Dave in Green

Please send us all a daily update on how to reassess our thought patterns.

Re: Abreu Coach Keith Dambrot could not give details about the suspension because of privacy concerns, including its length.

Welcome to the club!

OK, I had to go back and look at your history of posts on ZN.o. You have at least as many posts on ZN.o related to YSU and Youngstown as to the Zips and Akron. Also, this is not the first thread where you've accused others of "attacking" you for being a "realist." If you focused more on the Zips and Akron as opposed to YSU and Youngstown, and lost the attitude of others "attacking" you for being a "realist," you would fit right in as a Zips fan.

I think the best thing for ZN.o is for Zach to pick the coach, because then if the coach doesn't turn the Zips around, we won't have to read all of Zach's posts about the idiot who picked the head coach.

This is terrible news. Some unconfirmed twitter posts here.

GoZips has done a good job of explaining why his first post came across as so angry. He's as close to the players as anyone on this forum, he cares about them personally and he wants the best for each and every one of them. His first post stirred up a lot of emotion, and some things have been said that probably aren't worth further discussion. We're all disappointed that Tree made a mistake in being in a bar at 2 a.m. The disturbance he was reportedly involved in will get worked out in the court system where it belongs. UA and KD will take over from there. Let's all hope for the best.

Add me to the list of those who believe that all the facts aren't in, and that a person is presumed innocent unless found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. As I understand it, there are hard and fast university rules and athletic department rules that apply to various incidents involving students and athletes. Beyond that, I believe that the coach would have the ability to personally evaluate the individual and the circumstances and do whatever he thought was in the best interests of both the individual and the team. Based on UA's and KD's history with player incidents, I would expect any actions taken to be firm but fair and reasonable.

I second the CBS Sports salute and admiration below to all Zips fans involved in raising this to the level of national media attention: Photoshop of Tressel in Akron regalia via "We Want Jim Tressel for Akron Zips Football" Facebook page. Your optimism is sincerely saluted and admired, gentlemen.

Guess you missed the speculation that this was part of a grander plan to bring in a big-name coach at a bigger-than-MAC salary to elevate the program in preparation for a move to a bigger-name conference. Personally, I'd rather be associated with big thinkers who fail while shooting for the big time than small thinkers who succeed in perpetuating themselves in the small time.

Eggplant parmigiana and a glass of chianti. Took about 5 seconds to decide. Some things require less thought, analysis and consideration than others.

Postmortems on situations like this should involve everyone analyzing exactly how accurate all their sources were, and how much weight those sources should carry in the future. There may have been reasonably accurate information from some direct sources, but then layers of optimism added on as the rumors were passed from person to person. We now know for a fact that Tressel was offered, because TW said in the ABJ article that "Coach Tressel has shared with us that he is not interested in coaching at Akron." They could not have known that without asking him. So that part of the rumor was true. The fact that UA actually did offer the job to Tressel certainly deserves the level of excitement the rumor of that offer created among Zips fans. There has been no official confirmation of when the offer was made, how much was offered, or how long Tressel considered before turning the offer down, so we can't really measure how accurate our sources were on those details. Maybe we can find out in retrospect, or maybe we'll never know for sure. Some of our sources may have been accurate in what they told us at the time they told us, while others may have shared the best information they had, but their information was flawed. We don't really know for sure if UA wanted this leaked out to help create a buzz or if UA really wanted this to remain confidential and they're unhappy with the internal leaks. So, if anyone else other than me is interested in learning from this experience, maybe we can keep this thread alive and discuss what we found out in the aftermath that either confirms or invalidates what we heard along the way from our sources. But we should all be cautious about revealing too much detail about our best sources. Some people are pretty good at putting together details about sources that allows the sources to be identified and outed. Outing good sources is the best way to lose good sources. So if you think you have good sources, be sure to protect their identities so that you can call on them again.

Whew, I can't keep up with the pace of this thread. I think the only hope here is that wildfires tend to eventually die out if left on their own.

That's extremely limiting to say either one of a handful of big-name coaches or one relative unknown. No need for a search committee, then. Just run a poll on ZN.o, hire the winner, and all ZN.o forum members cross their hearts and hope to die that they will never ever criticize the decision, no matter what results the coach produces.

