GP1

Well, well, well…. This game actually makes it worth the Great GP1’s time to post again. In the spirit of being a good Zip and in the spirit of southern hospitality, I’m here to help the rest of you have a good time, or at least in the case of Columbia, SC, avoid disaster. Let’s get started. I’m not going to paint Columbia as anything other than what it is, “The Screen Door to Hell”. Easily the hottest city in the country in the summer. The good news is it will not be unbearably hot like it normally is in Columbia. There are things to do in Columbia, but not much. This is why you need an expert like the Great GP1 to guide you through all your travel plans. First, sightseeing in Columbia consists of…well, not many sights and mostly things you would rather not see. You could go look at campus. The advantage of this activity is you can see the entire campus from your car as it is an urban campus much like UofA. The capital is nice, but you can basically drive by it too and see everything you would want to see. This concludes sightseeing activities in Columbia. If I still lived in Akron and wanted to make this trip (I know, it’s the weekend after Thanksgiving.), I would take Friday and Monday off work, leave Thursday and drive most of the way there. Golfing is always fun for people who like to travel. There is a nice public golf course in Tega Cay, SC just across the state line from Charlotte that is public and well maintained. Great people live in this town. It has 27 holes and make sure you DO NOT play the old 9 hold course. I would play golf on Friday and then go to Columbia Friday night. If I stayed in Columbia on Friday and/or Saturday, I would look for hotels in The Vista or generally downtown. Be careful of two night minimums for Gamecock games. Book one now and see if you can beat the chains putting on this restriction. Three places I recommend for dinner in Columbia are: Ristorante Divina (The Vista), Terra (close by but you must cross the river in to West Columbia) and my personal favorite The Blue Marlin. The Vista has a ton of other places though if these are not attractive choices. Sports bars at The Vista include: Wild Wing Café, Twin Peaks and Carolina Ale House. Wild Wing will have the best TV set up, CAH will have the second best and a rooftop bar and Twin Peaks will still have a good TV set up and hot girls working at it. Tickets should be easily available for this game as well as parking passes. Noon games are not very popular for Gamecock fans because the rich ones who drive from the ocean communities have difficulty waking up on Saturday mornings because of hangovers. This is my favorite type of game to go to. I love mostly empty stadiums and being able to park close to stadiums. I guess I am at the point in my life I like to have as little people around me as possible. Most definitely I will be attending this game. The best place to park is across the street from the stadium at Gamecock Park. Public restrooms and electricity make it a great place. https://gamecocksonline.com/sports/2018/6/21/ot-game-day-parking-information-html.aspx If you can surf the internet and find someone who has a condo in Carolina Walk and is willing to sell their tickets and parking pass, it is next to this parking area and is a good place. Near the top of Carolina Walk on game days, there is normally a band playing the residence hire and a bar. It’s a private party, but the residents often sell their wristband to attend along with their tickets and parking pass. The state fairground is a huge parking area and you should be able to buy a pass in it off the internet. Don’t park in some of the private business selling parking. The game will be over at 3:30 and you will still be waiting to get out at midnight. Be prepared, you must drive to the stadium from wherever you decide to stay. The stadium is away from campus and the general downtown area. Tickets? There should be plenty of them. Don’t buy tickets too low. The stands go right down to the field and it’s extremely hard to see the game from down there. Mostly, it’s hard to see over the players. Upper deck tickets are too high. If you want to stay out of the sun, get tickets on the Zips side. Plenty of tickets between the end zones will be available. If you are going to take my brilliant recommendation and stay until Monday, I have some Sunday advice for you if you can take a break from watching Baker Mayfield lead the Browns to the Super Bowl this year (cough…snicker). Either after the game or Sunday morning, get up and go to Charleston. It is beautiful there at Christmas time. If you are with your family, there are a ton of things to do in Charleston. If you are with a group of guys, go golfing again. However, if I wanted to take advantage of golf on Sunday, I would probably go to Myrtle Beach for that. If you take the family to Charleston and want to play golf also, Wild Dunes at IOP is the best place to stay. Rooms will be dirt cheap. You could get up Sunday, take a nice walk on the beach with the temperatures in the 50s or 60s (best time of the year to go to the beach here) and then play some golf. Drive safe on the way home. Too many people from Ohio get in to wrecks on their way home from Hilton Head in the summer in Charlotte and it clogs up traffic on Saturdays. It makes it hard for me and the luckiest woman in the world, Mrs. GP1, to get uptown for dinner on Saturday nights. Cheers!

