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

Steak, how do you earn a major college football program when the board entrusted with growing that program sees it as at best competition for donations it considers rightfully UA Tuscaloosa's and at worst as a threat to be destroyed? It's not UAB's fault that the school has only existed a short while, that kindergarten teachers who ask "Are you 'Bama or Auburn" of small children don't mention UAB.

UAB is the largest employer in the state other than the state and federal government. Of the three schools in the system, UA Tuscaloosa, UH Huntsville, and UA Birmingham, it brings in about 70% of the revenue. It sits in the middle of a city that is top college football TV market year after year.

Look at Central Florida. They were in C-USA with UAB, as bad off or worse, to include an 0-fer season. Their Trustees invested in the program, hired a good coach, built an on-campus stadium. They built it to the point that when almost all of the rest of C-USA moved up (or laterally) to the AAC in this last round of conference reorganization, they were to the point that they made a BCS Bowl, and won it. UAB succeeding in that way is exactly what the UA board is frightened of. UAB did not move up when the rest of the league did because the facilities are abysmal and there was no change to that in sight.

The thing is that the BoT that governs those schools is in no way evenhanded about it. There are fifteen members of that board. They can serve up to three six year terms. The Board picks its own members with the lege rubberstamping them. The Board removes members that it wishes to. This is the body which is responsible for spending the UA budget, which is large and a mix of public funds and donations. The set up is a fertile ground for backroom dealing and influence peddling. This is the Board that UAB has to get to approve anything they want to do, including building things with donated funds purposed for them.

Paul Bryant, Jr. is Bear's son and one of the most powerful and influential men in Alabama. He and a couple of his associates tend to drive policy decisions. There are fifteen members of the board. Thirteen of them are UAT graduates, the fourteenth has a medical degree from UAB but went to UAT for undergrad, and the fifteenth is a UAB graduate. UAH has no representation on the board at all.

As an example of how things work on the board, Bryant owns Bryant Bank. The current president pro tem was on the board of Bryant Bank when she was voted into that position. The fifteenth, the UAB representative, is Barbara Humphrey, who was a record-setting athlete in track at UAB. She is married to Bobby Humphrey, the former running back at UA. Bobby is employed by... Bryant Bank.

That Board of Trustees is a corruption and influence peddling story waiting to happen, but all I really care about in this regard is what they've done to UAB Football.

UAB is told to build, sell enough tickets to prove there is a demand, and then money will be spent on their program. They play at Legion Field, which was built when Calvin Coolidge was president. It does not just lack anything resembling the amenities so important to recruits, the upper deck had to be torn down because chunks of concrete were falling on the seats below. In recent seasons the locker rooms lacked hot water.

Not a waterfall, hot water.

The stadium itself is in a very bad part of town and that directly affects attendance because suburban fans are convinced that the mean black people there will rob or hurt them. That's nonsense, but it is a direct damper on attendance. Students have to get on a bus and ride to the projects to go to the game. The stadium is owned by the City of Birmingham Parks and Rec, who rents it to UAB. UAB does not get the parking money. UAB does not get the concession money.

Now, grow your program and get your budget in order and maybe you can get some funding.

Watson Brown has recently become the losingest coach in NCAA football history. He was there 11 years and went 62-74. They were finally able to get rid of him after his last team went 3-9 with 35 seniors on the team. Do you think that the BoT would have tolerated anything resembling that record had it involved the Tuscaloosa campus? That board knows very well how to build a football program.

After Brown was fired, Pat Sullivan was coach in waiting. The board did not approve his hire, he's an Auburn man. UAB boosters lined up Jimbo Fisher, then OC at LSU, and boosters were to pay half his salary. He would have cost less than Brown did. The board refused that, reputedly because at the time they were negotiating with Saban and Fisher had been his OC at LSU and they wanted him available if Saban wanted him.

The Board then issued an ultimatum and forced the hiring of Neil Callaway, who had just been demoted from OC at UGA. Callaway is a good guy and an SEC level O-line coach. I had never once heard him put forward for any HC position. Callaway needed a job though, and he was Paul Bryant, Jr's old college roommate. After his third season, when he was 11-25, he was given a contract extention.

