I posted this under another thread but wanted to make sure you saw it so here we go again.
Okay Airport KC I need to know what that drawing of the Ohio stadium is supposed to mean. Is the second deck or upper level of seating on the right side something that is in the works or just someone's idea of how the stadium might be expanded at some point in the distant future?
I was wondering where he got the picture too. It's not in the works right now. The AD was recently interviewed and said that we are going to work on getting the attendence up and if we need it in say 5 or 6 years then we'll look into it. but there are no plans to build that in the next few years.
I found the interview. This is what he said:
"...Fifth and final is the renovation of Peden Stadium - not an expansion yet, just a renovation. Think back to the crowds we had against Pittsburgh and Toledo last season. I envision that we'll replicate those atmospheres game in and game out. Peden Stadium was built almost 80 years ago with the amenities to seat 12,000. Now, we seat 24,000, and those amenities have not changed.
"I think it would be a mistake if we don't look to the future and hope that, over the next three to five years, it becomes much more challenging to get a football ticket. Hopefully, down the road, (expansion) will become a need, and we will have a plan in place."
midlandchip Wrote:Okay Airport KC I need to know what that drawing of the Ohio stadium is supposed to mean. Is the second deck or upper level of seating on the right side something that is in the works or just someone's idea of how the stadium might be expanded at some point in the distant future?
Yes, a deck is in the works. My picture is the official design.
Like GoCats is saying however, we have to increase our attendance average to brimming full before they pull the trigger on this. The plan is to double our season ticket base by 2008 which should do it.
The OU administration is thinking and acting like they play in a major conference, kind of like Louisville was in CUSA, and they want a nationally competitive football program.
The location of the soon to be built indoor practice facility has been changed to right next to the football stadium from the other side of campus to enhance the presentation of our football program to recruits. Not to mention the redesign of the tower happening currently that is going to utilize more of tower for the football program (originally it was for all-sports).
The AD has just written a new letter about the goal to be the model program for the MAC and increased ticket sales for 2006......
It was indeed a very good year for Bobcat Athletics and I know you are equally proud of our student-athletes' success in the classroom and in competition!
Looking forward, I am pleased to communicate to you that our football season ticket renewals have been coming back at a rapid pace. If you have already renewed your tickets, thank you. If you have not yet done so, I encourage you to reserve your season tickets right away! We need each of you in Peden Stadium creating our home field advantage! The 2006 season promises to be exciting and by working together we can continue to make Peden Stadium the best game-day atmosphere in the MAC!
Speaking of football tickets, we are very excited about the positive response to the Bobcat Family Package. To date over 200 new season tickets have been sold! We anticipate this number increasing when we launch our marketing initiatives as the football season draws closer.
I hope each of you have received information introducing the Ohio Bobcat Club. This program is vital to our future success. We need every Bobcat Fan to join the Ohio Bobcat Club and assist us in enhancing the student-athlete experience for all 537 student-athletes. As the cost of operating a Division I-A athletics program continues to escalate, we need your help to achieve our goal of becoming the model athletics program in the Mid-American Conference.
We will not accept anything short of that goal and the foundation is in place to accomplish some very special things! If you have not received information on the Bobcat Club, please send me an email and we will mail you a brochure and contribution form.
Renovation of Peden Tower continues to progress in a timely manner. Demolition is now complete on the fifth floor of the tower, all framing has been installed and we are beginning to see some dry wall. Completion is scheduled for mid-August. Once completed, we will have the finest football support facilities (sports medicine area, team auditorium, position meeting rooms, coaches' offices and recruiting space) in the MAC!
In closing, I hope each of you have a great summer and we thank you for your continued support of Ohio Athletics. There are great days ahead for the Bobcats and I look forward to September 2, as we kick off the 2006 football season and set out on another academic and athletic year!
Go Bobcats!
Kirby
Ohio owns MAC V-Ball....