Sorry, but I happen to have an inside source on this one. The journalist has a good record and his sources were also good. It's just that they were not infallible. No need to trash someone just because we don't agree with their conclusion.

How about looking at it exclusively from an age point of view. Would you prefer a young guy or an old guy? Does watching 35-year-olds Shaka Smart and Brad Stevens take their mid-major basketball teams to the Final Four in the NCAA basketball tournament make you wonder what a 32-year-old hotshot offensive coordinator might do vs. a 60-year-old ex-major head coach? Pretty intriguing stuff.

ITZ, this is manageable if they have the right people in the right positions. It doesn't even require someone at UA. There are consulting companies that specialize in managing situations like this. If done properly, the rumor stage can be stretched out to achieve maximum national interest, and good results can be achieved no matter what the hiring outcome. Tressel can be in the mix without necessarily committing to be head coach. I'm anxious to see how this plays out because I was involved in similar scenarios in the corporate world before I retired. So far, things are going just fine. I think that the key person in all of this is Dr. Proenza, and I believe most of us have a fair amount of faith in his abilities.

Yeah, why on earth would we consider an offensive coordinator whose team averaged 48 points a game against MAC teams to finish 7-1 in the conference, beat Temple in Philly and come within one play of beating tOSU?

Would the new software have the ability to automatically exclude multiple quotes when posting with the Add Reply button? Many of the forums I post on have this feature, which only quotes the last post responded to. This would eliminate the continuing ZN.o problem of posts that include quotes from the previous 10 posts.

I would like to see who Tressel would recommend, assuming he does not take the job himself.

Seems as if we've all ignored an important post earlier in this thread: Now I'm no expert on all the things UA's Board of Trustees does, but there's a simple description on UA's website: The University of Akron's Board of Trustees is the governing body for The University of Akron, pursuant to Ohio Revised Code 3359.01. The Board is composed of 11 members—9 voting members and 2 nonvoting student members—who are appointed by the Governor of Ohio with the advice and consent of the State Senate. Trustees are appointed to a nine-year term of office, with the exception of student Trustees who are appointed to a two-year term. The Board of Trustees has been charged by the Ohio Legislature (Ohio Revised Code 3359.03 and 3359.04) with: selecting and appointing the president; setting the operating budget; approving personnel appointments; granting all degrees awarded by the University, including honorary degrees; establishing tuition and fee rates; approving contracts; and approving all rules, regulations, curriculum changes, new programs and degrees at The University of Akron. The bolded parts would seem to relate to things involved with a major hiring. So it's not unreasonable to think that the UA Board of Trustees would be presented in this meeting with a report on any previous UA meetings with someone like Jim Tressel, and whether anything further was required moving forward. After reporting out to the Board of Trustees and fully informing them of all details, it's not unreasonable to expect that any significant news might also be shared with the public. So I think it's fair for all the zero percenters and all the hundred percenters to reign in their ponies and wait just a few more hours to see what official word comes out after the Board of Trustees executive session, which, by the way is private and not streamed on the web as regular public sessions are.

Your words prove that you are a big man in more ways than one. No need to say any more.

The Tressel-UA story will be over whenever the two parties choose to make absolutely clear to the public that the story is over. If Tressel ultimately decides not to accept the offer, he could do UA a great service by making a joint public announcement with Dr. Proenza about what a great opportunity the UA head coaching job is, but it just wasn't the right fit for him at this time, and he reluctantly had to decline. Further, if as part of that announcement he were to publicly offer to help UA in its search for the right coach, that would also work to help keep the UA head coaching position in the news. Even without becoming head coach, Tressel still has tremendous leverage to help make UA more attractive to an up and coming Jim Tressel of the future.

Everyone should read the Canton Repository story. It's bylined by a good sports writer (Todd Porter) who spoke directly with someone close to Tressel. Stuff can always change, so I wouldn't consider this to be the definitive answer. But it carries more weight than the anonymous twitters, and tends to lower the odds a notch. Tressel won't coach at Akron

Rasor has a good take on all this: I’m still quite skeptical, but rumors across Facebook, ZipsNation and Twitter are buzzing like nothing I’ve ever seen relating to Akron. That can't be all bad, as long as they're spelling Akron correctly. Tressel rumors are getting wild, fun to read