Again, this is the same board that fired Shula at UA when he went 6-6 with a lot of injuries the year after going 10-2 and winning the Sugar Bowl. I know that there were many other issues regarding Shula, but the board does not require excellence at UAB, it cultivates mediocracy. and then it says "No one goes to your games, there is no demand."

Winning games creates demand and excitement. Watching losing ball in a decrepit tomb leaches all excitement away.

UAB finally hired a coach that is turning that all around with no regard to any obstacles. Bill Clark is the son of an Alabama high school coach. He won two state championships before coaching at South Alabama and Jacksonville. He has won as many games this season as the last two seasons combined, with two games to play. Attendance is up 130%. The team is playing for a bowl berth. Things are turning around, it's a good team, fun to watch. It's attracting local media attention. So in November it leaks that the program is under review. It has no OOC games scheduled after 2017. The new coach, when signed did not get a five year deal, he got three... till 2017.

A local group got wind of what was going on and formed the UAB Football Foundation. They've raised money. They've offered to cover an indoor practice facility, but are not being allowed to as the program is under review. It's dirty dealing, and the locals are fighting it. I think they are going to win, and its a great story. It's just complicated and does not lay out in a few sentences.

 

UCF has 60,000 students, so I don't know that it's comparable to UAB.

I'd say UAB is more like UT-Chattanooga (which has a football program, but is in FCS) or Missouri-Kansas City (which doesn't have football).

Trying to think of states comparable in size to Alabama that have more than one successful major-college football program in the same university system (i.e., not Texas or California). Are there any?

(LSU is not part of the Louisiana University System).

 

I don't know that there really is an exact parallel. Alabama has no pro teams to dilute the various fan bases though. Still, you have UA and AU, Troy, Jacksonville, Alabama St, Alabama A&M, South Alabama. People all over the state manage to afford football somehow.

Put UAB in a 30k stadium on campus, built to be expandable if need be, and they'll fill it. They tried to do that, put a proposal in front of the board at a time when interest rates and construction costs were at all time lows. The financing plan was in order, but it needed a bond issue. All of the luxury boxes were already committed to be leased.

A vote for the stadium was put on the agenda of the Board of Trustees. Two days before the meeting, President Pro Tem of the board Paul Bryant' Jr. announced that he was removing it from the agenda "because it did not have the necessary support on the board to move forward."

How do you know that without a vote? Alabama has an open meetings law. Who determined that, and who counted the votes? More important, if the votes were not there, why not simply let it go to a vote and vote it down in an open Board meeting?

 

Look at Florida's system. They built up UCF, and they are in the process of building up FAU and FIU. It can be done, if the board is engaged in working for the betterment of the various schools it represents.

Remember too that if UAB loses football that it will also lose C-USA affiliation. That conference is not what it was, but it's far better than the downward alternatives and still takes in decent TV and bowl money, which would also be lost. UAB Basketball, and it has long been considered a basketball school first, would play where? The A-Sun? The Sun Belt? I don't think the A-10 is a viable option.

If football goes away, so do 80-100 women's scholarships which were funded under Title Nine. There will be no need for a marching band, so those kids will lose their scholarships. There is a very real chain of consequences here. These are real young men and women, and their lives and futures are being played with.

 

For what purpose? It's pretty clear from the history of these kinds of things that it's never going to be worth it in a financial sense. If football is a money-loser or something that needs that kind of investment (with a very questionable non-guaranteed return), the only reason to keep it is if it's also a major tradition and a big fund-raising vehicle. Neither of those seems to be the case with UAB.

My general sense is that when the discussion turns to whether a program should be disbanded, that's probably too late and the reality is the program should have been disbanded years ago.

 

Why can't they go the FCS route, or D-II? Why does it have to be all or nothing for FBS?

 

Once you go FBS...

 

Why does anyone do it, particularly in the Deep South? Tailgating on the quad and then walking over to the game is considered an absolutely normal and in some senses nearly an essential part of the undergrad experience. Attachments to the school formed there lead to alumni donations later, and later still to bequests. It puts the school out there in terms of marketing. There are very real advantages to a successful athletic department, and even to some degree to an unsuccessful one. There are schools in every conference who generally are bottom dwellers, but they keep on playing.

