kreed5120

Nobody at Akron is going to make that kind of money. Players at schools like North Carolina, Kentucky, and UCLA are already getting it under the table. Look at the most recent Nike/Adidas scandal.

If an athlete can get $300 from a car dealership for doing a radio add, I see no problem with it. I just feel the university shouldn't be the ones paying players, especially since we're not actually profiting given our deficits on athletics. We're a place for higher learning, not a semi pro club.

Groce was never going to be here for 10+ years and if he was that would mean he'd have a Mr. Pinky like tenure, which I wouldn't want. Personally, I expected him to eventually leave for a job at a place like Depaul. I doubt he leaves for the ETSU job, but that would be a pretty big blow if he does. At least when Dambrot left for Duquesne he left for a better conference even though Duquesne really wasn't as good of a program at Akron at the time. The MAC top to bottom is better than the Socon although the top 3-4 teams in the Socon have been pretty good the past 2 years.

Men's basketball IMO should be the safest of all the sports. It's way too expensive to try to keep up with the Joneses in football. Even when we tried to with Infocision and Stiles, we got a pretty poor return on our investment. At least with basketball we've shown we can get pretty decent value for the amount we put into it.

Even in the article that @Captain Kangaroo shared their coach made $400k in base pay plus an additional $250k in bonuses. That's $650k total so the same amount that Groce is making now. I'm pretty sure his contract is fully guaranteed so not sure if the university has any leverage to make him take a pay cut. That said perhaps they told him they will be reducing his staff budget and/or cut funding enough that he's not sure Akron will be able to compete moving forward. ETSU is a public school with even a smaller enrollment than Akron. It's not like they're immune to this covid-19 stuff. I can't see them making the same 7 figure offer that Duquesne did for Dambrot.

Everyone is in agreement that the athletic subsidy needs reduced. This isn't an argument unique to those wanting our football program drop down to a lower level. Those arguing we stay FBS are simply arguing that any costs we save by dropping down to FCS are more than offset by revenue lost and increased travel costs. We can still slash the football budget while remaining FBS. We can also schedule more buy games to boost revenue and help cover the costs of the other sports.

Decades overdue IMO. In the short-term to it's going to put a beating on the university, but eliminating the waste will provide long-term benefits.

Arth and Groce are Akron's 2 highest paid employees. Just because the student body doesn't care about athletics doesn't mean the administration feels the same way. In fact, Akron has tried bribing students with things like free tuition just to get them to games. Nothing has seemed to work. What I really think we're seeing is people losing their pride in their local community. ESPN has preached for decades the if you're not first, you're last mentality. Their viewers have bought in. Cable tv has made it easy for Akron alum and area residents to sit at home on a Saturday and watch what they believe to be a superior product instead of going out and supporting the local team. People have proposed dropping down divisions in hopes that being more competitive at a 3rd rate division would make people care. Mount Union has been the Bama of D3 for decades. Below are their attendance figures from last season. I'm seeing home attendance as low as 1840 and as high as 4631 for their home games. I've lived within 20 minutes from their stadium for virtually my entire life and I've never attended a game, nor do I have any desire to attend. Not a single one of my friends who attended Mount have been to a game neither. I know I certainly would never attend a game of watching Akron playing Otterbein, Capital, or Heidelberg. Granted I haven't attended a football game in 2-3 years, but I would attend if they were ever to consistently become competitive in the MAC.

For the most part the people who I've seen posting that they wanted the football program to drop to a lower level are the ones who are very anti-football. The football fans for the most part are the ones who want to stay in the MAC. Akron wasn't competing for national championships before they joined FBS. Why would they start competing for them now if they dropped down? In fact, they never even won a I-AA playoff game. Personally, I don't see what's wrong with playing 2 buy games per year. If Akron can't go 6-4 in the remaining 10 games while playing in what is by far the worst division in all of FBS, they don't deserve to make the postseason. Slightly off topic, I'm not sure MAC soccer will survive this. Akron may prioritize its soccer program, but it's not nearly the same priority at the other schools. We may need to look for a new home for the soccer program regardless if we want to or not.

I think the biggest difference is with 8 teams instead of 4 we're looking at 3 solid games instead of 2.

My comment wasn't to be taken seriously. I was just making a small joke at our own expense.

It should be in pristine condition. Very little wear and tear as we've been practicing social distancing at games for the past 10 or so years.

Your fear very well may be right. I thought it was a mistake for Arth not to bring in an experienced OC or DC to help him with the jump. Arth obviously has a lot off faith and loyalty with this staff as he has taken many of them from John Carroll to Chattanooga and now Akron. If we gave our assistants more money, I feel Arth would just split it up amongst his cronies, which means we'd just be paying more for the same people.

I'm not entirely sure what each of them make to be honest. They are all Arth's guys and Arth wanted them. None of them have prior FBS experience, at least for the most part, so they should be among the lowest paid assistants in the MAC. We should be paying people after they prove their worth, not before.

