CL Fires the Stoehrs!!

[parkedgourmet2]

Since we showed that $100,000 mattered sooooooooooooo much to our athletic department, why don't we save that money and hire no new assistants to replace those that have been fired, encouraged to leave, or left on their own accord. That lets the new coach next year come in without having to let go anyone that Chris Long would hire. Surely that would save a little cash (more than $100K) and not give Long the excuse that it takes time to get his assistants on his page. Talk to Coach Barmore and see if he would come back for the year to bail out his boy and his program.

[barkinloud]

Last I heard, joakes is still a.d.

how convenient for you guys

[StrayDawg]

how convenient for you guys

And, how unfortunately true for you.

[rustondawg5198]

Call whatever you want, since it's obvious that you are in over your head. Make all the "love affair" comments you want about Dooley, but conveniently ignore the man crush you have on our outgoing AD. The numbers don't lie, bro.

Besides the numbers that baddawg quoted above, think about CUSA and other conferences. Lots of people on this board talk about teams with media markets. Why do you think conferences look for media markets? Why do they look for bowl tie-ins? Why do they want teams with name recognition? Same answer to all questions: MONEY

If you were a commissioner, why would you invite La. Tech? We don't do anything that they look for. We don't market our team so we don't have butts in seats. We spent several years satisfied with mediocre performances from our football and men's basketball coaches, so we did not generate any tournament revenue or bowl revenue with the exception of the Humanitarian Bowl in '01 and the NIT apperance a few years ago. That means that our football team has made exactly ZERO dollars for the WAC in the last 7 years. Put another way, kids in the second grade were not even alive the last time Tech football generated one red cent for the WAC. The WAC deserves more from us and, more importantly, our student athletes deserve more from all of us.

The closest media market is Shreveport and we have no presence there because we make no effort to have a presence there. You can buy a truck load of Florida State T-shirts in Shreveport, but most of the population there has never been to Tallahassee. Where can you buy Tech merchandise in Shreveport? Exactly. Are you seeing a pattern here, barkinloud?

Oakes spent so much time politicking and crying about what Reneau wouldn't give him, that he never realized that he was not giving the WAC anything. Why should we expect other conferences to come calling? How can we sell other conferences on our membership when we do not give ourselves the necessary sales tools? The Peter Principle might work in the business world, but not for conferences that look for money and market share.

Yes, presidents do the actual voting, but they all understand (Reneau might finally be catching on) that when the teams win, more kids know who your school is and more kids apply to your school. When athletics actually makes money, then it puts less of a burden on the rest of the president's overall budget. If you were the president of the XYZ conference and you had the chance of adding ULM to your conference or Tulane, which would you pick? Tulane would actually add something to your conference, while ULM would live off of your conference. If we plan to move these programs forward, we have to stop approaching everything in the ADs office from a position of weakness and actually show that we bring something to the table. Jim failed at that job, whether you care to acknowledge it or not.

The job of the AD is to move the department forward, not focus on trivial details. We spent a lot of years in neutral under your boy, Jim and now we have to move forward. Dooley seems to understand (and Buskirk definitely understands) that no athletic program can be successful without money. Our current focus is on programs that can actually generate money (football and MBB). We used our WBB success to get into the WAC, but we can't use that now. Putting all eggs in one basket is not very bright, and our basket was a money pit.

Chris Long has not done a great job. But, because of the financial situation that Oakes left the department in, we can not afford to buy him out and sign a big contract with another coach. We can't do it...bottom line. Next year, if he doesn't perform, he doesn't get a new contract. We have to move forward realizing that the athletic department is an entertainment business that does major advertising for the university. But, we have to move forward with someone at the wheel who knows how to get everything he can out of that department.

Sorry if this long post interrupted your game of grab ass.

Good post.

I think the biggest problem within athletics has been the constant nepotism and "staying within the Tech family" attitude that exists. Someone can be completely and utterly unqualified for his or her job around here, but because that degree has Dan Reneau's or F. Jay Taylor's signature on it, they get that job. I can think of AT LEAST four administrators within Tech athletics that are not qualified for their job and are either lazy or incompetent (or both), but are allowed to stay on because of "who their parents are" or because they're "part of the Tech family."

