My comments are based on the article:
Who is UAB President Ray Watts? Doctor, son of Birmingham and a man under fire
I just posted this in an earlier thread but wanted to make the point a little more salient:
This looks like to me that they are taking a play out of the political communication playbook. The goal of the article is to humanize Watts and the paid comments are being use reinforce this and his "character" while negatively labeling UAB football and its supporters. The term they are using against us is "UAB football socialists"; I wonder how much focus grouping they did for that term...
They are going to use this in attempts to turn public support against us, and going to repeat it over and over and over again to try to make it stick to us and our group as whole.
When we see them try to use that label we need to reject the label and refute their claims using any of the valid points we know to be true about our athletic program.
In many cases we may not even want to address this because it could change the message away from what Watts has done and alter the media agenda to "football class warfare" or something like that.
For example:
1) many athletic programs do not turn a profit. Mainly due to non-revenue sports.
2) UAB football made was not a money loser.
They are probably going to be trying to take their label of us to the airwaves soon so be ready to call in if needed to refute this.