The biggest reason that this is an issue is not that the program has failed, it's that the people who should be nurturing it have a huge conflict of interest and in some cases a personal animosity. They continue to hamstring it and attempt to smother it deliberately. It is only recently that this has become easily visible and believable to the public in the area, who up till now have tended to treat this as the paranoid fever dreams of crazy UAB fans. Now UAB is having their best season in ten years, on the verge of bowl eligible, doing all the things that the BoT said must be done, and they're attempting to shut it down again. It does not make sense, and it's not just the UAB fans saying so.

Let's talk about fund raising while we're at it. When this broke, UAB was in the middle of a billion dollar fund raising effort. Roughly half that amount has been raised or pledged. Big individual and corporate donors are getting very annoyed about this as a continuing problem. I've heard that something in the range of half of the donations have either been rescinded or suspended. Given that building a stadium wold have cost perhaps 7% of that, I'm thinking that it would be money well spent. Add in that athletics was nowhere mentioned in this fundraising plan, in part to mollify the board, perhaps. It is still the issue that has caused a lot of outrage and anger, and there are a number of fans promising to stop donating entirely if this does happen.

 

Yeah, that and you still have expenses but are less able to offset them. Losing the conference affiliation would be a huge deal. Most of the women's programs would be shut down, and the others would see players and coaches transferring out to other schools. Softball for instance has been making the NCAA's and we'd lose that. Our men's soccer has been doing well, top 25, that we might be able to keep if we're lucky.

Mostly it's knowing that we're the engine that drives the UA System's finances but we are denied the benefit while UA uses that cash flow to secure bonds to build new million dollar Frat and Sorority houses. The numbers are crazy, I'll see if I can't grab a quick set of those.

 

Oh well, they're just extracurricular activities.

 

Copped from a thread for reporters on Blazertalk.com. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the figures, although I can for the anger and outrage of the poster.


"UAB wanted to create its own law school with one of the top pre-law debate teams in the country surrounded by some of the best law firms in the country....denied - UA has a law school. UAB wanted to build a new Charles Collet business school building after he gave millions...denied - UA didn't want it competing with their business school. UA wanted a nursing school even though it competes with the UAB School of Nursing. No problem, Capstone School of Nursing was created.

The UA BOTs will fund fraternity and sorority houses....not at UAB!

1 out of every 3 jobs in Birmingham is tied to UAB!

UAB's operating revenue is $2.4 Billion dollars with $3.9 Billion in Assets and $1.35 Billion in Liabilities!

10 YEARS AGO AT UAB: $1.4 Billion dollars with $2.2 Billion in Assets and $839 M in Liabilities!

Compare this to Univerisity of Alabama: $660m in revenue with $3.2 Billion in Assets and $1.24 Billion in Liabilities!

10 YEARS AGO AT UA: $225 m in revenue with $997 M in Assets and $243 M in Liabilities!

Guess which University has been borrowing from "Peter to pay Paul"?"

-------------------------------------------------------


"ANYONE ON HERE A BANKER?:

Compare this to University of Alabama: $660 Million in revenue with $3.2 Billion in Assets and $1.24 Billion in Liabilities!

10 YEARS AGO AT UA: $225 m in revenue with $997 M in Assets and $243 M in Liabilities!

REVENUE

$225 M TO $660 M in revenue (293% Increase in Revenue)

ASSETS

$997 M to $3.2 B (320% Increase in Assets)

LIABILITIES

$243 M to $1.24 B (510% Increase in Liabilities)

CURRENT RATIO = 2.6
CASH FLOW TO DEBT RATIO = 53!!!!!!
10 YEARS AGO UA'S CASH FLOW TO DEBT RATIO = 93

HOW ARE THEY BUILDING THE NICEST STADIUM AND CAMPUS IN THE U.S.A. WITH A CASH FLOW TO DEBT RATIO? USING THE ASSETS AND REVENUE OF UAB....

SOMEBODY WRITE A STORY ABOUT EVERY EXPENDITURE IN THE LAST 10 YEARS AND HOW MUCH MONEY THEIR SCHOOL IS LOSING EVERY YEAR ($35 m A YEAR in interest alone!).

Any bankers on here lend to a company with a 53?????

IMAGINE IF THE TWO ENGINEERING SCHOOLS AT UAB AND UAH HAD BEEN ALLOCATED THE $107 M THAT UAT USED TO BUILD ITS ENGINEERING SCHOOL!

 

That's kind of the attitude. "You guys stick to that med school, it's what you're good at."