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

"Unless my son decides you're not worth having around; in that case, hit the road!"

 

http://sportsrants.com/nfl/2014/12/03/open-letter-dr-ray-watts/

 

The RIFLE team? Banned? No guns? And in the SOUTH no less. Where's the outrage?

 

Supposedly, Alabama wanted to bring that monument back to Bryant-Denny and/or the Bryant Museum when they stopped playing at Legion Field, but the city of Birmingham wouldn't allow it.

 

Maybe I missed it, but I don't recall anything resembling this sort of histrionic reaction when schools like Pacific, Long Beach St. and BU dropped football, seems like those programs just sort of quietly slipped away into the night.

Wonder how many of those stomping their feet today actually bought tickets to and attended UAB games.

 

Come on. UAB's enrollment is 62% undergrad. That's simply not going to happen. To even suggest that it is is silly.

This kind of thing is going on everywhere. Modern languages and the humanities are taking hits all across America. Just a couple of months ago the University of Southern Maine announced that it is doing away with its French program. But that was a program, not the teaching of French itself.

Teaching-wise academic departments contribute in two areas: 1) so-called "service courses" that fit into general curriculum requirements (e.g., an undergrad's gotta take two sciences, one math, two Englishes, etc.); and 2) advanced courses that make up majors/minors. That latter area is where the financial pressure is in today's university. Those courses are almost always taught by senior (i.e., tenured or tenure-seeking) faculty, who cost more and tend to teach way less (as measured in credit-hours generated).

Offering a credible major in a given branch of modern languages/humanities is a very dicey proposition financially. You're always running the risk of shortchanging those gen-ed students (with fewer, larger sections) just so you can make your major work for a handful of students.

This isn't particular to the humanities, though. We offer a very small undergrad major (maybe 10 to 15 graduates a year) in my discipline, but we're only able to do so because several of our advanced courses satisfy general curriculum requirements in another academic unit. If that unit decided to drop even one of those courses from its curriculum, we would have to seriously look at doing away with our major.

My point in all of this is that while it might be very tempting to read any/all UAB maneuverings as part of some master plan orchestrated by the Tuscaloosa-obsessed BoT, most of the time that's not going to be the case. And I say this as someone who is very well aware of both higher education in general and the particularities/perversities of the U of A system.

 

I want to read a gamer about UAB women's bowling.

 

It's too early to tell what is going to happen to undergrad, but there will be a no-confidence vote very soon. The east side of the campus, the medical/research side, is firmily behind him. When Congress screwed around and let sequestration go through there was a straight 10% cut across the board. These guy's NIH grant money got cut unexpectedly. We've recently lost several prominent researchers, and I think mebbe some of the grant writing hasn't been all it might be either. Anyhow, you know how Departments typically have a some money left in the budget at the end of the year? Watts is doing a pullback of all that and putting it in the school of medicine budget. Odds are he'll get a near unanimous no-confidence from the undergrad in the faculty senate next week.

It very much looks like we are in the early stages of an attempt to cut undergrad. There is definitely something going on. The system chancellor, Witt, has mandated a 50% increase in undergrad, but at the same time they're cutting student activities, athletics, and undergrad? It won't just be football, bowling and rifle. There will be a couple of more women's sports cut. We'll get men's track, though, hoorah. Marching band is 200 scholarships gone. When they came off of football and asked about the band at the presser, Watts says, "well, now you're getting into trivialities." Not to those kids or their parents, you're not.

The guy just devastated the athletic department as a whole. C-USA money is decent and it has 5 or 6 bowl tie ins. Good bowl money coming in this year. The coaches have no clue if they will be there or what conference they will be in or if their players will stay. Watts is blithely saying that C-USA will keep us in the league without football when that is against their bylaws and teams from the Sun Belt are lining up for our spot. There does not seem to be a plan B as to where we land. Gene Bartow's basketball is in trouble. Haase has yet to have a signature season to ride to a better job, but I bet he's talked to his agent already. Watts wants basketball and soccer to be our headline sports but he just gutted the conference affiliation for those and there does not seem to be a viable option that's not a big step down.

 

BU, I recall, had a little bit of grumbling in the New England area because they had a long history in the Yankee Conference, although the rest of the country shrugged their shoulders. Long Beach had some surprised looks because Allen had just been coaching the team a short while before. Nobody gave a shit about Pacific.

 

Seriously, here is the year in the making report on UAB Athletics that he used as a rationale to kill the program. Read, it's only 12 pages including the index and footnotes. Doublespaced.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/248979169/CarrSports-Report-on-UAB-Athletics

There are professors at UAB who'd flunk you for producing what is being sold as consultant analysis.

They went to the various coaches and asked them, "What would you need to be competitive with the other schools?", and when the coaches reeled off a list of nice facilities that would give them a leg up on everyone in the conference, they added the cost of all of that up and that's where they got the figure for what it would take to keep athletics going. The maximum possible, in your dreams budget.

It's a complete sham he's hiding behind. The decision to close football was made long since. They made no attempt to say "there is a shortfall of 9 million dollars, how can we raise that?", they just killed it. Hell, they had a donor standing there going "I have eight million dollars to donate to build an indoor practice facility" they told him no. That money's not included in that report, either. It's completely political, instigated by three men, and it is going to do immeasurable damage.

 

In terms of it being completely political, I can see your point and it's unfortunate. Immeasurable damage? Please. The players who lost their team still get their scholarships. Those athletes who might have received a scholarship in the future will just have to hit their books a lot harder.

Only ones who are truly hurt by this are those who are losing their paid employment. Feel sorry for the $25,000 secretary or $30,000 video coordinator than then 20,000 fans who will just find something else to do on their Saturday afternoons.

 

And I say this with 99.999999999999999% confidence ... such votes mean diddly squat. This is true whether we're talking about UAB or UA-Tuscaloosa. Seriously, don't read so much into lots of this.