Dear Friends, MODERATORS, PLEASE POST AND LOCK POST. A few weeks back I said at the end of the season I was going to perform a personal evaluation to determine whether or not this program was worth spending time discussing. Well, after 28 years of abuse, I've had enough. Discussing this program is something I no longer wish to do. It's not like I haven't given it a chance. 28 years is a long time. I'm just fed up with the whole thing and will be spending time goofing off doing other things. I'm not even pissed off at this point, just fed up. A friend of mine and I have bought a website and are going to start working on a cartoon series that I think is going to be really funny. Probably will never make a dime, but it will be fun to put on the internet and see what happens. I want to win more than we lose. In six of 28 years, we have won more than we lost. Other than that, it has been a pretty horrible ride. In that period coaches have come and gone, athletic directors have come and gone, Presidents have come and gone, we've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on facilities, come out with new uniforms and generally have created an environment where it should be impossible to lose. Still, we continue to lose and in ways that are almost impossible to believe but have become common. This past season couldn't have been more set up for the program to win more than they lost and we managed to do so. I've watched enough college football in my lifetime to know this is the kind of season that some coaches never recover from and I'm pretty convinced that is going to happen to ours. Recruiting is everything in college football and it is going to be hard to get top notch players to want to come to Akron, so the failure will continue. We are in the cycle that schools like Can't find themselves in endlessly, only they don't have new facilities to create the illusion of something going on. Future discussions will involve our past discussions which is why I'm not interested in discussing any longer: Who will the next coach be? Who will be QB be next year? (Insert questions fans of losing programs ask here)? I will not ever back away from my support of the University and will still continue to watch the football program, but with less interest. I have not given as much financially in recent years to the Athletic Department because I believe it was throwing good money after bad ideas. Shame on me for not finding other ways to support the school in those years and especially in a time of my life when I could have done more, but recently I have gained an interest in the program that helps recent graduates pay for their student loan debts and will be supporting that financially more in the future. Other than that, I'll continue to watch our games on Tuesday night and whenever I have time on the weekends when I am not doing anything else. Hell, maybe some day we will go to a bowl game and I'll get to see as many of you who are still alive as possible. If they play a regular season game close by where I live I might see some of you there if you are still alive as well and you choose to attend the game. Over the years, I have had a lot of fun posting on this website. Thank you to all of the moderators who keep it going. Most importantly, thank you to Captain Kangaroo for taking money out of your own pocket to make this happen and allowing a forum for Zips fans to voice their opinions. Good luck and God bless all of the other posters. In closing, I have written, arranged, directed and performed this song as a closing gift. Fed up and exhausted with the whole thing, GP1

So, it is about the price and not the location? I went to one Zips game this year. Can't remember what I paid and I really don't care what that price was. It was part of the cost of going to a college football game. Anyone who worries about the difference in the price of parking ranging between one and five dollars really doesn't have anything to complain about. Are we really back to talking about the price of parking? How they park is much worse than how much it costs to park.

They are a symbol of the lack of creativity that encircles all of college athletics.

If parking was $1 and difficult to park by others, would you still have the same opinion? If so, it really isn't about the $10...most American waste $10 on a cup of coffee from Starbucks daily.

It's worth wonder about Lee. Universities hire ADs based upon what they believe they need. Some hire ADs who are good at getting stadiums built. Some hire for marketing purposes. There are a lot of different reasons an AD gets hired. I believe TW was hired because of his marketing background. What do we need right now?...What are the problems with the Athletic Department the new president should address if he can take a break from trying to dig the University out of the sea of red ink it is currently swimming in? Well, the programs that matter, MBB and soccer, are doing fine...the football program is not fine and can't be described as going fine after a 5-7 season with the easiest schedule we could hope for, a new stadium that has yet to see a winning season, an indoor practice facility that isn't being used to generate winning season, etc. So, what is the solution to the problem? My solution is very easy. Fire the current AD who ran the football program into the ground with the worst hire in the history of D1A college football and replace him with an AD who has experience in getting football programs straightened out and on a WINNING track. Let's get away from the "building process" and get involved in a winning process.

I expect winning. If my expectations are too high, I need to find something else to do with my time. No reason for this team only winning five games.

I'm concerned about the amount of turnover. It's one of the signs of a sinking ship. If there are an unusually large number of coaches leaving this off season, it is a sign that the ship is taking on more water than we would like.

We laid enough eggs the second half of the season to keep the breakfast buffet at the Golden Coral in Myrtle Beach stocked for a week during peak tourism season.

They will spend more money than they bring in.

I call this the Moe, Larry, Curly decision. We have a QB with experience who isn't getting the job done as someone with his experience should. We have another who throws INTs like he is handing out candy on Halloween. We have a third who is coming in after getting the boot from a terrible Pitt program and underwhelmed at a D2 school, but he is from a local high school so he will be taken seriously by those who believe that matters. If these are the choices, I'm probably going to choose to not pay attention.

Just real quick because talking about this team bores me to death at this point. Akron still has a talent problem. It should have been obvious after the Marshall beat down, but we were lulled into believing we were better than we were because we beat Pitt. Pitt will lose to Miami today closing out a 5-7 season with their best win against a bad Va Tech team that lost to Wake Forest last weekend. We have a weak arm QB. We don't have enough talent at WR to get separation and make big plays and our RBs have limited talent as well. Our DLine collapses at the least little bit of advanced competition and our LBs were frequently not adequate. DBs were OK. We are every bit the 5-7 team our record shows. When your current talent is better than your recent past talent, fans can believe their team is better than they are and I think that happened to many of us this year. How to correct the problem? Well, it has been 8 seasons since our last winning season. We have only had 6 winning seasons in the 28 years (21.4%) of D1A football at Akron. I don't really know how a school ever really attracts even top notch MAC players across the board with this history. We'll get some, but not enough to become a top team. We are a lot more like the program that beat us yesterday than even a BG or Toledo. This is a huge problem that nobody seems to want to talk about. We are picking at minor details, but never really focusing on the big problem, which is chronic losing and the impact it has on our program. We are like doctors who can't connect a person's high blood pressure, coughing and general poor breathing ability to their three pack of day smoking habit. 28 years, countless "building processes", tens of millions in facilities and here we are?.?. The more it changes, the more it stays the same.

Pohl has gotten better since he came to Akron. Not the jump in ability we should expect out of players. I do think Bowden played the best QB he had on the roster available to play in 11 of 12 games this season. Woodson was terrible and there really wasn't anyone else.

You might. I think I've had enough of all of the things that would result in me having to endure anything.

It's sort of like saying, "If we build a new indoor practice facility, build a new stadium and get a historically easy schedule we will eventually get bowl eligible so we can be embarrassed by a Sun Belt Conference team." I don't think everyone realizes how bad it is that we didn't go at least .500 and make a bowl game with a lot of things in our favor this year.