UA1996MAENG

Oh, Lou..... The current era in CFB is undesirable and disappointing in many ways, but Holtz can't/shouldn't romanticize the past either. It was never clean and never about academics no matter how we choose to remember it. Teamwork and character? Booster payments, academic fraud, racking up hundreds of victories in a century against teams that were either helpless or underfunded. So what's really changed?

I'm not shocked. UA has almost 400 million in debt, mostly for infrastructure investment over the last 20 years. We're about to reduce faculty, again, because enrollment is about 50% of what it was at its peak. I'm not sure where the additional money for football in particular and athletics in general is supposed to come from.

With Title-IX, cuts could only be in men's sports. What goes? Baseball and cross country were brought back recently. If enrollment and athletic revenues do not improve, it'll be football to be cut eventually.

Why? I do not pay much attetion to NIU's other sports. Are they a drag on basketball, etc.?

NIU is really leaving to be a football-only member of the Mountain West? What would NIU do with the rest of its sports? It can't remain in the MAC without football, can it? https://www.si.com/college-football/northern-illinois-weighing-offer-join-mountain-west?utm_medium=pushly_notifications&utm_source=pushly_notifications&utm_campaign=5919717

In regard to a NIL collective - yes! However, I'm sorry to flog a dead horse, but in the end what did the donation of the upgraded scoreboard do to improve or stabilize football in particular and UA athletics in general? Whoever donated it, thanks....but did it really do any good? Imagine what just that million+ dollars could have done in Zippy's NIL fund. If it meant 6+ wins I'd gladly sit on splintered wood seats with no scoreboard at all. I'd take randon beatings about the head between warm beers to see a winning team. If we are in this NIL era, which indeed is crap, then UA has to play it to survive.

I hope he finds some replacements in the portal. It just seems like the team is running in sand having practically to rebuild from scratch each year.

See the portal when it updates this week. The UA list is long. Not a portal issue, but still bad: the class Moorehead just signed is small and underwhelming - last in the MAC, 121st overall.

Yes, exactly. I simply do not see where the money will come from that would be sufficent just to "exist". With the Power4 moving toward a model in which they play more and more conference games (certainly a requirement of ESPN and the other media entities), each MAC athletic department will see a loss of 2, 3 million or more dollars a year. I'm not sure where they make that loss up.

Not techncally, but it is the flagship university in the state, which is de facto protection from the circumstances that the "regular folk" experience.

KSU enrollment was up this fall, and has been pretty good overall (the all-campus decline is a larger issue that affects many of our public universities). What is our (UA) debt, almost 400 million? (operating deficits and infrastructure investment). Overall, I'm on the side of all of our public universities, except Ohio State, which neither needs nor solicits my support, though I was a graduate student there as well. Kent and Akron both did not get the development and operating support in the 1970s and 1980s when they really needed it. In the current circumstances, KSU and Akron (and 100s of others across the country) are trying to compete with enormous, historically well funded land-grant universities like Ohio State and Michigan and Penn State. Our "mid-majors" can't compete with very powerful athletics marketing and infrastructure that was put in place a century ago, so they tried and are trying to compete by offering more academic programs and better on-campus facilities (half of UA’s campus and the new engineering building at KSU come to mind). I can't condemn Kent or UA (Proenza, mostly) for making the effort to expand and improve these universities.

At some point, maybe in the not too distant future, will the MAC, C-USA, Sunbelt et al have to seek a divorce from the NCAA as it is structured and governed right now? I keep thinking that eventually all of the "mid-majors" will come to the realization that they cannot survive or succeed by being the de facto developmental league for the Power Conferences. Obviously I'm thinking of my alma mater, UA, but even more successful programs like OU and Miami will eventually face serious problems faced with a rebuild from the keel up every damn year. Is there even one G5 athletic department that breaks even? No NIL to speak of and even winning programs lose 10, 15, 20 athletes a year to the portal.... It's crazy. I suppose younger people have adjusted to this new reality, but I'm in my 50s; for me the whole system, which was never angelic, is now a grotesque and terribly uneven professional league in which a team with a 20 million dollar roster plays teams without a nickel of NIL? WTF, are we really talking about Michigan spending 12 million on a high school QB over four years? What planet am I on?

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but who is PhotoShopping these high school recruits into UA uniforms? Is this some kind of easily accessible filter or is UA doing this as part of the recruitment process?

So basically an athlete can hit the portal a million times. No restrictions? I don't see how this is sustainable for the G5, rebuilding from scratch every season? Hats off to Ohio Bobcats and Miami who seem to be able to navigate this reality, but if you're trying to pull out of a dive like Akron is, it seems pretty grim. Not as grim as Kent but still deflating.

Still alive