Announcement at 4 pm re UAB Football reinstatement.

Snort. I was a tiny little cog, doing what I could, like hundreds of other people. It's not like I was one of the big money businessmen who backed Watts into a corner and forced the issue. This thing was won by a combination of community boosters and us army ants swarming and refusing to stop. Yeah, I was one of the people Archibald referred to, and I am proud of it and that we won. It was a near run thing, but I'm not breaking an arm patting myself on the back.

There was indeed a fight for justice, although "social justice" is a bit over the top. The UA Board of Trustees is old school redneck political machine, one of the most powerful and least scrutinized powers in the state. That they chose to back down rather than have their dealings dragged further into the light was a big victory, whether you realize and credit it or not.

 

I think NC is a C-USA cousin of that creepy Dr Pepper fan boy from the commercials last winter.

I've come into this with a bemused detachment but, with each NC post, I kind of find myself rooting for UAB football to lose $15 million over the next four years and for it to get shut down.

The sense of entitlement to live in the $350,000 house on a janitor's salary is unsettling.

 

The alumni and boosters raised nearly $30m in four weeks to bring back football. UAB has operating revenues of over $2.5 billion. Janitor's salary.

Know your role, shut up and be a have not. Gotcha.

 

Life is about knowing your place and especially what you're limitations and weaknesses are.

I see UAB averaged 21,000 per game this year after drawing under 11,000 a game in 2013.

Maybe in 2016 the alumni can have the millions in $5 bills dropped from a helicopter above the stadium at halftime. That'll draw a crowd.

 

I like turkeys better.

 

2013 was the most miserable year in UAB's inglorious football history. It sucked goat balls and was capped by losing to a Southern Miss team who had not won in two seasons. Garrick McGee ran for the hills and went back to holding a clipboard for Bobby Petrino.

2014 was Bill Clark's first year as head coach and he was hired late. Recruiting was a scramble. He took what he had and what he could scrape up and went to work. The team went 6-6, qualified for a bowl, and attendance nearly doubled. UAB was middle of the pack in C-USA for attendance, was a couple of plays away from two more wins, and was positioned to compete for a conference championship in 2015. That would have been enough to make the fans happy. At that, UAB's attendance was third in the state behind UA and AU, and I don't hear people calling for Troy, South Alabama, and the other twelve schools playing football in the state to close their programs. C-USA is appropriate, and the team could have been competitive this year.

That other thread is full of people whose opinion was that there should not be a team, or that it might come back as an FCS team in three to five years, or that it was gone for good. The people who cared about the program refused to sit down and shut up, and they fought and raised money and brought it back.

You don't care. That's cool, your option.

 

I'll say two things: NC is passionate, no real harm in that, and I'm glad he brought this story to our attention. It's been interesting to watch the story unfold, and it sure has turned out differently than I expected. I figured UAB was dead meat, and it might eventually be, due to the damage done. But if it does go down the tubes, at least they had a second chance. And, they fought a lot of back room shenanigans that just wasn't right.

There's some "feel good" elements to this story. I hope the UAB program survives and thrives, within mid-level expectations. This could be their "phoenix" moment. If it works out, good for them.

And NC has been just a messenger. Involved and passionate, yes, but as I was reading his posts throughout the past several months, I kept thinking, you know, it's a story and fishy and disgusting (BoT, etc.), and maybe the course of action will be reversed. And damn if it didn't. I am very surprised that it has turned out this way. But the final chapters have not been written, of course. Time will tell.

 

The real tripwire hidden in bringing the program back is that statement by Watts that no long term debt is allowed. How to build a $75m stadium without a bond issue is the next big challenge. It is possible that once President Watts is gone that the next President will relent on that, but my bet is that this was a mandate from the board of trustees. On the other hand, the big corporate interests in Birmingham have gotten off the sidelines. We'll see. I think that if the on campus stadium gets approved the program will stick. Until then we'll continue to worry about what we don't know about yet.

I know that this is not really the place to go all fanboi. Mostly I just read the board, pitch in a little here and there. This is an issue close to my heart, yes, and so I have taken on all comers over it. I don't apologize for that. If it is annoying to you, don't click on the thread, because by now you should pretty well know what it is. I figure that at some point someone will do a good long form of this story. It will require it, because the story goes back decades, and simply can't be told properly as a short update piece.

It is really annoying when the NY Times weighs in and frames the story as "Brave academic first university president closes football in the name of fiscal responsibility in football crazy Alabama." That omits so much and is so factually inaccurate that for once I agree with the hard core red state talk about the mainstream media. It's an incredibly lazy and shallow take on what really happened here.

 

NC, for what it's worth, I wasn't making fun of you. I just thought the Arab Spring comparison (not yours, as far as I can tell) was hilarious.

 

It's been an interesting story to watch. Dunno why anyone would slam NC for bringing it to light. That's what journalists do.

Not every story must scream "national appeal," especially on a media board. There are angles and developments that are useful to note for similar situations that can arise anywhere else.

 

I hope you made this clear to The New York Times.
Can't always parachute in and take over a regional story, ya know.

 

Actually, I didn't. John Knox did, and he is by far a better informed and more articulate spokesman than I. He has been pestering them about this story since 12/1/14, the day before the program was shut down. He's an academic, teaches meteorology at UGA, and was a Rhodes Scholarship finalist. Hell, let me throw a few things up of his, because he pulled together any number of facts and the history. On my best day I could not have written on the subject as well as he. He sent them two corrections and when they did not respond, he threatened to fly there and demand to meet with the editors over it. He would have, too. They published both.

UA Board of Trustees expansion efforts are ineffective, unsustainable - The Crimson White

The early years of UA and its Board of Trustees

A history of UAH and the UABOT

The UAB miracle and its obstructionists

The University and the City 2.0

All of these are worth reading to put this story into perspective, but if you don't want to put that much time in, read the second link regarding the history of UA and it's board of trustees. Most of this I did not know, as the history of UA as related by people here pretty much begins when Bear Bryant and UA won the Rose Bowl. It's not a story that they publicize much.

These were written by a passionate and articulate advocate for UAB, but they are also dead nails factual, based on quality research. There are so many layers to the origin of what happened regarding UAB and the board over the years. I have taken a crack at putting some of it in these threads but it is exhausting trying to do it from the hip, using Google on the fly, instead of sitting down and laying it all out sensibly as Knox does.

Re the first article - UA has $970m in outstanding construction bonds it is pulling debt service on, and Moody's put a condition on their credit rating. If it does not continue the current percentage of out of state students (paying double the in state tuition, and the incoming classes have more out of state students than state residents) and rate of growth of undergraduate numbers, the credit rating will fall and debt service will increase substantially. If the education bubble bursts or Saban retires and the out of state students leave Tuscaloosa, UA will be the university too big to fail. For perspective, the state of Alabama is currently unable to figure out a $200m immediate deficit, which balloons to about $800m if you include prison reform and medicare. UA at nearly a billion on top of that would bankrupt the state. If something goes wrong there the entire higher education budget would be going to UA's debt.