Volleyball
Three consecutive MAC regular season and Tournament Championships
Two straight NCAA Tournament appearances, including the program's first-ever trip to the Sweet 16
Finished season ranked 14th in the nation
33 wins ties Ohio for the most in the nation and were the most ever by a MAC team
The Bobcats own the nation's longest home winning streak with 37 straight victories
Ohio has won 43 straight MAC regular-season matches
Geoff Carlston received MAC Coach of the Year honors for the third straight year and Mideast Region Coach of the Year for the second time
Julia Winkfield earned MAC Player-of-the-Year, the fourth straight Bobcat to win the award
One Academic All-MAC selection
http://ohiobobcats.cstv.com/ot/hocutt-column-index.html
Airport KC Wrote:"It was indeed a very good year for Bobcat Athletics.. " Kirby
With men's sports #10/12 and women's sports #9/12 in the MAC, it's surprising what qualifies for a good athletic year at OU these days.
;-)
Rumors of an extant design for an upper deck on the student (East) side have existed for a number of years. During the Grobe years, attendance was high enough to justify consideration of an expansion of the stadium seating, but the fall off in attendance after Grobe left and the Bobcats went back into the cellar ended any near-term discussion of the idea.
I, for one, would like to see them rebuild the abominable corner bleachers at the North end to make them architecturally more pleasing and compatible with the original design of Peden. On the other hand, it might make more sense to build the upper deck first, then tear down the corner bleachers and rebuild them when the attendance justifies a seating expansion.
axeme Wrote:With men's sports #10/12 and women's sports #9/12 in the MAC, it's surprising what qualifies for a good athletic year at OU these days.
;-)
Kent State fans always love to bring up those non-revenue sports that no one really cares about except the players and their families. How many people on this board know who won the field hockey championship last year?? Women's Golf?? Softball?? Men's Track?? Men's Swimming/Diving?? And the people on this board are the most die-hard MAC fans--imagine the ignorance of the purely "casual fan".
In truth, to most people the only two college sports that matter are football and men's basketball. If Ohio can get at the top of those two, most fans wouldn't care if everything else was in last place. Right or wrong, this is just the reality of college athletics...
BobcatsFan Wrote:axeme Wrote:With men's sports #10/12 and women's sports #9/12 in the MAC, it's surprising what qualifies for a good athletic year at OU these days.
;-)
Kent State fans always love to bring up those non-revenue sports that no one really cares about except the players and their families. How many people on this board know who won the field hockey championship last year?? Women's Golf?? Softball?? Men's Track?? Men's Swimming/Diving?? And the people on this board are the most die-hard MAC fans--imagine the ignorance of the purely "casual fan".
In truth, to most people the only two college sports that matter are football and men's basketball. If Ohio can get at the top of those two, most fans wouldn't care if everything else was in last place. Right or wrong, this is just the reality of college athletics...
So we won't hear any more about volleyball then, eh? :shhh:
So what did he mean by a good year?
A good year is more than wins and losses for an athletic program.
Football
1. Hired Frank Solich
2. Ohio set single game attendance record in football for Peden Stadium.
3. Played 3 home games on national tv and had 7 of 11 games on TV.
4. Beat Pitt on national tv at home with largest crowd ever at Ohio
5. Had highest friday nite TV rating in history of ESPN2.
6. Dion Bynum national player of the week award
7. Dion Bynum all-american
8. Kalvin McCrae 1000 yard rushing season (preseason all-MAC)
9. Played Va Tech, NW, Pitt, Ball State, Akron, Miami, Toledo on tv.
10.Best recruiting class in decades
Basketball
1. Best start in 20 years to start season
2. 10,000 plus to see Central Michigan
3. Set NCAA record for fewest point allowed in a half 7 vs CMU
4. Played on National tv vs Kentucky and lead for 37 minutes.
5. Named ESPN "it" team preseason.
6. Received top 25 votes in December
7. Home game on espn 360 during bracketbuster
8. won 19 games
9. Beat Miami in MAC Tournament again.
10. reached MAC semis.
Volleyball
1. Longest home court streak
2. Perfect in MAC
3. Made sweet 16 and game was broadcasted on internet.
Exposure is what that top MAC programs have. Ohio got that exposure last year. Even when the news was bad, Ohio got plenty of press. Any publicity is good publicity. People recognize the Ohio name. OU has lived in the shadow of that other team in Columbus. Yes, Ohio had a good year. Compare that to the average football fan not knowing who coaches EMU, CMU, Kent State, or Ball State.........Ohio is years ahead of those other MAC programs because recruits know who is head coach at Ohio before they get that first letter or phone call. It takes a few years for on the field results, but so far the off the field results(fan interest, season tickets) are great.
