UA1996MAENG

https://gozips.com/news/2024/11/16/cross-country-kipchirchir-garners-ncaa-cross-country-championship-berth Kipchirchir qualfied for the NCAA Championship in the Norton, Ohio Great Lakes Regional. The team was not able to complete in the top of the MAC this year, but this is still a good thing for UA. Sadly, our top two runners will get plucked away by a larger program.

Cutting sports in an already slim program is a challenge. Baseball and mens cross country were recently brought back, and Title IX at a university with football makes cutting any women's program impossible. It's a difficult problem for UA in particular. Cutting football could make sense IF (!) UA were not on the hook for millions of dollars for Infocsion Stadium, a venue that is used for nothing but football....and the football blood-money games are essential to keeping the entire athletics program going. I think the only solution to any of this is for the new UA President to get more student on campus. As difficult as that has been, what else keeps UA and its athletics viable?

All I'll say is that Zippy (the live mascot) had a pouch going back to at least 1987 because I personally witnessed the KSU Flash tear her pouch at the ACME-Zip game. Zippy threw a real, deep punch into Flash's air hole. Good times.....

Tom Wistercill, I think, is the Big Sky commissioner. Careers continue on sometimes in spite of obvious negatives.

https://fundraise.givesmart.com/vf/Roovember2024 I know that many of my fellow UA alumni are angry and frustrated about the actions and lack of action by UA's Board of Trustees over the years. I am too. However, I still love our university, and I believe that our new President will be a positive force for the future of UA. As well, I have a dog in the fight - my son is a current UA student in mechanical engineering. The Roovember campaign allows us to make specific donations to UA’s schools, departments and projects that directly support current and future UA students, including UA Athletics. This year I chose to support UA's Buchtel College of Arts & Sciences and the College of Engineering & Polymer Science. Thank you

Getting fired from a dumpster fire like Vegas could be a blessing. In a terrible system run by a terrible owner, somebody has to be the scapegoat. Head coach Pierce will be next.

I do not know much about NCAA soccer. What is the pathway for the NCAA playoffs for a team like Akron? Automatic bid for winning the Big East tournament? At-large bid for being highly ranked?

Looks like Torterella was at Akron for three years going back to the early 2000s?

Kent alumni and former Kent coaches have done pretty well in spite of KSU being at the bottom of CFB since around 1976: Don James, Saban, Pinkel, Lou Holtz, Glen Mason, Sean Lewis (The jury is still out on him overall, but he managed to do what nobody ever did at Kent since Don James - have mutiple winning seasons and bowl game bids). At this point, I'd hire Charles Manson is it meant UA would go 6-6.

UA certianly was hurt by instability in its leadership; the university got a lot of bad press (Olive Jar!). The Ohio public universities that are doing best in difficult times are in small towns I guess (Kent, OU, BGSU). Ohio State is simply Ohio State; enrollment there is not going to decline. Having grown up in Cincinnati, UC's growth has surprised me most of allo (another urban location). Crime is high and some of the areas bordering campus are among the most dangerous in the city. It's not a "comfortable campus" and I would not imagine that it would appeal to "mom and dad" in my previous scenario, yet it does somehow. Did joining the Big 12 have some influence on this? Maybe?

It is certainly a part of it. Yes, find a special coach and things could get better, but there are basic population dynamics that affect college athletics in states and regions that are oversaturated with universities and colleges as Ohio and other nearby states certainly are. College enrollment in Ohio is stagnant except for Ohio State and Cincinnati. I know, OU and BG had larger freshman classes this fall. Sustainable? We'll see. Working in secondary education, I see that the yearly cohort of college-viable high school graduates is shrinking as well, especially among males. The decline in participation in high school football is also playing a role in this problem. Up a bit in the last two years, participation in high school football is down nationwide by about 13-15% since 2006. That's not insignificant; the pool of candidates is shrinking and this affects not Ohio State but the mere mortals of CFB.

I guess this is directed at me. I stated as well that a special coach can compensate for the disadvantages. If Ohio still had a ton of talent not already grabbed up by the big conferences, you might not need a "miracle worker" as a head coach.

Coaches mean everything for these types of programs (non-blue chip, non-power 5, often isolated locations, no money...). I know it's anathema to mention Kent State on this site, but Darrell Hazell took Doug Martin's players and won 11 games in his second (and last year) ant KSU; Martin was never going to do this. I'm not going to bash Moorehead, but I think he's missing something even if he's put together a better roster than Arth. Here we are in year three and headed again toward 2-10 or maybe 1-11. He does not have the special touch that coaches at Toledo, for example, have had for going on 30 years. OU was a total mess (like as bad as UA is now) for a long time until they found some limited suceess with a legitimate coach (Grobe) and then won consistently with Solich.