Arth was brought in making ~50k more than what we were paying Bowden and Arth had 0 FBS experience and we gave him a 3x pay raise compared to what he was making at Chattanooga. We pretty much bid against ourselves as I didn't see anyone else bidding for his services. Why pay someone $500k when you can probably get him to do the job for $300k? It just doesn't seem like a solid business strategy. As you see more schools cut subsidies, the amount head coaches and assistants make is going to decrease, not increase. Not just at Akron, but everywhere. You're already seeing it happen at WMU. Last month they hired a basketball coach for about 60% of what they were paying Hawkins. As contracts expire, coaches will be forced to take pay cuts or they will be replaced by someone who will do the job for less. Salaries were artificially inflated due to institutional support. You take away that institutional support and make athletic programs become more self sufficient, those salary bubbles pop. Akron football brings in somewhere in the neighborhood of 6-7 million in revenue. No private business that does 7 million in revenue would pay their CEO $500k then have an additional 7 or so VPs making north of 6 figures. That's not a sustainable business model.

If baseball is being operated as a donor funded sport, like promised, it would seem safe to me.

Whatever 4 non-revenue sports that would generate the most net savings should be the sports cut. From there we need to slash overhead costs at the remaining 16 sports.

Thanks for sharing. If that gets played, it should be a pretty good tournament. Akron, Vermont, Indiana State, and Middle Tenn are all pretty solid mid-majors. Although Mid Tenn has struggled the last year or 2. Omaha and Fordham are the cupcakes, but they're still good enough to beat any of the other teams on a good night. I wouldn't be surprised to see 2-3 of these 8 teams win either their regular season or conference tournament.

That's not how the math works. Men's T&F is allowed 12.6 scholarships. Women's T&F is allowed 18. Everyone else is paying their way. That means nearly 200 of them are paying their way and the vast majority of them probably wouldn't have picked Akron if we didn't have the program. I really don't know the numbers, but giving away 30.6 scholarships to boost enrollment 226 may make keeping T&F worth it. Then again that may run up quite the bill busing them around the country. Someone who is better in the know can run the numbers. I just didn't want bad information spreading.

The city isn't going to buy Infocision or take over the debt payments. The city taxpayers balked at building a downtown arena and that would have been much more versatile and easier to get events for than Infocision would be. Who would even rent it out besides Akron and the occasional high school game? At $100k per rental the city would need to rent out the stadium 50 times per year just to break even. That's not even factoring in annual maintenance or paying staff to manage the property. There is next to no demand for renting it. If there was Akron would be doing it to reduce its burden. Perhaps if Blossom didn't exist it would be useful for outdoor concerts, but Blossom does exist.

I believe Akron has Groce under contract for $650k for each of the next 4 seasons. His contract is I believe fully guaranteed so they can't cut him to bring in someone cheaper. The only threat is if he does well enough to attract bigger offers. His salary makes him I believe the highest paid coach in the MAC. I'd think it would be tough for many A10 programs to come in and offer him a $900k+ salary given the current climate, especially if it meant paying their current coach a buyout. If Groce does well enough that a B1G or SEC comes along then there really isn't anything we can do. On the plus side that also probably likes means somewhere along the way Akron picked up their first tournament win.

People are acting as though this pandemic is going to last indefinitely. We already have 2 buy games scheduled between the years 2021-2023 and 1 scheduled in 2024 and 2025. Our 2024 and 2025 schedules still has room for more games. 4-5 years from now this coronavirus thing is going to be a distant memory. Schools like OSU will be having 100k people packing their stadiums and the SEC & B1G will be looking for filler content for their networks. The reason programs like Clemson, OSU, Alabama, etc. pay $1.3 million is because between ticket sales, concessions, parking, tv rights, etc. they're making several times that amount for each home game. They could instead agree to a home and home with another P5 school, but then they'd have to split the revenue ~50/50 instead of keeping the vast majority of it for themselves. The general admission price for an OSU - Akron game is the same as an OSU - Missouri game. It's the scalpers who profit on the secondary market for those higher profile games, not the schools. 2021 at Auburn at Ohio State 2022 at Michigan State at Liberty 2023 at Temple at Indiana 2024 at South Carolina 2025 at Nebraska

There are 350+ D1 schools. There are much smaller schools with much smaller enrollments and endowments than MAC schools in D1. If MAC schools are saying they can't keep up with the NCAA D1 requirements, conferences like the MEAC, Southland, Northeastern etc. are probably even facing worse problems. The NCAA isn't going to let 100 or so schools drop from D1. I expect to see system wide changes.

Yep, people are talking about dropping down to D2 or D3, but it's not like those divisions come without costs. Eliminating the football program in its entirety would shave ~7.7 million from the budget. 4.3 million of that 12 million cost is for Infocision so that's not going away. I did the math in a thread a few years back about how much revenue the football program generates. I really don't want to have to do the research again so I'll just use @DannyHoke numbers. I'll even round his 6.85 million in revenue down 6.5 million. That was with Akron playing 1 buy game. If Akron plays 2 buy games, we're back even. If Akron plays 3 buy games, like Kent, we're +1.25 million. That's without even getting into cutting overhead costs related to the program, which we should definitely be doing. Frankly, I quit caring about the football program 2-3 years ago. That being said, if Akron gives the program bare minimum funding and schedules 3 OSU, Bama, Wisconsin type games per year the operating revenue may exceed operating expenses in excess of $2 million, perhaps more depending on how much expenses get cut. The time to cut the football program would have been before Infocision was built. Hindsight is 20/20 though. Edit: If we were to decide to drop down in football, I'd think non-scholarship FCS would make more sense than D2 or D3.