Dave in Green

And another piece of my homework assignment: Summit County Jail inmates, deputies pushed to the limit by tight budget

Hilltopper, I'm sure you'll appreciate this sign of fiscal responsibility: Towel donations made to the Summit County Jail help stretch the sheriff’s budget

That's quite a homework assignment, professor. The online Summit County budget, which includes a detailed section for the Sheriff and a sub-section on the Jail, is here. But it only goes back to 2011. It suggests at the bottom of the page that if you are looking for additional budget information to contact the Finance Department.

This question was answered in an April 23 ABJ story. It's not that expenses have gone up so much, it's that tax revenue was going down resulting in budget cuts that led to reduced staffing:

HS Stripes, it's good to have you back on the forum. I hope you'll revisit this thread occasionally throughout the basketball season, as your experience and expertise give us a different perspective from the typical fan. I guess the one thing everyone agrees on is that the palming call on Pat was highly unusual. That incident alone would cause many to be more inclined to question other calls throughout the game, especially when so many calls rely on judgment. On the player control versus blocking issue, if 95%+ of coaches don't know the rule then they would be unable to properly teach their players how to deal with it and it's always going to remain a controversial subject. What is obvious is that the NCAA changed interpretation of the rule last season, and we saw the number of blocking calls versus charging fouls go way up. Unfortunately, almost all of those calls at both ends of the court went against the Zips in the same game where the highly unusual palming call was also made against the Zips. Just because officiating isn't easy and fans don't understand all the fine nuances doesn't mean we shouldn't question what we've seen with our own eyes. The fact that the majority of Zips games do not generate fan comments about the officiating suggests that fans believe most games are pretty well officiated. Since refs are human like coaches and players, we can be certain that they make mistakes and have good games and bad games. If it's fair to call out coaches and players when we think they haven't had a good game, it's just as fair to question the performance of the refs.

Is anyone suggesting that any of the following specific comments from the story are inaccurate?

Yeah, when I come across numbers like that it almost makes me wish I didn't research things. The only part of the story that may hold a little hope that the UA situation is not quite as bad as it looks is in the following three paragraphs: Without knowing exactly how UA calculated their numbers in this particular report, we can at least speculate on the possibility that all revenues and expenses are being averaged across all athletic programs. For example we know that Zips football attendance is way down and there's a new stadium to be paid off, which would drag down the entire athletic department proift/loss line.

He was considering Southern California, Texas Christian, the University of Akron, Cleveland State, South Florida, Central Florida and DePaul, and ended up at Loyola Marymount, which has finished dead last in the West Coast Conference standings the last two seasons. I suppose there's some kind of hidden message there.

Nobody's mentioned it yet, but Bluffton had a great turnout of fans since they're only a 2-hour drive from the JAR and this would have been a big game for them. I could see it being the largest paid crowd of the year when you add all the Bluffton ticket buyers and consider all the Zips season ticket holders who didn't bother to show.

I couldn't find a comprehensive source of assistant basketball coaching salaries anywhere, but everything I found supports the claim above that only a few assistants make as much as $400k per year. There's a big gap between head coach and assistant coach salaries at every level. Coach Dambrot's $400k salary appears to be right around fair market value for a head coach with his credentials at a school with total men's basketball expenses in the $2 million range like UA. If you take that $400k as a percentage of the $2 million total expenses, it represents 20%. By comparison, Mark Few's $1.2 million salary is also 20% of Gonzaga's total expenses of $6 million, Greg McDermott's $1 million salary is also 20% of Creighton's $5 million total expenses and Shaka Smart's $1.5 million salary works out to 30% of VCU's $5 million expenses. At the top end, Louisville has the highest total expenses at $15 million, and Rick Pitino's $4.7 million salary is about 30% of that. It seems that a fair percentage of head coaches at schools with consistent winning programs are paid about 20-30% of total program expenses.

There's no doubt that Big Dog is struggling. Right now he doesn't appear to be playing at the level expected of him from the promise he showed as a true freshman. The time he missed with the broken wrist may be having a bigger effect on his performance than expected, while at the same time the loss of Tree has created a greater need for help in the frontcourt. Pat and Kwan need an effective Big Dog to help carry the frontcourt load. I know that a lot of effort is being put into Big Dog's physical fitness, but I'm not sure what his mental attitude is right now. At times he appears to be a little frustrated and down on himself similar to the way Zeke used to appear.

As pointed out in a previous post above, we know exactly how much UA budgets for men's basketball compared with 348 other schools, and the Zips rank #153. So if UA is spending a ton of money, others are spending as much as 8 tons of money. Right here in the MAC we know that OU budgets 1.6 tons of money, or more than 50% more than UA. Even Buffalo has a slightly heavier budget than the Zips. So there's no question about where we stand in the financial pecking order.

