No. 5: Is North Carolina really still the team to beat?
If a program not already in possession of 20 NCAA championships lost full-time starters the caliber of Whitney Engen, Kristi Eveland, Ashlyn Harris, Tobin Heath, Jessica McDonald and Casey Nogueira — not to mention Nikki Washington, lost to injury after eight starts last season, and Lucy Bronze, who also started eight games — is there any chance that program would open the following season ranked No. 1? To be polite, it’s unlikely. That’s essentially half a WPS starting lineup that is now, well, starting on at least an occasional basis in WPS (as of Aug. 13, they had combined for 39 WPS starts this season).

So it must be time to rebuild in Chapel Hill.

Only, if you looked at a 2010-11 roster for “Generic State University” that featured Courtney Jones and Brittani Bartok up top, Meghan Klingenberg, Ali Hawkins and Amber Brooks in the midfield and Rachel Givan anchoring the back line, could you really dismiss it as a championship contender? And what about when you throw in a recruiting class that includes the likes of United Stated U-20 internationals Crystal Dunn and Meg Morris, as well as Kealia Ohai, the NSCAA High School Player of the Year?

And in a nutshell, that’s why North Carolina is North Carolina.

I don’t think North Carolina enters the season as the most likely team to win the title, nor would I have voted them No. 1 based on their status as defending champions (a status for which any value, it seems to me, is directly proportional to how much of the championship team is still around). But if North Carolina isn’t college soccer’s Chelsea this season, it’s considerably closer to being Manchester City or Arsenal than it is to falling back to Bolton or Wigan status.
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