(09-11-2019 12:07 AM)geosnooker2000 Wrote: (09-08-2019 08:52 PM)TripleA Wrote: I don't think the West speech made any difference. The decision had already been made to pour money and support into football about 9 months to a year before West was fired. It was going forward regardless of what West said. In fact, firing West was one of the first steps in turning around our football program.
I totally disagree. Tommy West BLASTED the admin to their faces, and there was no turning back from that point on. Need I remind you, RC Johnson was still the AD at that time (for another 3 years), and Shirley Raines was plenty happy with his pitiful results. Hell, they spent $30,000 on a freaking OCS study that was pronounced DOA the moment it hit the athletic department's PO Box.
Oh, how soon we forget.
Believe what you want. The big boosters had already decided we were going to turn around football about a year before West was fired. I talked to a couple of them back then. It had to do with chasing a better conference. We had just made our first real behind the scenes effort (pamphlets don't count) at joining the Big East (hiring Tranghese and pitching the Big East), but we were told our football wasn't good enough, even though our basketball was great. That was in late 2008, and THAT is what caused the decision to be made to fix football.
But it doesn't happen overnight, especially with the two idiots we had as AD and president. Raines was a big part of the holdup.
Fred Smith and others finally convinced her to fire RC when salary funds were threatened to be withheld after RC bungled the hiring of Porter.
Bowen was hired with specific instructions to concentrate on fixing football w/o doing harm to basketball. That came from the boosters, not from Raines. The same ones who started talking about fixing football a year before West left.
Then Raines retired, we got Brad Martin in there, and he put Rudd in, and things rolled from there. But I guarantee you the decision to fix football was made by boosters in 2008, after an attempt to join the Big East.
West's rant didn't hurt anything, but it was NOT the impetus to fix football. Btw, I could make the same argument you did, that it took 2+ more years after West's rant before RC was fired, lol.
That's b/c Raines was resistant, and Fred finally had it with RC over the Porter hiring, which eventually led to RC's firing.
Think about it. What you're saying is Fred Smith and other big boosters were too dumb to figure out we needed to fix football until West went on his rant.
No, Fred and others had already bumped heads with Calipari over this same issue, again tied to the aftermath of the Big East effort, well before West was fired. And West being fired was a step in that direction, so the rant could not have been first.