I feel terrible this morning. I just found out yesterday that Texas Southern was playing #25 Michigan State and tried to call Coach Izzo all day on his cell phone to warn him about how good the Tigers are. But I couldn't get through to him and the Spartans were totally unprepared. So Texas Southern pulled the upset in East Lansing, 71-64 in OT, and I'm feeling guilty that I didn't do my job and get a timely warning to Coach Izzo.

It has to be a mistake on the schedule not to show this as an exhibition game. Last season the Zips played two exhibition games, one against D-II Malone and one against D-III Bluffton. This season the NAIA Rochester College game was marked as an exhibition and the Bluffton game wasn't. However it may have been marked on the Zips calendar, playing a D-III team is by any reasonable standard an exhibition for the Zips.

Skip, I'm assuming you mean that UA is the 50th largest university by student enrollment numbers. I couldn't find a list that showed where UA stands in the endowment rankings of all universities. But I did find the following data on university financial endowments: Of 1,141 ranked national universities, national liberal arts colleges, regional colleges and regional universities that reported endowment figures to U.S. News, Harvard was #1 at about $30 billion and the average endowment was about $330 million. Another source showed UA with an endowment of about $133 million, well below the average of 1,141 schools. Considering all of these rankings, UA appears to be relatively rich in student enrollment and relatively poor in financial endowments. As the one story points out:

On Tuesday those same guys were up against D-I talent whose smallest player was 6-3. Tonight they were up against D-III talent whose tallest player was 6-4. The most obvious change tonight was that BJ was inserted into the starting lineup and played more minutes than he has all season. He performed better against D-III competition, and maybe gained a little more confidence tonight. Other than that, it was hard to remain engaged in trying to analyze the Zips' play in a D-III exhibition game that was only played this late in the season due to being bumped by the late addition of the Penn State game earlier in the schedule. I guess it could have been worse. Without the Bluffton game the Zips would have had 14 days off between NDSU and Marshall, and now it's only 10 days.

Calling UA AU is always a good conversation starter on ZN.o. But the point about so many good mid-major basketball programs being at schools that don't have FBS football teams is a good one that we've discussed here in the past. Gonzaga, Butler and VCU are also good examples of schools that have invested heavily in basketball to compete with the big boys. It wasn't too many years ago that Gonzaga had a mid-major basketball budget similar to the Zips. Today Gonzaga budgets about $6 million per year compared with about $2 million for UA. Creighton spends about $5.3 million. Even Dayton has a $4 million budget -- double what the Zips spend. In 2013 UA had the 153rd highest basketball budget of 349 schools listed in a ranking of D-I team men's basketball expenses. The biggest winning mid-majors all have much higher than average budgets compared with all mid-majors. Schools outside the power conferences simply don't have the resources to compete with the big boys on equal terms in all sports and have to cut in other areas to raise the level of their basketball teams. It's a fact of life we Zips fans have to live with, and there's no easy solution.

Just trying to ease Zip_ME87's mind here: Columbus officials reportedly think city will host Browns training camp We probably all agree that it would be stupid for Akron to get into a bidding war with Columbus over this.

Sorry, it's hard for me to get excited about a game against a lower division team when the stat sites only count stats for games against other D-I teams. OK, I guess I can't deny I get some enjoyment from watching the Zips play even a lower division team when I'm already on record as finding Zips scrimmages interesting to watch. After the last two losses it's clear that the Zips have a lot to work on. I'll be at the JAR looking for little things they might be trying to do differently tonight.

Skip, I used to get frustrated and upset about the way a few people posted what I thought were unrealistic and unfair criticisms of specific areas of the Zips basketball program about which they knew little. Over time I've come to understand that a lot of that criticism comes out of the frustration and desire of Zips fans to see the program improve even more than it already has on Coach Dambrot's watch to date. I no longer doubt that we're all pulling in the same direction even if we have different ideas about what changes might work better than others. I'd like to see the conversation continue at a higher level without a few people at one extreme crying that the other side believes Coach Dambrot can do no wrong and a few at the other extreme crying that the other side believes he can do no right. That's just plain silly. Every Zips fan posting here on this subject believes Coach Dambrot has done many things right, and every one of them also wants the program to get even better. We should all discuss the pros and cons of various suggestions without taking offense at each other.

