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

I was going to let this thread just die, 'cause I know a lot of y'all have to be sick of hearing about it, but Tim Brando was on the David Glenn Show and really unloaded. It's near the end of the segment. Maybe if someone with more stature than I have says this you'll be willing to hear it.

http://davidglennshow.blogspot.com/2014/12/tim-brando-of-fox-sports-1_8.html?m=1

David Glenn:

“One of your not too long ago tweets that struck my interest was about the UAB situation. You know, we have a lot of ECU fans that used to call UAB a conference rival for years, and they are shutting down their football program - the first major program in almost 20 years to basically shut their doors.

“One of your tweets was that “UAB’s issues are the underbelly of old South cronyism in intercollegiate sports.” As we let you go, elaborate on that, because that was an eye-opening headline for a lot of people that love college football.”

Tim Brando:

“No one is writing about it because no one wants to deal with it. No one wants to come to terms with it, and it’s uh, I get it. It’s a sad and tawdry, ugly, gray, dark, dank cloud with no silver lining. But the truth of the matter is, much of what happens with the currency of our sport deals with the history, both good and bad of intercollegiate athletics.

“And sadly, what has happened at UAB is an angry, old, bitter, rich man has a vendetta against a dead man who was once a high profile basketball coach who founded the UAB athletic program. Gene Bartow made some statements that he wished he had not made about Paul “Bear” Bryant. His son, Paul Bryant, Jr., who is the head man on the board of trustees, never forgave Gene Bartow for that, and in his final year before he was going to have to exit because he was turning 70, this was one last crowning achievement, in his mind, a dastardly deed that was inappropriate and impacts negatively a number of people’s lives, both coaches, coach’s wives, players, players’ families, and it is deeply, deeply unfortunate.

“A number of people don’t want to go there because of his political standing and the power that he has within the infrastructure of not only that institution, the institution’s institution and the conference that represents the institution. But that is the bottom line to this sad and tawdry story. And you can read whatever you want to read about the finances, about the lack of crowds, about the situation at Legion Field, how unfortunate the stadium circumstances were… there are a lot of other schools that operate at a far greater deficit than UAB ever thought about in football, in fact they actually made a little money on the football side.

“This has nothing to do with that. It has everything to do with old South cronyism and vendettas that date back decades, and that is a really sad story. And for those of us that are from the South, and I am one of them, that have fought so many negative stereotypes through the years, you never want to give the pinheads in the Northeast a leg to stand on. Well, when things like this happen, we do. And we don’t need that open cut bleeding, and those wounds of the past for everyone to point to when it comes to what decisions are made in the Southern corridor of the country. And I take that personally.”

David Glen:

“Tim Brando, on Twitter @timbrando. Great answer on a fascinating topic. I’m glad I squeezed that one in there, because that is a heck of a heartfelt answer…”

 

One other thing. The root of Paul Bryant, Jr.s hatred of Gene Bartow was a letter he wrote to David Berst, who was in compliance at the NCAA. It was released to teh public and Bartow caught hell about writing it. Bartow complained about cheating in basketball recruiting by Wimp Sanderson at Alabama, and he complained of a culture of cheating at UA that Bear Bryant had fostered. He pointed to the number of coaches on the Bryant coaching tree who had gotten their programs in trouble for recruiting violations, coaches like Charlie Pell and Danny Ford.

The report on UAB Football that was the fig leaf for shutting down the program was done by Carr Sports Consulting. Bill Carr was the AD at Florida in 1979 when Charlie Pell came to Florida, before he won a lot of games and then was run off for scandals around *that* program.

Is that a coincidence? Maybe. UAB people tend to get accused of conspiracy theory.

 

Among those cheating accusations against Alabama basketball was the case of Bobby Lee Hurt, a star center from Huntsville. He was allegedly given the keys to the Coke machines in his high school so that he could clean out the money every night and pocket it (the distributor was an Alabama booster).

And then there was Buck Johnson, whose mother supposedly got a new refrigerator so that he would sign with Alabama. The Birmingham Post-Herald (Paul Finebaum wrote the story, incidentally) quoted Buck's mother as saying "motherf***er, you're going to Alabama" when he was said to be leaning toward UAB.

Another run-in between Bartow and Wimp Sanderson involved Alan Ogg, one of the few true 7-footers to come out of the state of Alabama. Ogg appeared on the cover of the brochure for the Wimp Sanderson basketball camp while he was still in high school, and thus would have been ineligible his first year had he signed with Alabama. He went to UAB instead, which further amped up Wimp's hatred for Bartow.

Around this time, Wimp was about to appear on a Birmingham sports radio talk show and was chatting with the host before the segment began. Alabama was supposed to play Southern Cal at the Birmingham Jefferson Civic Center on Saturday, and wanted to get access to the building to practice the day before but Bartow wouldn't let them because the Blazers had a game that night.

Wimp said something like "and you c***suckers wonder why we won't play UAB."

The host then said "coach, we're on the air."

Wimp replied "we better not be!" and hung up.

 

Thanks, Steak. A lot of that was before my time, although I had heard some of them. I knew there was something about Hurt, but not the specifics.