NMBobcat Wrote:I, for one, would like to see them rebuild the abominable corner bleachers at the North end to make them architecturally more pleasing and compatible with the original design of Peden. On the other hand, it might make more sense to build the upper deck first, then tear down the corner bleachers and rebuild them when the attendance justifies a seating expansion.
I like the idea myself but I can't see OU tearing down seats when its capacity is under industry standards.....
The need to keep capacity high keeps those endzone seats from being torn down.....unless they decide to build a monster deck which is not in the plans.
The deck planned for Peden is only like 6k......not going to cut it without the corner seats.
Make it 10k+ then maybe you can knock down the corners.
Here is another question for you Airport KC. When they built those large sections on both sides of the field why didn't they attach them to the existing sections? I don't understand why those add ons are separate from the rest of the side line seating. I think it would have looked a lot nicer to have continuous seating running down both sides of the field, into and then part way around the end zone. I'm not being negative here, I'm just trying to understand what was behind the design decisions.
midlandchip Wrote:Here is another question for you Airport KC. When they built those large sections on both sides of the field why didn't they attach them to the existing sections? I don't understand why those add ons are separate from the rest of the side line seating. I think it would have looked a lot nicer to have continuous seating running down both sides of the field, into and then part way around the end zone. I'm not being negative here, I'm just trying to understand what was behind the design decisions.
Here is what happened.....
Those sections were built in 1986 when OU was under pressure to increase its capacity to the 30k stadium rule.........well originally it was going to be a horseshoe in the endzone.......the expansion was going to take capacity from 14k (capacity prior to 1986) to 24k........but OU didn't have the money to complete the horseshoe, thus in desperation just put half of it up.....5k (increased capacity to 19k).
So OU was going to do do this new horseshoe, unconnected with existing stands for better site lines, but balked at finishing it because of cost and a very lousy team in the 1980's. President Ping who was at OU from 1975-1995 didn't want to spend a dime more on athletics than we had to.....and that was how OU fell behind in athletics after being a MAC power in the 60's.
In 1992 OU expanded to 20k when it built the stadium tower with an extension of premium chairback seating........In 1996 the former AD Tom "Idiot" Boeh decided to build brick work around the incomplete horseshoe instead of tearing the corners down or....completing the horseshoe? I was down in Athens that summer they bricked in the north endzone thinking to my self what the F@#$ is Boeh thinking!
Its like they made the abortion of placing those seats unconnected and incomplete in the endzone in 1986 and as the years have gone by they've just built around the mistake rather than correcting it out right.
Not only do you have the brick work wrapped around the corner seats today but you also have a park and statute built outside of the stadium between the corner seats, and that band seating area........in short there is just no way to complete the horseshoe without tearing all this new construction up.
There was talk of extending the corner seats down to the playing field at one time......but that was scrapped with the addition of the band seating section......the site lines just wouldn't work and the university is using the gap between the corner seats and the field as handicap seats.
If it was up to me I'd just build a big wang (deck) on the visitors side like 15,000 more seats to dwarf any stadium in the MAC.......I am serious it is easier to convince people to come out to a stadium when its big.
Airport KC Wrote:President Ping who was at OU from 1975-1995 didn't want to spend a dime more on athletics than we had to.....and that was how OU fell behind in athletics after being a MAC power in the 60's.
This statement, while true, doesn't tell the whole story...
In the mid-70's, Ohio University faced a severe financial crisis as a result of 2 factors: first, the university was in deep debt due to the building program of the '60s which was, in large part, needed to support rising enrollments (between 1960 and 1970 enrollment grew from about 8000 to nearly 19,000); second, in the mid-70s, enrollment dropped precipitously from the 19,000 down to about 12,000, leaving the university without the revenue to service its debt.
Dr. Ping, rightly so, chose saving the institution over the health of the athletic programs. Many in the faculty and administration were in favor of outright abolishment of the athletic department and withdrawal from intercollegiate competition, or dropping the programs down to Div. II. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed, and Dr. Ping and the administration nursed the athletic programs along until the financial crisis passed. Unfortunately, the legacy of this situation is that Ohio's athletics programs were severely underfunded for a long period of time, resulting in an obvious lack of competitiveness in several sports, including football. (This last clause is JMHO, for the record.)
