Study out on UAB Football closing

Ragu, as to costs of scholarships, you and I both know that universities play all kinds of games regarding that. The room will be there, the lights will be on, the professor will be lecturing whether a football player is in the room or not. They make those cost figures dance depending on how they want it valued. The original report that they used as a fig leaf to close football used the worst possible numbers and far less reasoned estimates and projections and left things out at will. For instance, closing football means that UAB will lose affiliation with Conference USA, which requires football. No conference that there is any reason to think UAB can get in has a payout anywhere near as high as C-USA. For that matter, football brings in the money that helps keep the olympic sports above water. Take away football and it is an automatic huge budget cut.

If they're lucky, maybe UAB can get into the MVC, even though the geographical fit is bad. If not, it's the Sun Belt, most likely, and at that point you start losing players and coaches from pretty good basketball, baseball, softball and soccer programs, etc. Softball has made the NCAA's five straight years, men's soccer is a solid program. It's a domino effect. The whole athletic department is liable to go within a decade, and it really isn't necessary.

 

Here's How The NCAA's Black Magic Accounting Turns Profit Into Loss | VICE Sports

 

UAB would be the big dog in the Sun Belt, which isn't a bad position to be. But if West Virginia can be in the Big 12, UAB can certainly join the Missouri Valley.

 

If they get invited to the MVC. The league would have to add them and a partner, split the not so large pie two more ways, and add additional travel costs for all members. That's not a no brainer.

Sun Belt would be a pretty big drop in quality. C-USA is pretty bad as it is.

 

They would have done well in the 80s with that budget. The 1880s.


(I know this is a typo, but I still found it funny)

 

Yeah, "billion" was the wrong word to drop, huh? >grin<

 

It stopped being about football from the second day. It's about the process. Period.
Baby Bear and the rest of the board play Plantation Politics and, thanks to the ham-handed way all of this came out, the moran running the university, and the incestous tie-ins from the UABOT and Bryant Bank/Protective Life, those with UAB are trying to have more control of their college. Period.
The idot state rep who is tied into the UAB fanboi site and tried to force the legislature to decree the school needs football is out of bounds. But the school and UA-Huntsville -- have earned a bigger seat at the table, and certainly a fairer shake than the BOT (and it's mouthpieces at the Tuscaloosa News) want to give it.

 

How do you feel about an Ole Miss grad writing a #longform piece on the fall of UAB football? It'd be just like him to do that, too.

 

I'd love it. Don't think its going to happen, but if I were proved wrong I'd do cartwheels.

Yeah, Jack has those bills in the lege but I doubt he expects them to pass. The hope is more that they'll make a deal to quiet down the shitstorm.

What is really telling is that when Sen Wagner put up a bill calling for two trustees each from UAB and UAH (who currently has no representation at all, even worse than the token UAB does), the Trustees sent a delegation to try to talk him out of it. He didn't, and they hired one of the most powerful lobbying firms in the state to oppose it. That would be four delegates added to a nineteen person board, and they're spending big money to fight even that.

 

Do they have bourbon and daddies in Birmingham?

 

You bet your sweet ass they do.