I had heard the Buck Johnson story as his mama smacking him on the back of the head and saying "You're going to Alabama, I'm not giving my kitchen back" but I suspect that's accuracy drift as the story gets passed along. Still, Hurt, Ennis Whatley, and Buck Johnson were at the root of it. Bartow was monumentally pissed, because Whatley and Johnson were linchpins of a recruiting class he felt was outright stolen. Bartow and Sanderson outright hated each other.

I had heard about Wimp calling Gene "that lying cocksucker" on Herb Winches' show when he didn't realize the mic was hot.

The root of Paul Bryant, Jr.'s longtime hatred of Gene Bartow and UAB was a throwaway paragraph at the end of a story about outlaw UCLA booster Sam Gilbert.

http://articles.latimes.com/1993-08-04/sports/sp-20220_1_sam-gilbert

" . . . You think of the Charley Pell situation at Florida, the Jackie Sherrill situation at Texas A&M and the Danny Ford situation at Clemson, and now we have the Auburn situation," he wrote, referring to several highly publicized NCAA infractions cases. "All (of the coaches involved) were trained by Coach (Paul (Bear)) Bryant at Alabama. My Add - *"The Auburn situation" refers to Pat Dye.*

"David, cheating in recruiting has been a way of life here in this state. . . . I do think that when Coach Bryant died, Ray Perkins (Bryant's successor) tried to clean up the Alabama program. When Ray left and Bill Curry came in, I think (Curry) ran a pretty honest program in football, and I think (current coach) Gene Stallings is probably trying hard to keep it clean."


When that got loose in the Alabama press all hell broke loose. It was all true, which probably made it worse.

Steak, do you know for sure if Carr actually hired Pell? I know he was AD in 1979, and Pell was hired in '79, but I can't get teh Google to tell me for certain that Pell was Carr's hire.

 

Urban legend: Before he died in 1982, Bryant was at the Country Club of Birmingham on one particular afternoon when informed of an Alabama-UAB baseball score, a UAB win. He supposedly said something to the effect of "we'll never play those bastards again" which, legend has it, became the edict for Ray Perkins to discontinue playing UAB in all sports. This has never been confirmed, though.

 

That's honestly a little before my time as well, but my sense of it based on what I've read was that the Florida president and one or two big-money boosters, not Carr, hired Pell.

Some of what I've read indicates that Carr was so embarrassed by Pell's cheating that he wanted to make sure he was in charge of the next hire, which turned out to be another cheater, Galen Hall.

 

My understanding was that Bartow told Wimp he could have it to practice if he'd schedule UAB next season. I'm not a journalist, I wasn't there, and I have a very definite feel that you know a damn sight more about it than I do, so I'll defer.

Note also that I had heard that Carr was a man of principal, and I don't mean to slander the guy, I'm just wondering out loud. It's an interesting train of thought but I'm just spitballing.

Consultants are paid to write the report that their client ordered, and I strongly suspect that is exactly what happened with the Carr Report.

 

That might be true. It's possible Bartow was partly at fault, but if you ask people who knew both which one was more respected throughout his profession, it's certainly him over Sanderson.

 

Yeah, the idea of Gene actually *hating* someone is really atypical, but that was a very specific case and he certainly had his reasons to be angry.


BTW, this year's UAB team put 15 players on the C-USA All Conference team, including three on first team all conference. It's a damn shame, I think we would have legitimately contended for a conference championship next season in Clark's second year as HC.

Those of you speculating in columns about the coaching carousel would do well to mention Bill Clark. He won championships as a high school coach, he took Jacksonville State to the quarterfinals, and he turned UAB, which has been horrible for a decade, around in a single season without recruiting his own guys other than odds and sods and jocos.

He's a damn fine coach and a first class human being, and he deserves to run a good program somewhere. I am saddened that it won't be at UAB.

 

Boom. Down goes the fig leaf. UAB's President claimed that no one offered any funding for football and that it was a financial decision.

The Champions Club is the very highest level of the UAB donor chain. It's the big guys, the kind who get their names on buildings. One of them was on Gameday last Saturday. They are publicly calling him out for his lies. Note that the quotes from UAB's website was Watts calling a couple of them liars when they said that they had money in hand and could not get anyone to take it... so he had in public, called at least two of the gentlemen signing this letter liars and said that they did not offer money. Jimmy Filler heads the new UAB Football Foundation which was offering to build the new indoor practice facility at no charge to UAB, to the tune of $8m or so, and did so from the front page of the Bham News.

http://www.uabstrong.blogspot.com/

He's lost the students, alumni, enough of the faculty that a no confidence is pending, and now the biggest donors we have are calling him out as a liar?

He's toast. The only question is if we can get him out before January or not.

Things just keep getting a little more interesting...

 

He's *still* being offered a chance to back down and save his job. Filler is a generous man.

http://www.bizjournals.com/birmingham/news/2014/12/10/filler-to-watts-lets-restart-this-thing.html?page=all

 

If Bear Bryant Jr. hates UAB football, then why would Watts' job be in jeopardy? Don't keep changing the narrative.

Are football fans waiting for the sharply worded motion of no confidence from the faculty senate?