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

Yeah, like he's really going to give up his six-figure job because the kids in the faculty senate don't like him.

 

That's not what the report says. The report says that in the emerging NCAA environment, expenses -- not including a single dollar spent on capital projects such as practice facilities, etc. -- are going to increase but that revenues aren't going to increase accordingly. The total value of the projected shortfall is $25.3 million without any capital spending and it's $47.5 with the capital spending. Argue with that if you want, but the case you've been making is that if they'd just invest in the program, the revenues would go up. You can't have it both ways.

 

I'm not really talking about football. This is going to hurt UAB across the board, in terms of the integrity and stature of the University. This is a hit to the branding and image of the UAB undergraduate programs. It's also that anything that hurts UAB is directly bad for Birmingham's economy.

This used to be a steel town. When U.S. Steel pulled up stakes, and the four Forturne 500 banks in town mergered out from under us, the only thing that kept Birmingham from turning into Detroit was UAB. UAB is why it is now a medical and high tech town and brings 5 to 6 billion dollars to the city.

 

The 47m in capital spending was what I mentioned above - they went to the coaches and asked, if you could get all the facilities you wanted across the board, what would you want? They did this with every coach in every sport. Then they took the "If I could get everything I want for Christmas" fantasy budgets and added them all together and got 47 million.

In reality, they would have been happy with much less. They hung themselves making out a wish list because they didn't know how it would be used.

They also used the attendance figures from last season when we stunk and made no allowance for the possibility of it improving, as it did by 130% this season.

 

I covered one Long Beach State football game for the P-T, against Pacific. Terrible game.

 

The population of Birmingham is 212,000, and the metropolitan population is 1.13 million, according to the census. They were drawing 20,000 after drawing half that just a year earlier. Not exactly Green Bay.

They were, like I said, a Johnny-Come-Lately to college football and had barely anything memorable happen to them save for a couple of upsets and one bowl game that nobody outside two states watched.

When people think of UAB, outside the state, if they're thinking of them at all, they're thinking of their academics and research. They're not thinking of them for football. Which is how it should really be. So no, it's not going to cause immeasurable damage, as you put it. It'll cause a few groans, some more shaking of heads, a whole bunch of shrugged shoulders and a quite a few, "UAB? I didn't know they even had a team," remarks.

 

No, it was $22.3 million in capital spending, and that didn't include a new stadium. The shortfall is $25.3 million without any capital spending, and it's $47.5 million with capital spending.

 

Drawing 20k to a 70k seat tomb in the projects. If we'd built a modern 30k on campus with luxury suites it would be full or near full, and we'd have the naming rights, the concessions, the parking, and the gate. We pay to play at Legion Field and get none of the above.

 

Roger. I'll come back to this one if you don't mind. Yeah, it's heavily subsidized, but my point was that no one said that the program was hurting for money and how can we raise it. The support was there and swelling if they wanted to work it, but that attempt wasn't made. We are in the middle of a billion dollar capital drive that is Watts' baby and none of it was for athletics. He considered any money donated to athletics as being money that should have gone there, whether the donor wanted it to go to athletics or not.

They killed it quick, they didn't say "Hey, if you can't fund raise this we'll have to shut it down". They had a donor with eight million in hand to build the IPF that they turned down and he was willing to commit millions per year more if Clark got an extension and further OOC games were scheduled. He was turned down.

 

One other thing - the idea of a UAB on campus stadium gets treated as a vanity project. The only stadium of any size in B'ham is Legion Field, and it's falling down. The only thing left there now is the Classic, and that's one game yearly. The city needs to spend a couple of million to update it to half civilized, and probably won't spend that now that we're gone.

Other than that there's high school fields, the old ballpark the Barons moved out of, and Regions Field which is purpose built minor league baseball.

The city talks about a domed stadium but there is no tenant and that's been pie in the sky for twenty years now. There's no money for one.

A UAB OCS would have served a number of city needs, concerts, soccer, whatever. It wasn't UAB football and sitting there, and having it would have been a huge boost to ticket sales and recruiting, which gets you better so you win more and put more asses in seats. You know the deal. It would have dropped in beside Regions Field near Railroad park as part of a burgeoning entertainment district downtown. That economic engine thing again.

It's all academic, although there are going to be a lot of ripple effects.

 

Doctorquant, do you not consider it odd that they commissioned a year long study a year ago for who knows how many thousand dollars and got a sloppy twelve page report? There's a dozen guys on this board who could do a better job over a long weekend.

If you were doing that study don't you pick out a couple of similar schools and compare what they did to what UAB is doing, then compare and contrast?

It stinks.

 

So which one of the kids on the team is your nephew?