GP1

The rebirth of baseball at Akron was always a bit of a head scratcher to me and it has nothing to do with money. I think it's awesome that someone was willing to donate a large sum of money to rework the field and bring back a team. This level of dedication needs to be harnessed and exploited in the right direction. It was a failure of leadership at Akron to allow for baseball to happen. Sometimes leaders have to say "no" and this was one of those times. You have to say no in a manner that the donor is more than willing to donate to something that fits better in the changing landscape of college athletics. Leadership was not paying attention to the big picture and that's their job. Baseball is not in a growth mode in the USA. Universities were already cutting baseball. Cold weather state schools don't have very good programs generally speaking. MLB has gone from the national pastime to a regional sport. Minor league attendance is a disaster. The attendance and support for baseball on the professional level is so bad MLB made a proposal to reduce minor league affiliates from 160 to 120. I wonder how many of those small cities poured out millions in the last ten years to help build stadiums. God does the "building process" look even more idiotic now.

It's dead because the Great GP1 has not been around to spread some whit and wisdom. With South Carolina opening up, it will slow down again because the great one will have more to do/bars and restaurants to drink and eat in.

Sure, but it's not just us. It's boiling over all around us at many, many schools like Akron. Pathetic indeed..... I applaud many of the moves made by the MAC and other schools/conferences like ours. It is an unusual display of self-awareness.

Nice post. I agree the product needs improved. Not just on the field, but the experience the MAC football consumers are purchasing. Meyer is correct. On field coaching is the most overrated thing in sports. It isn't irrelevant, but it is wildly overrated. You don't win with X's and O's. You win with Jimmies and Joes.

It's waaaay bigger than this.

Financially, this is a good idea. In practice, let's look at the law of unintended consequences. When I was in school, travel squad was 47, not sure how the "building process" got it above 70, but the mysteries behind the "building process"...well, you know. In practice, herding the animals the night before a game is important. In reality, fans of home teams are going to have to accept that some players are going to be as hung over as Micky Mantle during a Sunday double header. Some are going to be suspended for the game because they were caught out drinking. In reality, the traveling team numbers need to be lowered to below 60. This will create some really lopsided scores when facing a poor home team, but too bad. If NFL teams can put on a game with 47 players, so can the NCAA.

WOW, the University figured out acting alone would be a disaster. They also figured out acting in concert with the rest of MAC is important. This gives me hope for a sane outcome. I would encourage them to get advice from their athletic directors and then do the opposite of whatever the athletic directors recommend.

Exactly. Wake Forest and Akron have almost exactly the same size stadiums. In every way, Akron has a nicer stadium. Wake gets small crowds for teams like Tulane, Boston College, etc., but the same game day experience takes place regardless of the crowd size.

I hope you had the good sense to sit on the Wake side and avoid the skin cancer sun beating on the visitors side. Seriously, did you enjoy your day and is Wake doing anything Akron couldn't reasonably do got the fan experience with just a little effort?

Thanks. My observations have been brilliantly articulated as usual... And wildly misinterpreted by some readers. Some things never change. Time away from watching the MAC in person and season tickets to a low to mid level ACC team has given me a healthy perspective on what could be possible at Akron. I'm certain a decent product on the field combined with a solid fan experience can go a long way to righting the ship for all MAClike schools. It really isn't hard. There isn't anything going on at a Wake Forest game that couldn't be done at Akron or any other MAC school in terms of game day experience. Schools like Akron are just focused on the wrong thing. Actually, their athletic directors are focused on the wrong thing.

I call it "The Building Process". Either way, here we are living in the national nightmare it created. It's not just Akron.

You're right. I can't give a good business reason why. But then again, it isn't a business. It's a university.

1. Thank you 2. Then we are doomed. There has to be another way. 3. Our men's basketball positioning is the same as it always has been. We are a one bid league. As a conference we are worse off all around because of the weeknight games. 4. This board is all the volunteering I can do. Thanks for being a fan.

Facts aren't reasons. I would like to see what MAC schools could do if they put a compelling, more enjoyable product on the field at a time and day of the week when it was reasonable for fans to attend. It wasn't that long ago that they did and attendance was good.

