(06-17-2014 06:59 PM)St. H. Gink Wrote: (06-17-2014 07:10 AM)CyberBull Wrote: (06-16-2014 10:43 PM)St. H. Gink Wrote: Quo, at this point, you've had SEVERAL posters shoot down your straw man fallacies. I'm not going to bore you with debate talk of informal fallacies since that's for someone with a little more grasp.
Fact is, a win is a win. You're not going to convince anyone that UCF's accomplishments were any less valid because someone at their arch rival school has their panties in a bunch about it.
USF will get there, in due time. In my opinion, Judy Genshaft is the one person who is holding your program back. She has mismanaged a department that had a BCS windfall for years and could not take advantage of it. She tried to block UCF from joining the Big East and recommended the conference invite Villanova over objections from WVU, Pitt, Louisville, etc. which led to the conference's demise. Any good manager and leader would've seen that although counterintuitive to USF's goals, the addition of UCF only would've made USF stronger. She was shortsighted and rash. I honestly believe that USF will only begin to reach its full potential once she's gone.
For now, we'll go ahead and establish the obvious that you lost this argument.
I look forward to our next debate! 
Genshaft was not the driving force behind Villanova. Feel free to have your conspiracy theories but USF/Genshaft didn't have that much power.
I was not insinuating that she was the driving force behind Villanova at all but rather that she was actively blocking UCF and putting her support behind the Villanova move. After Villanova became so unpopular as a candidate, Genshaft suggested adding Houston as a travel partner for TCU instead. She's very good friends with Houston's president who I think used to be an admin at USF. She was that adamant about UCF being left out. Her failed efforts are well recorded, so this puts to rest your conspiracy theory that these are conspiracy theories.
With conference realignment sweeping the country, Marinatto still was able to convince TCU in November of 2010 to join the Big East, to help bolster an inconsistent football league. People mocked a Texas team joining the Big East, but it gave the league a solid football addition. That would have given the Big East nine football members in 2012. There was even speculation the Big East might be able to attract an ACC school to join the Big East, which was in the midst of negotiating a huge upcoming media rights deal.
"At that point when the Big East was intact, the only school the Big East could have legitimately added that made sense was UCF," an industry source said. "Maryland and Boston College? They wouldn't even return the Big East's calls. But the Big East couldn't add UCF because [South Florida president] Judy Genshaft kept shooting down UCF."
Genshaft's continuing insistence to block UCF from the league was a huge contributing factor which ultimately led to the league's current instability, a league source said.
There was a significant media and political uproar in Florida that followed Judy's move.
“Make no mistake about it, Judy Genshaft is behind this. She unsuccessfully tried to stand in the way of UCF getting a medical school and now she’s trying to stand in the way of UCF’s football program. It’s becoming very transparent, and it’s time for our state legislature to say enough is enough. What you have here is one state-funded institution harming another state-funded institution and costing the taxpayers money.”
- State Senator Lee Constantine
"I think that's horrible. I think it is ridiculous of USF, as a sister state university, to try to stop UCF of something that it wants to do to make its athletics program stronger. I was just talking to one of my fellow [state] representatives today to say that we need to call anybody on the carpet who would try and hold down a fellow university that's trying to do something big. I think that should be stopped and I'm going to do everything we can to stop it."
- Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives Dean Cannon
The Hillsborough County (Tampa) legislative delegation held their annual meeting on USF's campus that year. It was attended by county, university, and state leaders. State Senator Jack Latvala of St. Petersburg asked Genshaft about the reports of her blocking UCF and she denied it completely. When asked to divulge what the miscommunication was she told them that normally university leaders are silent on matters involving another state school, and remained hush on the issue.
Asked by a Tampa Bay Times writer after the meeting concluded whether she supported UCF joining the Big East, Genshaft said, "That isn't the question right now." That quote became pretty popular with UCF fans poking fun at the USF President whenever unfortunate events occurred at her school.
Fact is that at that time, Judy Genshaft was the Big East Chairman of the Board. She had plenty of power and influence as she was the one running the meetings. She went against ESPN's $130,000,000/year grain that would've added TCU and UCF and would've created long-term stability for the league.