UT has consistenly made better coaching hires, the type of guy who could compensate for all the disadvantages that the MAC has. The UT AD over the years simply made good to great decisons over and over and got coaches who were "special": Pinkel, Saban, Campbell, Candle. UT hired really good coaches while Akron and Kent and EMU, etc. mostly missed the mark and often worse than that - terrible coaches: Ionello, Arth, Paul Haynes, Kenni Burns, and so on. A great hire means success. Bad hire means being hopeless for the whole 5-year contract.

Ultimatley, much of this is about demographics. UA and the rest of the MAC depend on the near region (surrounding 3-4 states) for the majority of its students and its recruited athletes. Ohio (and the rust belt in general) has a stagnant population and a large number of universities. The state is recruited almost to exhaustion by the ACC, Big10, etc. Texas has a large and growing population plus a ton of football talent, enough to supply its own Power4 universites, G5 universities, a large number of programs outside of Texas, and there's still enough left over for the Texas-based FCS and programs transitioning from FCS to FBS, like SHSU. Akron has none of those "territorial" advantages. To succeed at Akron (or Kent and for 20+ years Ohio, which struggled mightily before Grobe and Solich) the program would need a dynamic coach able to recruit, develop, work the portal, and coach his ass off on game day. I don't think UA has that at the moment in Moorehead. He can't overcome the particular challenges that UA faces.

Or Curt Cignetti at Indiana. He started at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and Elon before getting a larger job at James Madison.

This seems like a good program for all parties involved and certainly increasing enrollment at the regional campuses is a good thing for UA overall. I hope that the selected students pursue a B.S. in Nursing at UA main campus in the future.

Perhaps he never finds that guy to run this particular offense? At some point you have to run a system that fits your personnel or the type of players he can get. With NIL and the portal, a coach just can't build and develope like before, especially in the lower tier of G5. At this point, whatever commitments he has for 2025 mean nothing. They can decommit in an instant. If they're worth signing, do they still sign to a team that's probably going 1-11 in year three of his tenure at UA after going 2-10 in '22 and '23?

Yes, I suspect that Kill's influence has played a role in Vandy's recent improvement.

He's currently a consultant with Vanderbilt. His resignation from NMSU is a bit cloudy for me. It was either because of health concerns or that the AD at NMSU had promised something (facility development?) and could not or would not follow through.

If we are pulling names out of a hat I want the guy who has proven he can turn around specifically a G5 team with no tradition and no money: Jerry Kill. What he did at New Mexico State was nothing short of a miracle; we see what happened to NMSU right after he left. For many reasons Kill isn't going to coach again, but at this point UA can't miss again on this hire (whenever that may be whether in a few weeks or in two years). The new guy has to fit the Jerry Kill profile. I don't see our fellow alumni, Getsy and Frye, fitting that mold.

BSU's 2-4 record isn't representative of mediocrity per se (it's much owrse than that), but I'd take it over UA's 1-6.

https://gozips.com/news/2024/10/4/cross-country-school-record-time-highlights-akrons-efforts-at-joe-piane-notre-dame-invite The 2024 men's XC team looks promising after losing the team's coach and top two runners from the 2023 MAC Championship team. Two of the newest runners just ran sub-24:00 in the 8K race in South Bend. Zips are within striking distance of Miami, EMU, etc. MAC championship should be interesting on November 2 in Muncie, Indiana.

The MAC can be fun. It can be exciting and surprising. The conference can put talent into the NFL sometimes. It can even beat teams it shouldn't occasionally. It is also as "small time" as it goes in CFB, and with the exception of the top 1 or 2 teams, its members would find the competition in FCS at the very least to be tight and competitive. "We" are small-time in athletics, but we are a university first and foremost - not an athletic corporation like OSU and the financial elite of the P4 (I’ll never use the term P5 because the PAC [insert number here] is not now nor will it ever be in our lifetimes a Power Conference). Maybe UA in particular and the MAC in general can find success in BB or in the olympic sports from time to time, but we are what we are, and we are what we are in a new landscape that almost overnight made being a successful G5 program and conference immeasurably more difficult (maybe impossible) than it ever was before.

At 2-10, worse is 1-11 or 0-12 (sorry for being pedantic), and as a long-time fan and UA alumnus I don't feel the difference in those degrees of failure. Worse could also mean dropping the program outright, which is something that many G5 programs on the bottom of the NIL-Portal tidal wave will have to consider in the near future. Given the choice, I would prefer no team to annual failure ("worse" than 2-10 as you indicate). Many universities survive without football - some never had it and many dropped it for financial reasons. I do not know anything about UA's AD; I still hope that he and the new UA President will make future decisions to benefit UA and not to accept the undesirable status quo.