GP1

Thanks for the link ZZZips. I'm going to ask a favor out of one of you, but many may have the qualifications to do the task. The first one to meet the qualifications gets to do me the favor since I live so far away. Your only compensation will be a feeling of 100% satisfaction. If you have access to the following items, meet the physical requirements and know the location, please raise your hand. 1. A five gallon bucket 2. Three gallons of water 3. Two pounds of crushed ice 4. You know where Buchtel Hall is 5. You have the means to get to campus and can walk to Buchtel Hall 6. You are capable of integrating the crushed ice into the water and letting it almost completely melt before completing the task 7. You have the physical strength to lift the bucket of water over your head First one to volunteer wins.

Nice post. I'll focus on this last sentence. I don't know if I would use a word referencing lack of inspiration. I would probably use the word "misguided". The leadership at the University (my guess is at almost every G5 school right now) looking in the same place for a different solution. Misguided means, among many things, sending someone along a path that is not going to get them where they need to be. The way college athletics works in 2020 dictates that UofA is spending in the range of normalcy for similar athletic departments. In reality, the well is pretty dry at this point. Chiseling out an extra million dollars is not going to be easy. By guiding the committee in this direction, the leadership of the University is setting them up for failure.

Article UofA receives a significant amount of state funding. "directly" is an interesting word. I guess the money does go directly there from student fees, but in reality, without state funding, there is no UofA and no athletic department. The same probably goes for the rest of the Ohio MAC schools. Taxpayers should support public universities. I also believe taxpayers should pay the bill for college athletics as part of public universities, within reason. I also think it would be nice if for their tax dollars, taxpayers could go see what they are paying for within reason. There are very few places in Ohio that are not within 2 hours of a MAC school. Wouldn't it be nice if a taxpayer woke up on a Saturday, looked at his wife and discussed what to do that day, looked in the news and saw (insert MAC school) WBB was playing and told his wife, "Let's take those two tickets from our taxes and buy two more GA tickets and take the girls to a game this afternoon. They like playing basketball.". And then to top it all off, when they got to the game, there were clean parking lots, clean bathrooms, clean seats, maybe some decent food/drinks and an entertaining game that didn't start at the girls bedtimes. I think a family of four would be pretty happy with this minimal effort on the part of the school they went to see. The might even go again. They might even see the benefits of their tax dollars. I do not know how coaches get their retirement. Saban is set to get a huge one at Alabama. Not every coach is breaking the bank. Assistants at places like Akron do OK, but they aren't breaking the bank. I have no problem with a couple of people making a lot off of the Ohio system if others can take advantage of it as well. In reality, there are only a handful taking advantage of that. Solich, Tressel and Fickel are the three that come to mind that may or will have 20 years in. Maybe Faust, but I'm not sure he had 20 total years at UofA or how his employment was structured after coaching.

You are 100% correct. To pretend it won't impact decision making of employees is foolish. To leave it out of discussions is whistling past the graveyard. To pretend politicians who head up state universities don't figure politics in their decision making calculus is foolish. It is causing smaller, leaner athletic departments and that is on theme of this topic and can't be ignored. Forget the MAC. Does anyone think that if the state of the coronavirus is the same next year at this time there won't be enormous political pressures on the leaders of midwest states to play college football? The Big Ten is teetering on the verge of giving in this year as we speak. Is it data and science moving them (it should be), or is it political pressure? If the Big Ten doesn't play next year, it will be catastrophic for the league. Elected officials will lose their jobs over it. There won't be a decent coach or player left at any of the schools, and that includes Ohio State. They too can enjoy their smaller and leaner athletic departments.

It would increase revenue. Expenses are something else.

I believe they are all legitimate questions and my guess is a lot of athletic department employees are asking the same questions.

It would increase revenue. Expenses are something else. Coaches shouldn't be held responsible for enrollment.

Thanks for the link. Trying to put myself in someone else's shoes here. If you were an employee in the athletic department of one of these schools, what evidence is there that the current conditions will change by next year? At what point do you leave for another job in order to provide for your family? At what point do you leave to go somewhere where they will let you do your job? If it turns out that on November 4th, everything returns to normal magically, how peed of are you to the point you will leave the conference just to avoid further exploitation? I don't think the Big Ten or PAC 12 clearly thought through their decisions.

Throw in: he has a hot sister.

Since we know there would be no MAC athletics in Ohio without the taxpayers and student fees, shouldn't the taxpayers get something for their money? If student fees get you a free ticket to an athletic event, should't your tax dollars in a small way? What would be wrong with every Ohio taxpayer, filing electronically with an email address, getting a voucher for two general admission tickets to any MAC sporting event they wanted to attend, as long as tickets were available, along with their confirmation of tax filing? Conference championships would be excluded.

Better yet, interrupt the steady drip of negative stories about finances that are driving new students away and bringing down enrollment. G5 schools have a revenue problem driven by declining in enrollment. The expenses of college athletics would be reduced if they could get this under control.

On a side note, I know a guy who played for the Force. He was the soccer coach for the local high school here in South Carolina and I think he still might be.. Anyhow, if the goal of college athletics is profitability, they should close every program with the exception of around 20. G5 schools need to examine exactly how much taxpayer dollars they are willing to spend on college athletics (I think we are at an acceptable level). They then need to provide such an awesome experience in the form of good football, clean stadiums, clean bathrooms, clean parking lots, good food/beer at a time convenient for the taxpayers to attend that the taxpayers will find it acceptable to put some of their tax dollars into college athletics. If that means giving tax payers free GA tickets to something they are already paying for, then so be it. Then, here comes a crazy idea, maybe they can cut back on some of the endless stories about budget deficits and mix in some PR related to the awesome public service the kids engage in around NE Ohio. What they need to do really isn't difficult to do. In and effort to win an award in the category of "Best Use Of Language In A Rant Against Stupidity", I present the following. If college athletics is the "business" everyone claims it to be, it would have been shuttered years ago. It is closer to "monkey business" than actual "business". It's complete nonsense to look at it as a business. The only actual business going on comes from those making money off of it outside of the universities (television networks, beer companies, etc.) and if they completely destroy G5 athletics, they will shift their business elsewhere. I rest my case and hope the judges will look favorably on my submission for "Best Use of Language In A Rant Against Stupidity".

As crappy as the BB arena is, it's amazing 3,500 went to games. Look at my plan for success. The BB experience fails on multiple levels. Bad stadium, bad food, feh parking, half of college BB games take place on weeknights in the dead of winter, beer?, etc.

I was hoping this might say something along the lines of, "With 70% of the world's layers in the United States, these two schools have taken an important step in reducing the number of leaches on the rest of us."

Regardless, they are losing money hand over fist. 1,000 seats at $5 each is a drop in the bucket. Give the tickets away to youth football teams that want them. The kids will load up on enough junk food to pay for themselves. Give steep food discounts for inter city teams that may not have much money to spend on food. Don't openly promote it though, just do it. Our biggest problem is we and our partners in the MAC have successfully destroyed our fan bases with the ESPN nonsense because the athletic directors/universities prioritize money over everything else. The destruction is complete. Time to build a fan base again. It's more expensive to acquire/reacquire customers than retaining them. It shouldn't matter at this point if they hand out 60,000 free GA tickets in the hopes that 10,000 show up. Remember, don't over think it.... What should be openly promoted at this point? Clean parking lots, clean bathrooms, clean temporary restrooms, clean seats, decent food/beer, good football at a time when people can attend. It is not very difficult.