NMBobcat Wrote:Airport KC Wrote:President Ping who was at OU from 1975-1995 didn't want to spend a dime more on athletics than we had to.....and that was how OU fell behind in athletics after being a MAC power in the 60's.
Dr. Ping, rightly so, chose saving the institution over the health of the athletic programs. Many in the faculty and administration were in favor of outright abolishment of the athletic department and withdrawal from intercollegiate competition, or dropping the programs down to Div. II. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed, and Dr. Ping and the administration nursed the athletic programs along until the financial crisis passed. Unfortunately, the legacy of this situation is that Ohio's athletics programs were severely underfunded for a long period of time, resulting in an obvious lack of competitiveness in several sports, including football. (This last clause is JMHO, for the record.)
Very True.
The question I have a difficult time answering is why did OU roar back during the 80's and 90's? If you go back to the early 80's, Miami and BG were in fact bigger than OU in enrollment now its the other way around.
A lot of it had probably a lot to do with stronger leadership at the university than what other comparable schools had during those years. Having a vision for the Journalism and Engineering schools by building nice facilities.
I think OU in recent years has been hurt by the rise of Ohio State as a serious academic school, casting a larger shadow over Athens. Selectivity has risen dramatically at OSU over the last 10 years while its stayed steady at OU.
Airport KC Wrote:The question I have a difficult time answering is why did OU roar back during the 80's and 90's? If you go back to the early 80's, Miami and BG were in fact bigger than OU in enrollment now its the other way around.
In the mid-70s to mid-80s timeframe, Ohio continued to be plagued by stagnant enrollment, even though admission was pretty much wide open to anyone who wanted to attend. (The standard college rating/survey books at the time listed Ohio University as "noncompetitive" in its admissions policy.) In analyzing why the number of applications continued to lag behind goals, some wise guy suddenly had a flash of brilliance...
good students want to go to good schools.
So the OU administration did something counterintuitive...they made OU harder to get into by raising admission standards and limiting the size of the freshman class (and ultimately earning a "more competitive" rating from the raters). As a result of this move, applications started increasing and soon exceeded the numbers OU could accept (based on their yield curve). Now, enrollment on the main campus is back where it was in 1970, and the current administration is considering boosting it to about 25,000. (I guess they'll have to tighten up the admission standards again. ;-) )
The problem with the Ohio MAC schools is the same. The State is losing population (which pays taxes and receives federal money from census). The high paying manufacturing jobs are in decline. The state can't raise taxes, because there isn't enough big wage earners to offset the blow to the middle class that such a move would create. Thus budgets are being cut in higher education. These cuts are forcing Athletic departments to adust and either play money games in football, go into debt or scale back upgrades. Ohio is playing the money games to balance their budget. This might cost us a winning season, but were still playing D-A ball and will have that tower project paid on schedule.
OUBOBCATJOHN Wrote:The problem with the Ohio MAC schools is the same. The State is losing population (which pays taxes and receives federal money from census). The high paying manufacturing jobs are in decline. The state can't raise taxes, because there isn't enough big wage earners to offset the blow to the middle class that such a move would create.
I ensure you the reason for the state not raising taxes has nothing to do with protecting the middle class.....
The reason the state is under pressure to keep taxes and potential funds for higher education down is they need to remain competitive tax wise to attract new industry for the state. Believe it or not, Ohio is attracting new jobs to complement its manufacturing base, some of which is foreign investment in the auto industry.
The problem Ohio faces in higher education stems from a large inefficient public university system.......states like North Carolina and Virginia have a more streamlined higher educational system with smaller universities for higher per university student expenditure than Ohio.
Note to OU....expanding to 25,000 students is bad! For god sakes, no more than 4,000 of them will be from SE Ohio.....the region cannot support a large school.
Airport KC Wrote:Note to OU....expanding to 25,000 students is bad! For god sakes, no more than 4,000 of them will be from SE Ohio.....the region cannot support a large school.
Part of the plan in increasing enrollment is to increase the percentage of out-of-state and foreign students, who are not subsidized by the state and therefore effectively pay the whole cost of their education.