The problem is -- being from Tech, they have NO IDEA how things are done other places. They just shrug their shoulders and shake their heads when they try to figure out how other mid-major type schools (Boise State, Southern Miss, East Carolina, etc.) have managed to have sustained athletic success while Tech remains at the bottom of the barrel in everything. They don't know how to market. They don't know how to sell tickets (or manage a ticket office). They didn't know about websites until Buskirk came in, took one look at our old site, and laughed. They've had to outsource a lot of their publication work because no one in the marketing department knows how to use any desktop publishing software. They allow facilities to go to crap and then try to blame someone else or dump their problems on someone else so they don't have to do any work.

In addition, they are understaffed in every single department. So not only do the administrators not know how to do their job, they are stretched so thin that they can't even do enough of what they don't know how to do. So JOakes' solution to everything is "just hire some student workers." Problem is, they can't pay them. So they go to the financial aid office and find the dozen or so out-of-state students who are so dumb that they can't get their out-of-state tuition waived. And they give them jobs in media relations, marketing, ticket office, facilities, sports medicine, etc., and don't pay them anything except waiving their out-of-state. So the student workers are pretty much worthless, which leaves the administrators to not only do their jobs, but clean up all the messes the student workers make.

It's a sinking ship over at the Louisiana Tech campus, let me tell you. I hope against hope that Dooley -- who has some "big time" experience at LSU, the Dolphins, and with his dad having been an AD at Georgia -- can turn this thing around. We all know he's not here for the long haul, but maybe he could leave the program better than he found it so someone else can help take the next step and show Conference USA (or whatever better option exists 10 years from now) that we're ready to move up in the world.

If he doesn't, we might as well give up this facade of being good enough for the WAC and go start begging the Sun Belt (or the Southland) to let us back in. This whole aura of "we're on a level above ULM and ULL"? We're about to lose it, folks. We've dropped down to their level. Maybe below. Their facilities are already better than ours. Their marketing is better. Their administration gets it. Ours doesn't.

[glm47]

Good post.

I think the biggest problem within athletics has been the constant nepotism and "staying within the Tech family" attitude that exists. Someone can be completely and utterly unqualified for his or her job around here, but because that degree has Dan Reneau's or F. Jay Taylor's signature on it, they get that job. I can think of AT LEAST four administrators within Tech athletics that are not qualified for their job and are either lazy or incompetent (or both), but are allowed to stay on because of "who their parents are" or because they're "part of the Tech family."

The problem is -- being from Tech, they have NO IDEA how things are done other places. They just shrug their shoulders and shake their heads when they try to figure out how other mid-major type schools (Boise State, Southern Miss, East Carolina, etc.) have managed to have sustained athletic success while Tech remains at the bottom of the barrel in everything. They don't know how to market. They don't know how to sell tickets (or manage a ticket office). They didn't know about websites until Buskirk came in, took one look at our old site, and laughed. They've had to outsource a lot of their publication work because no one in the marketing department knows how to use any desktop publishing software. They allow facilities to go to crap and then try to blame someone else or dump their problems on someone else so they don't have to do any work.

In addition, they are understaffed in every single department. So not only do the administrators not know how to do their job, they are stretched so thin that they can't even do enough of what they don't know how to do. So JOakes' solution to everything is "just hire some student workers." Problem is, they can't pay them. So they go to the financial aid office and find the dozen or so out-of-state students who are so dumb that they can't get their out-of-state tuition waived. And they give them jobs in media relations, marketing, ticket office, facilities, sports medicine, etc., and don't pay them anything except waiving their out-of-state. So the student workers are pretty much worthless, which leaves the administrators to not only do their jobs, but clean up all the messes the student workers make.

It's a sinking ship over at the Louisiana Tech campus, let me tell you. I hope against hope that Dooley -- who has some "big time" experience at LSU, the Dolphins, and with his dad having been an AD at Georgia -- can turn this thing around. We all know he's not here for the long haul, but maybe he could leave the program better than he found it so someone else can help take the next step and show Conference USA (or whatever better option exists 10 years from now) that we're ready to move up in the world.

If he doesn't, we might as well give up this facade of being good enough for the WAC and go start begging the Sun Belt (or the Southland) to let us back in. This whole aura of "we're on a level above ULM and ULL"? We're about to lose it, folks. We've dropped down to their level. Maybe below. Their facilities are already better than ours. Their marketing is better. Their administration gets it. Ours doesn't.

Well said.