Maybe we should try this?!!

[Ryno aka Menace]

Jones' contract is expected to be for five years and close to $2 million per year. The deal is expected to be booster funded. SMU athletic director Steve Orsini has reportedly sold up to 20 boosters on the concept of donating up to $100,000 per year for five years. This was mentioned on ESPN about 10 minutes ago. I really admire SMU, doing something like this is showing that they are committed to having a winning program and went out and got a proven head coach.

[GP1]

Jones' contract is expected to be for five years and close to $2 million per year. The deal is expected to be booster funded. SMU athletic director Steve Orsini has reportedly sold up to 20 boosters on the concept of donating up to $100,000 per year for five years. This was mentioned on ESPN about 10 minutes ago. I really admire SMU, doing something like this is showing that they are committed to having a winning program and went out and got a proven head coach.

Great idea! No go out and find the boosters. We can't fund what we do now. It is going to take more than a few boosters to get the Athletic Department to where it needs to be.

[ZachTheZip]

Jones' contract is expected to be for five years and close to $2 million per year. The deal is expected to be booster funded. SMU athletic director Steve Orsini has reportedly sold up to 20 boosters on the concept of donating up to $100,000 per year for five years. This was mentioned on ESPN about 10 minutes ago. I really admire SMU, doing something like this is showing that they are committed to having a winning program and went out and got a proven head coach.

Great idea! No go out and find the boosters. We can't fund what we do now. It is going to take more than a few boosters to get the Athletic Department to where it needs to be.

We have very few boosters at UA. Ovbiously we have a few big donors (that we're EXTREMELY grateful for) that are responsible for things like the Field House, Stadium, and much of the greenspace on campus, but that's about it. We can't expect them to carry coaches' salaries as well. Mack Rhoades has said that when he first came here, he saw the sorry state of the donation base, and tried to use nostalgia to grow it. He asked the alumni "Don't you remember back in college that feeling that you would get on game day being on campus?" They responded that they had no feelings about it, because there were no gamedays on campus to begin with. They were all at a concrete hole in the ground, 5 miles off campus. Not to mention the fact that there was really nobody on campus for the basketball games because we were a commutter school.That's changing, though. UA has more students living on campus than ever before, and we're getting a football stadium, and EJ Thomas hall is going to start catering to student-oriented entertainment instead of the more artsy, but less popular, theatre stuff. They're getting involved with campus life. We have fan sections now. The only thing is, the real benefit of all this won't be seen for a few decades once the current students are graduated and out there making money. There is no quick fix for our problems. Everything will have to be done the hard way.

[Ryno aka Menace]

Is SMU is no better than UofA? I mean they are terrible year in and year out, how do they do it their enrollment is 10K ours is 23K. Their stadium holds 32K ours holds 32K. What the hell man.

[ZachTheZip]

Is SMU is no better than UofA? I mean they are terrible year in and year out, how do they do it their enrollment is 10K ours is 23K. Their stadium holds 32K ours holds 32K. What the hell man.

Simple, their students care about their school, and keep that care once they graduate, turning into donors. Ours pretend they're OSU grads, and completely forget about UA once they get their diploma. More than 50% of UA students would rather be going to another school, but either can't afford it or their academics weren't good enough. That's the problem with being an open enrollment school, you get all the people who resent not being smart enough to go somewhere else.

[johnnyzip84]

I dunno, maybe it's just me, but once you take this level of cash from a small number of "boosters" for the expressed interested of hiring a certain coach, aren't you setting up a the potential for "meddling" and all sorts of bizarre conflicts of interest? I liken this to a private company going public. Sure, cash is generated in the short term (in this case for a specific aim), but in the long term "management" might also have to answer to a group of powerful "stockholders" who may or may not have the best interests of the University or the Athletic Department in mind. And it just seems to add to the strangeness of this story that SMU is the only NCAA school to have ever suffered the dreaded "death penalty". Weird.

[Zippysgotagun]

Is SMU is no better than UofA? I mean they are terrible year in and year out, how do they do it their enrollment is 10K ours is 23K. Their stadium holds 32K ours holds 32K. What the hell man.

Simple, their students care about their school, and keep that care once they graduate, turning into donors. Ours pretend they're OSU grads, and completely forget about UA once they get their diploma. More than 50% of UA students would rather be going to another school, but either can't afford it or their academics weren't good enough. That's the problem with being an open enrollment school, you get all the people who resent not being smart enough to go somewhere else.

Bingo...Akron is open enrollment, SMU is a private university. (Most) People that go to SMU are (generally) smarter and (again, generally) have money lying around to donate to a bad football program.