Now look where she is.
What she failed to understand was that competition breeds success. Your competitors are what make you stronger. That's why UCF President Dr. John C. Hitt is a proponent of a package deal. Judy tried to eliminate competition. That only works when you're an established power and even then, it never lasts. See Texas and Texas A&M. See Florida and Florida State. And now see USF and UCF.
You cite an article by notorious USF-hater Brett McMurphy (citing an unnamed "industry source" blaming Genshaft and USF), and quotes from "State Senator Lee Constantine", who just happens to have been student body President at UCF, and "Speaker of the House Dean Cannon", who just happened to represent UCF's district in the House at the time, blaming Genshaft? Talk about your credibility gap.
Here's a good retort to McMurphy's article you cite. Yes, it's from a USF fan, but it's no more slanted our way than your or McMurphy's rant was slanted against us. A useful tonic:
http://www.voodoofive.com/2012/5/8/30066...afts-fault
That said, of course Genshaft didn't want UCF in the Big East. Cannon and Clementine are not wrong about that. What they are wrong about is criticizing her for it. At that time, keeping UCF out was good for USF, and her job was and is to do what was good for USF, not "the state" or "sister institution" UCF, as Senator's Constantine and Cannon seemed to think. It wasn't personal, it was just a good university President doing her job. Proof of that is that when conditions changed, when the Big East lost more members and suddenly having UCF in the Big East was more good for USF than bad, Genshaft and USF stopped blocking UCF and the invitation was extended.
Your stance on competition is - why am I not surprised, coming from Gink - breathtakingly simplistic. Competition can be a good thing, something that keeps everyone on their toes and fighting-fit, but that is from a macro, society-wide perspective. For a given organization, it has diminishing returns. After a certain inflection point, competition can be harmful to a particular organization. Plenty of organizations have in fact been driven out of business by competition. The phrase "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is of course a lie. Sometimes, competition doesn't kill you, but sometimes it does, or else leaves you a quadriplegic in a wheelchair, definitely not "stronger" than you were.
Not that UCF could ever do anything like that to USF, but Genshaft's perspective that UCF is too close to USF such that a powerful UCF would likely do more damage to USF than strengthen us is and was certainly a defensible position, and I applaud her for her stances in the Big East back rooms to protect USF's interests by opposing UCF. Good work, Judy!
And if you were honest, had the situation been reversed, you'd admit that you'd have wanted a UCF President to oppose inviting USF to the Big East.
Of course in the end it didn't work, but that's because the Big East collapsed, which of course wasn't USF or her fault either. The Big East collapsed because the ACC (correctly) saw that it could never expand into the lucrative northeast corridor if the Big East was strong. It attacked the Big East by inviting Pitt and Cuse, and those schools did NOT accept the ACC invite because we rejected ESPN's $12m contract offer. No Big East school at any point in time would EVER have turned down an ACC invitation. The ACC was simply the superior conference - from a prestige and money POV. Signing that ESPN deal would thus NOT have provided the Big East with any modicum of "stability".
As for "where USF is now", while she isn't perfect, we are doing just fine under Genshaft. Our research results and academic standing have never been better. Athletically, we are suffering, but it's not the kind of suffering you probably believe. The results on the field are transitory, we'll be a winner again in no time. The suffering isn't because of our couple of years of lousy football results, it's because out of 9 Big East football members circa 2011, 6 got promoted to P5 and none of them was USF. That's what hurts - being relegated to a G5 conference. For the first time in our history a conference shakeup resulted in us moving down, not up, and unfortunately for us, it was the biggest shakeup of all, with the most at stake. That will cost USF athletics tens of millions of dollars every year for the next 10 or so years.
But frankly, while that sucks, there wasn't anything Genshaft could do about it. We simply lacked the overall brand value of the six that got rescued from the dying Big East, and Genshaft had far too little time to build our brand up. That's up to the whole USF community.
Bottom line: USF neither wants nor needs UCF Gimps lecturing us or our President about what we should be doing. We will continue to do just fine without that.
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How good have AAC teams been in conference play?
