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bengalboardgg....I wish that winning games filled stadiums and arenas. However, you don't need to look any further than Northern Illinois' football program and Akron's basketball program to know that it's not that simple. Effectively marketing to your potential audience is essential, and so is plenty of other factors, including the level of people who you are beating.

You're assuming a military-like organization is the only way (or best way) to instill discipline and leadership. Good professors who give a damn about their universities and their students can do a lot more for a student and their career. Professors whom mentor their students can instill the discipline needed to succeed in their fields. Corps of Cadets seems more like an agenda than it seems like a program that would have, to be completely frank, any measurable impact on students. We already have a LOT of student leaders at UA's campus that are rarely backed in any meaningful way by administration. Just ask the students who put on Relay For Life...you think they don't have discipline to pull off that event? You don't think they have leadership to pull of that event? C'mon man!

It's going to take 2-3 years of winning teams, and 7+ wins to get people's attention. The first winning season we will average around 10K. The second season around 15K and then the jump to 23K will happen. Of course, the killer in all of this will be the MAC mid week games that sap out attendance and kill the overall brand of football. Sorry if I appear to be disappointed with the last man standing hire in Larry Williams. A career private school guy coming to a place where everything is micromanaged by a Board of Trustees and a loose cannon President. Someone who knows nothing about Akron, nothing about the marketplace, with only a 1 year President and Captain Bow Tie Larry Burns to guide him around. Not exactly lighting me up with optimism. The entire interview pool for this position save for Van Horne was a massive letdown, including 3 people who were fired from their last jobs, a Miami lifer in Hernandez, leaving only Williams as one who would even take the job. Van Horne should get this AD job and I would not be surprised if after getting passed over he finally leaves. Loyalty at Akron has never been rewarded as in house AD hires never happen. They didn't after Thomas when Wadell was up for it, not after Rhodes when Yurachek wanted it, and not now after Wistricil when Van Horne deserves it. The repeating cycle of the grass is always greener will repeat itself and again we will fail to achieve anything consistent or upward in motion.

Over many years the Zips have dug themselves into a deep attendance hole that's not easy to climb out of. Winning a few games in a row isn't enough to get people excited. Putting together a couple of winning seasons would offer a fairer assessment of just how many fans would come out to see a consistent winning Zips football team. In football no one can use the old JAR excuse that the inferior facility is keeping fans away.

They have decades of that identity and culture and multi-generational aggy families who don't even consider sending kids elsewhere. They also have a population 3x the size of Ohio with a very conservative military culture and retiree population. Even still, A&M has a very self-selecting applicant pool that alienates a significant portion of the potential students because of their narrow culture and general weirdness. To a huge portion of the Texas population, particularly transplants from the Great Lakes and West Coast, A&M is considered this very weird, bizarre university and if kids don't get into Texas they don't even think about A&M as the backup. I just don't see how you attempt to transplant that aggyness and wrap the identity of UA in it without alienating a huge pool of kids who'll just look to K--SU, YSU or CSU instead. UA should be trying to broaden its appeal right now rather than narrowing it, but that's what SS is doing with Polytechnic (which I admittedly lukewarm support depending on how it's implemented) and now the fake army. If you want to increase the graduation rate, have better academic counseling, send marginal kids to a branch campus or CC for a year or two and provide more need-based aid to get kids through with less financial pressure to quit. A fake army is no magic bullet.

What you state about Dambrot and the basketball team was exactly my point. "Just win more games" is a total cop out answer, and doesn't even scratch the surface of solving the problem of why Akron Athletics is not a more attractive draw for Ohio sports fans. The Indians drew when they were competing for a World Series title. The Steelers win Super Bowls. Akron competes for a chance to play in an unknown bowl game or for the chance to reach the high point of their season by winning a tournament in Cleveland to be regarded as the 64th (or 68 now?) best basketball team in the nation. And that's only one other piece of the complete puzzle.

LeBron James, University of Akron pave way for college scholarships for inner-city children

http://www.cleveland.com/cavs/index.ssf/2015/08/lebron_james_university_of_akr.html#incart_m-rpt-1 http://www.ohio.com/news/break-news/university-of-akron-to-rename-college-of-education-after-lebron-james-foundation-1.616118 So here's his next move. Since nobody wants to discuss anything positive.