Good question, Skip. Of course the obvious answer is that Coach Dambrot tries to attract the highest level recruits he can to the Zips program. Each season he makes offers to players who end up signing with high major programs that annually skim the cream of HS seniors off the top and leave smaller budget mid-majors to fight over what's left. In most cases the selection ends up being a choice between players who haven't clearly shown they can excel at the college level. Some of them make it and some don't. Even the best coaches in the biggest programs don't always get it right. So, yes, I agree that Coach Dambrot doesn't always get it right when choosing which players to sign. Does he get it wrong so often that he deserves special criticism for it? I haven't seen anything to convince me of that. I do think it's unfortunate that not everyone has had a chance to speak with Coach Dambrot and get to know him a little better as I think that would end some of the wilder speculation and assumptions about him that may have come from misinterpretation of things they've read. I don't pretend to be a close friend of Coach Dambrot, but I've had enough private conversations with him over the years to know that some of the comments that have been made about him on this forum do not fit the man I know. From all I know I believe that he's driven by a single-minded ambition to help build a great Zips basketball program that will reflect well on UA long after he retires. Everything I know about Coach Dambrot tells me that he has a true passion for basketball, UA, his players, his assistants and the whole Akron community, and he sincerely tries to do what's best for all of the above. He's not above criticism. But he deserves thoughtful criticism as opposed to wild speculation and assumptions not based in fact.

Specifically addressing the 15 or so players in 10 or so years who didn't get to their senior year in the program, the raw number can be concerning when considered by itself without specific details on each instance and with no context of how it compares with other D-I programs. The first point I would make is that this is not all directly related to player development on the court. There's a mix here of kids who didn't develop to expectations as players and some who didn't develop as model citizens. There are some who transferred out for personal or family-related reasons, and in Steve Swiech's case a student who completed his undergraduate degree before his senior season and transferred to another school that offered the advanced degree he was interested in. So the raw number would need some detailed analysis to categorize the 15 individual cases. While there may be no accurate, reliable measuring system of a coach's ability to develop players, there is certainly language in every head coach's contract about his responsibility to develop student-athletes both on and off the court. I'm certain that Coach Dambrot's annual performance review involves way more than just his won-lost record, and I would expect it to include reporting on the development progress of every player on the roster. I would also expect each instance of a student-athlete not living up to expectations to be addressed individually and for Coach Dambrot to be held accountable for his role in each instance. Of course we can all agree that Coach Dambrot doesn't have perfect judgment and makes mistakes like everyone else. He doesn't ace his performance review every season and is expected by UA to improve any areas of concern. Still, UA thinks enough of his overall performance to put him under contract for 10 years, and UA is more aware of more details about Coach Dambrot's performance in the area of player development than we fans can be with our limited access to all the pertinent data. While I'm concerned about things that appear to be wrong with Zips basketball, considering all of the above I have a fair degree of confidence that UA closely monitors the situation and has found nothing about Coach Dambrot's performance in this specific area that merits a high level of concern.

Fair enough, Ada Zip. How could I possibly object to a post that contains stats? But you really bring up two separate points that I'd like to address separately. The first is this: Of course the other extreme from wanting to give Coach Dambrot a free pass is wanting to criticize him every time something we don't like happens by venting in general and never producing factual data to support the criticisms. Honestly I think both extremes are in the minority here and that most fans are open to critiquing coaching performance in a positive and productive way. To accomplish that it's important to stay focused on discussing specific issues and not get sidetracked on portraying everyone who questions our comments as an extremist trying to stifle our free speech. I've said this many times before and I'll say it again here because it really applies to this subject: I never post on any forum without expecting to be questioned, and I'm always surprised at the reaction I see from those who get indignant when they are questioned. Discussion forums are all about everyone feeling free to state their opinions and everyone else feeling free to question the rationale behind those opinions. In the course of a good discussion, different people contribute different thoughts, ideas and verifiable facts that help educate everyone reading the discussion. I've already stated that I know of no accurate, reliable measuring system of a coach's ability to develop players. It's a very broad and complex subject for which there may be no definitive answer. But that doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't discuss it. I want to know what others are thinking to help broaden my own understanding and I hope others feel the same. Every point brought up by me or anyone else is open for challenge in the course of intelligent discussion. Anyone who can't tolerate being challenged probably shouldn't be participating in a discussion forum. With all of the above in mind, let's go back to discussing player development.

I'm all in for intelligent discussion. Can we start by picking a single point and discussing it in a calm, measured manner? I thought we were focused on the single point of player development, but that seems to have been lost in a stream of generalities. If we take one point at a time and stick with it, we may be able to come to some kind of understanding. If we keep throwing out multiple issues at random this thread will accomplish no more than other threads that have gone in that direction. Are we done discussing player development or does someone still have a point to make on that issue?

Ohio has 8 D-IA football teams -- 5 more than Illinois or Pennsylvania, 4 more than Indiana, 3 more than Michigan, even 1 more than California. Only Texas has more (11).