UA1996MAENG

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

https://footballscoop.com/news/asked-about-his-future-at-akron-joe-moorhead-shrugs-and-mentions-lack-of-resources For most of Moorehead's three seasons, I bounced from "give him time" to "fire his ass" and now I'm back to "give him time". For many reasons, it makes sense to to keep him, but now I'm afraid he's going to resign due to "lack of resources". If he stays I think UA has a chance to win 6 or 7 games in 2025, but that all depends on what happens in the portal in a few days. Will he stay? Can he cobble together another roster to compete in 2025?

My disgust with college football in general and OSU in particular, can be seen in the whole Kyle McCord situation. The OSU fan arrogance/entitlement is off the charts. McCord committed the "unforgivable" sin of not being perfect. The kid was a good QB for OSU. He did very well at Syracuse this year and still had a few bad games (5 INTs in one game bad). Then the OSU fans welcomed Will Howard as the savior (though his stats at Kansas State were pretty much what McCord did in 2023); now he's a bum for not "meeting expectations." Maybe I'm just picking this up from the media around me in central Ohio, but it seems like Day and many others made McCord the scapegoat and then in 2024 faced the same dilema - OSU isn't perfect. Blaming it on one kid is disgraceful. CFB on that level is just too mercenary for my taste.

Ryan Day's mental breakdown as witnessed by the increasing size of the bags under his eyes. He looks like a guy barely hanging on to sanity.

I finally got mine too. My Zippy football Bobblehead is definately fatter, but the quality is nice.

Yes, I do prefer a more corpulent Zippy.

I live in Central Ohio, and in just a few short years I went from OSU fan to indifferent to OSU to hating OSU fans. Insufferable a-holes. The lunatic fringe in Columbus are the 2-3% who are not insane.

You're not kidding! A couple adminstrators down the road could scrape that together from their car ashtrays.

I think it is very likely that he still gets fired even with four years remaining on his contract. I have seen the contract and it does appear that the buyout is about 360k, not the remaining four years of salary like we are accustomed to seeing when coaches are fired (see Jimbo Fisher at TAM, who got a gillion dollars when he got canned, i.e. the entire contract's total).

UA's Bismark Kipchirchir runs an excellent 29:43.9 at the Men's NCAA XC Championship. He was 73rd out of 252 finishers. https://live.pttiming.com/xc-ptt.html?mid=7388 The sad part is that the clock is already ticking on a larger program picking him up via NIL as was the case last year with UA's top two runners and the coach.

So why can't/couldn't the MAC keep men's soccer as a viable sponsored sport? Money I guess.....😑

I saw the Kent State Golden Flashes trolled on Facebook as the KSU Electric Chickens 😝. I've never heard this before. I'm sorry that it took until age 57 to hear it.

There is no law school at KSU, but it's reasonable to assume many of its graduates go to law school in other locations.

It's only a matter of time before we find out he's hosting fentanyl-fueled midget orgies in his basement. One financial default is never the end of it.

Or it could be the pathway toward firing him, which would be good for KSU.

I had doubted this story, but it's all out there on the Portage County Court site. Makes half a million dollars a year and owes 23k to a local Kent bank. Burns Portage County.pdf

On other sites this info is showing up too. As well, there are rumors that Burns has been shaking down his assitant coaches for "loans". How do you make 500k+ a year and default on your credit cards? Bum.

Fair enough.

How did Jim Grobe get into this conversation??

I live in Picktown!