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I appreciate your wish to minimize the negative impact on UA. But you can't get away with secret moves in the modern world of instant social media. Word would leak of the first move and everyone would jump on UA as being sneaky and untrustworthy. The first move would get headlines, then a few months later the second, then the third, and it would become a downward trend with no end in sight. People would become paranoid looking under every rock to uncover the next move. No, the right way to do it is to be 100% transparent when announcing the moves. Put three years worth all together in one package and take your lumps all at once. That news will slowly fade and be replaced by good news in the coming months and years. As painful as the big announcement was, it beats the heck out of a series of negative gotchas.

My prediction: Akron will rue this day that baseball was scrapped. As the planet continues to warm, NEO will eventually become the most conducive region for baseball while the South will actually become too warm for Spring/Summer sports. As the SEC, ACC & southern BIG XII & PAC-12 schools are forced to shutter their bb programs rather than subject players to heat stroke, Akron will once again be left woefully unprepared to fill the void.

So the big question is, is elimination of some sports the answer? Or cutting the budgets of all sports and stop pretending to mount a Division 1 effort? Wooster and Baldwin Wallace and CWR and heck Wayne College can have these sports without spending all that money. The popular opinion is we're not going to attract Joe Sportsfan to our games, and/or can't afford the marketing campaign it would require. I would bet 90% of the paying fans would be paying fans if we were D2. So why pay out all those scholarships and expenses? Advertisers who like to advertise in front of the number of fans we have now, would they think the same way? Would a different baseball model work better for cold weather schools? One where you don't travel cross country the whole month of March. One where you don't pretend you're going to go deep in NCAA Superregionals. Maybe a fall season and a spring season, like was proposed for college soccer. And no out-of-state overnight travel... Just throwing out ideas.

Doesn't this make you proud? http://fox8.com/2015/07/10/university-of-akron-to-cut-baseball-215-positions-due-to-budget-issues/ We're also taking an absolute bath on social media... First and foremost there's the huge deficit being broadcast all over NE Ohio and the internet. Other schools may have a deficit, but Akron is on the news. It doesn't matter whether it was Proenza's fault, Tessel's fault for not raising funds, or Scarborough's fault for panic'ing or not having faith/ability to raise funds. It doesn't matter. This is a HUGE black eye for a university with enrollment problems. What does this say to prospective students and their parents? Especially if they're interested in majoring in Economics? If they dump 200 people, is the grass going to be cut? Is the snow going to be plowed? Is the garbage going to be emptied? Will the computers and networks and wifi work? Are the walls going to be painted? Are the toilets going to work? Will there be enough police? Will class be cancelled every time a faculty member is sick? Then, there's the story about the baseball program. Shut down. Now. It's heartbreaking for the fans. I know I came on a little strong last night, but I'm a baseball lifer, had a lot of fun watching the team and the guys. And needed a place to vent. And this was where other baseball fans hang out. It sucks for us, but that's not the major problem here. First lets look at prospective students again. So baseball was cut, very few 30 years and under care, right? A prospective student might say "What next?" What other programs and organizations and activities are they going to cut? Then there's the other sports programs. That had to send a shock wave through the rest of the department. Who's next? Are we still going to travel for non-conference games tournaments? Are they going to downgrade our programs? Decreased budgets? Decreased number of scholarships? Drop to a lower level? To a prospective student/athlete, this cannot look good at all. I can't imagine recruiting is easy with the given budget and the regional competition, this has to really screw it up. I know Scarborough is trying to show the state that he is making the University fiscally responsible. But is he cutting off his nose despite his face? Enrollment is as important as cutting costs. And there's no way in hell that this news helps enrollment.

The new basketball arena would hold all of the 2500 paying fans, right?.... and we would get to se Coppin St some years, and maybe a team like Xavier every 10 yrs? How does anyone think a new arena works for this University? Re Zipsoutsider... the "Power 5" aren't stickin around... they have one foot outside the NCAA already. So everything will change for the remaining schools .. See Div 2

I still think the arena will be built down by Canal Park. The baseball field can become a general-use area for football drills, cadet/ROTC drills, intramurals, etc.

Based on the financial situation, and cutting an entire sport to make up for the financial situation, the outlook of a new stadium is ..................

So how was it reduced? YSU must be doing it right because they aren't in the news every other day pissing more alumni off.

Bingo! This is exactly why I thought Tressel was the best man for the job. I got the impression UA did not pursue him hard enough and he sensed the lack of support. Tressel was successful in his role as an administrator and would have had no difficulty raising money. He was a go-getter. The elitist faculty snubbed their noses at him and we will struggle to raise the money we need to raise.

Dave Giffard of VCU tweeted this photo yesterday...saying that it was 50 days until they opened against the zips so 7 weeks from tonight....the zips will hopefully be opening the season with a win.... looking forward to watching this team build on the improvement they showed in Brazil

Don't blame Scarborough. This is Louis Proenza's bills coming due! SS is jut the adult stepping in and trying to balance the checkbook and make the credit card payment. UA's athletic subsidy is twice the entire annual disbursement of UA's endowment. It is fully 5% of the university's entire budget. Somebody explain to me why this should be considered proper.

The budget situation was going to have to be corrected whether or not there was a rebranding.

How much will we have to sacrifice to pay for his rebranding?

New basketball arena on the old Jackson Field baseball diamond? My heart goes out to the baseball team and staff. They were improving, and had a great coach.

Outsourcing dining services would suggest at least one place where non-faculty staff positions might be cut. Read between the lines in some of the other bullet points. Assuming that the athletics department had to share in the overall pain, can anyone think of a more likely thing to cut than baseball? The team is fairly large compared to some other sports and racks up a fair amount of travel expenses for all the away games. Zips baseball also doesn't have the winning tradition of the soccer or basketball teams, and the games draw small crowds. I hate to see UA lose any sport, but this seems to be the most logical.