Originally Posted by
StrayDawg
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.