This is a really good point and central to what I have been concerned about as it relates to schools like ours for a few years. I would bet a lot of money your lack of interest didn't happen overnight. All of us have been given two scenarios by the morons who run our athletic departments. Fans can pick one or the other or both. Both are bad. The experiment has run it's course and the results are in and the current state of MAC football proves how disastrous things have become. Scenario one: Set up a schedule designed for early season failure and hope things turn around and you get to .500. Given the standings, this is a 50/50 bet. Heck, the highest number of wins by a MAC school last year was an uninspiring 8. The results drive fans away because of early season failure and little to hope for down the road positive possibilities. I don't blame a fan for losing focus. Scenario two: Enter into television contracts that make it almost impossible for some fans to attend games because of travel restrictions and those who are close enough can't go because of work restrictions, late season weather problems in the midwest or any number of reasonable excuses not to attend a college football game on a Tuesday/Wednesday night. Even the games at the good schools are not well attended on weeknight games so I'm not buying the argument anymore that winning will solve branding problems. The only conclusion any sane person can make is the athletic departments of these schools could care less about the average fan, enjoy making the schools they work for look like a joke on national television and could care less about winning or losing football games. The erosion of fan support has happened slowly, but it is no accident. There is a really good book called "The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*$k". The book isn't about indifference or not caring about things. It is about accepting that life is a series of problems you have to solve daily and then basically you die. Dropping down a division isn't going to solve the problem of horrifically bad decision making on the part of schools like ours. Some just think our problems will be solved if we drop down. Some problems may be solved, but others are created at that point and they could be far worse than what we are currently experiencing. The best thing we can do is accept our failures and chart a new course that will surely bring different problems, but in fact may make the average fan of schools like ours more positive about supporting sports teams. We really need better long term thinking and the current crop of athletic directors being produced in this country simply are not capable of solving our problems and may in fact be the central problem. The best example I can give of problems never being solved is Warren Buffett. Are all of his problems solved because he has a pile of cash? Heck no. He has so many problems he has to have a team of executives he pays millions of dollars each to take some of the problem solving burden off of his shoulders so he can focus on 3-4 problems he can deal with.

Amen. Further, there is no reason we shouldn't be competitive against all G5 conferences. It was just 5 years ago we had an 8 win season, which was just a few years after the Coach I disaster. We won a bowl game against a good Utah State team. We were in the conference championship. We have beaten P5 teams. Now isn't time to panic, but action is necessary. We just need to keep in mind most G5 schools are in the same financial predicament we are. We need to work with them to chart a better path. We aren't living in the Gilded Age. All of us need to make smart decisions. It's been a while since we have done that collectively.

Not with Jim Dennison as AD.

If my aunt had balls, she would be my uncle. The rest is unknown.

Spare me the stats game. He was the Lee Owens of the OVC. A nice guy, but not someone to get you over the top. At least Owens has great players at Marshall and Miami as an excuses. In reality, Dennison was not the guy to take the program forward and Huggins wasn't going to be around Akron much longer. The effects of Huggy's influence would be long gone. He was a terrible athletic director. He set the program back years.

The legend of Jim Dennison is different than the reality. He was barely over .500 in I-AA. The real question is.... Where would we be if when they brought in Faust, they didn't keep Dennison around as an AD?

Stupid people need a place to go to school too.

Can the opinion writers of NE Ohio do anything else to harm the school? My goodness are these people the enemy. What do petty morons like Pluto, etc. think their endless articles about cutting sports do to recruiting, enrollment, etc. It's a conveyor belt of stupidity in NE Ohio opinion writers.

That doesn't mean it always has to be like that.

On the high end, there are only about 10-12 schools capable of winning the national championship. Everyone else is just playing games for their alumni, community and fans. At P5 schools, they do a good job of putting on those games for the fans, or I should say that those fans are in a position to enjoy a nice day at a game regardless of the outcome of the game. Let's crawl first. How do we accept our reality and move forward in a way that gives the best experience possible to our fans, students, alumni and communities? Crawl-Walk-Run

I respectfully disagree. I think the University and many universities like ours care very much about their athletic programs. So many of them are making such bad decisions around their athletic programs it just looks like they don't care and historically don't care, but they do care. I remember a time not that long ago when lot of students went to games. We haven't given them many good reasons to go to games in recent years. They are very uncomfortable. They just need to follow the first rule of getting out of a hole...stop digging.