GP1

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.

Ludwig von Mises 3 Elements of Change. In order for someone to make a change, three elements are required. The second cannot take place without getting past the first and so on. First, the person is uncomfortable with the current state. If you think the current state of G5 sports is good, you don't go to question 2. Second, there is a vision of a better state. I don't like the current state of G5 sports and I would like one where we compete well against one another while giving communities, fans and alumni something enjoyable. Third, a belief that the vision of a better state is achievable. This is the hard one. I believe it is achievable but I don't know how to get there. I do believe things have gotten so bad compared to the P5 conferences it is going to take a lot of really smart people to figure out. See my previous comments in this topic on this subject. We are so far past deciding how much to charge for a ticket is isn't even funny. I am not sure the first questions they should ask are even about money. We and schools like ours have a lot to offer fans, alumni and communities. I don't believe it is what the P5 conferences offer but that's not necessarily a bad thing either. We just need to put our best foot forward, whatever that may be. If we go about this right, our better days are in front of us. Now is the time for optimism, not fear (unless UofA is planning another unilateral decision).

It's why schools and conferences like ours need to collectively and look at the options. One school cannot do it alone. I don't even like to look at them as cuts. As much as I hate it, I'm about to use a corporate Americaism....."right sizing". If everyone agreed to right size together, it is easier to take to the public. A school can claim to make decisions for the "greater good" or whatever sounds good at the time.

Interesting. The PR hit is not ideal for Welty or UofA, but things like this happen on state construction projects all of the time. It's just happening to us this time and why construction lawyer exist. $1 million is a lot to ask for. I'm sure they will settle out of court for a number lower than $1 million and the problems will get fixed.

Over a 10 year period, Mother Nature will be more harsh on any NE Ohio stadium's concrete than if there were weekly sold out crowds. Most new construction roofs are not expected to last very long because of the wear and tear during construction so The Big Dialer may be in need of a roof replacement in the next 4-5 years.

It helped. What really inflated salaries was the rapid influx of money into conferences, specifically P5, that allowed salaries to be driven up. This trend followed in to the P5 coordinator ranks which used to be the nursery for MAC level schools head coaches. Those coordinators are hard to dislodge from their schools at this point so we have to take risks on P5 assistants or lower level head coaches which are significantly less proven. In any event, we and schools like ours are wildly overpaying for what we are getting. This would be a question for the Matt Kauligs of the committee I propose. How do you build a great management team at a small to mid size business when you don't have the financial resources of your larger competitors to attract and maintain human talent?

Thanks for bringing the bad roll out of this to the forefront. Seriously, nobody knows and that is the problem.

For now. South Carolina opens back up tomorrow. I'm going to Charleston and interacting with others in an effort to regain my humanity.