Marshall is playing for an unbeaten season. UAB is playing for its life.

Disagree. Given the allegations and the history of how college football operates in that state, it's a story worth following on a sports board. Not interested? Don't open the thread.

 

I'm not saying it's not a story, but let's have some perspective here. It's a minor D-I football team that has little to no history and little fan base outside its home state. It's not like it's Penn State or Alabama.

 

FWIW, I wish they would all die. We don't -need- college football.

 

My biggest frustration is that the UA Board of Trustees is a political corruption case as bad as anything in old time Louisiana or Chicago. They control the flow of many millions of dollars, they let contracts to cronies and business partners, they intimidate and smear anyone who gets in their way. There is no oversight, no checks and balances, and basically everyone in the state knows it.

No one wants to take the story on, because if you are a reporter in Alabama, getting on the wrong side of these guys is poison.

I know personally someone who was very vocal about the dealings of the BoT during our attempt to get an on campus stadium approved. His father runs a big construction supply business. Once his name was out in public, his father began to have customers tell him that if things didn't quiet down they would have to take their business elsewhere. Suppliers suddenly developed shortages, or orders were delivered a couple of weeks late. Once my friend stopped speaking out, things slowly went back to normal.

It's how they do business. Bare knuckled politics, reward your friends and punish your enemies... but primarily enrich yourself by taking advantage of your connections.

I'd love to see someone like Kristi Dosh take it on in longform, but she works for ESPN, and they are not about to take on Alabama. They're as afraid to as most others are. SEC is a big meal ticket for them, no way in hell they open that can of worms.

 

So? Our kids should have gone to the big boy school if they wanted a real undergraduate experience?

I say again, if not backstabbed repeatedly by those entrusted with caring for the program, things would be very different. Basically, one old man's twenty year old grudge is the root of everything bad thats happening regarding the UAB football program.

 

A school has to have a football team in order for a kid to have a real college experience?

And how do you know things would have been different? Different how? Would UAB be a Top 10 team on a yearly basis? Become a member of the Power 5? How?

 

Question for Neutral Corner: In the past few years, several schools (So. Alabama, UNCC, Old Dominion et al) have started football programs from scratch and proceeded to the FBS level ASAP. If this trend hadn't happened and administrators had instead decided that football wasn't worth such a massive investment, would you feel any differently about this imminent shutdown? In other words, is the wound more painful because so many other mid-sized public institutions are just starting football?

 

As I posted way way back near the beginning of this thread, it looks to me more than anything else that UAB football has been run under bad faith and a set-up-to-fail situation right from the get-go.

I remember watching games from Legion Field in the early and mid-1970s, and even then teevee commentators were not afraid to say the stadium was decrepit, run-down and desperately needed to be replaced.

To launch UAB football into FBS competition without a plan in motion to replace it was pretty much a self-fulfilling recipe for disaster.

 

http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2014/12/how_broke_is_uabs_athletics_de.html

 

Let me emphasize that I understand what you're feeling. But just because UAB's program isn't losing appreciably more than other programs doesn't mean ithat the program merits continuation. Those losses UAB incurs come at the expense of other opportunities that aren't pursued. And if that is no longer the case, UAB might actually be better off in the long run.

 

Baron, you compared UAB to North Dakota St. and Delaware because they have similar numbers of students. This is a false equivalency.

UAB is the biggest employer in the state of Alabama other than the state and federal government. It's annual revenue is $3.2 billion with a B. It's economic impact on the city of Birmingham, the largest city in the state, is $5 billion per year.

No, we wouldn't be a top ten team. We wouldn't be P5.

If we'd had a decent stadium, we *would* have moved to the AAC when everyone else in C-USA did during conference reorganization. Only UAB and Southern Miss did not get invited, and the Birmingham market has substantially more television eyeballs than Hattiesburg, Mississippi does. There was no improvement in our football prospects on the horizon and football was driving that bus, so we were left behind.

Our trustees have refused to invest in the team. They know how the value of doing so, obviously, as anyone who watches the Tide knows. They just refuse to.

We've been saddled with horrible coaching, intentionally. We were stuck with Watson Brown, the losingest football coach in NCAA history, for 11 years. He was replaced with Neil Callaway, who got a contract extension when he was 11-25. He was 18-42 before we got out from under him.

The BoT does not want us to win. They have rigged the game so we would not, then said "You have poor attendance." Well, duh! Birmingham knows good college football, and they'll come out to watch it. What they won't do is go out to a crumbling dump of a stadium to watch the local kids lose miserably again.


As to other programs getting in because they see the value to their institutions of having football, while we are being forced out, of course that adds to it. So does having our attendance sneered at when we were fifth in the conference, and draw more than Troy or South Alabama... which no one seems to think should be closed due to poor attendance numbers. Our attendance went up 150% because we got a decent product on the field. We found a new innovation in coaching - for the first time, UAB hired a head coach who had a winning record as a head coach. Damned if it didn't work, I think all teams should try this approach.

I think we're going to beat this. If we survive it, it will be because this attack has galvanized a lot of people and made them pull together to fight for the program. The mayor and city council, donors, businesses around the city, many ordinary people who are not really UAB fans but see what is happening as unfair, many others are pitching in. The local media, almost to a man, have been beating the drum against this, as they know the history and that the program is in better shape than it has been in years and is trending up. Frankly, I believe that is why the shutdown is threatened, because another year like this past one and it will be impossible to justify it.

 

I guess the board's big advocate for the players getting theirs only applies if they're playing for one of the big boys. Where's the outcry for those who are going to get no opportunity at all?