RE: AD Replacement Thread
I don't think the BOT or Leebron are particularly anti-athletics. Certainly not a BOT chaired by Bobby Tudor, and before him Bucky Allshouse. As far as Leebron, I am aware of situations that I am not at liberty to disclose openly, where he has stuck his neck out for athletics in ways that to my knowledge no prior Rice president has ever come close to being willing to do. If you want to know more, PM me and if I know you and can trust you, I will give you details. Maybe something similar happened to get Rice Stadium built, but I don't go back that far.
But it is not the job of the BOT or Leebron to micromanage the athletic department. Their priority is and should be preserving the endowment. To spend a bunch of money on athletics, they need to have a plan, and that plan needs to be realistic. The problem is that, for the longest time, there has been no coherent plan or vision coming out of athletics. I have actually had conversations with BOT members who told me, "Look, if they would just give us a coherent plan, we would approve it. But they don't give us anything." It is the job of the AD, not the BOT or president, to develop and sell that plan.
"Throw another $10 million a year at athletics and we can show you how that will get us into the XII or SEC or ACC--or even American," might be a plan that the BOT could approve. But you need to put some meat on those bones and make the business case for how and why that can happen, and nobody has done that. I think Chris was on the way to that, but he left the project very much incomplete. Ranger Rick promised that--I was given specific assurances that such a plan was in the works by the son-in-law (that's the correct relationship, isn't it?) at lunch at the Cheesecake Factory in The Woodlands early in Rick's tenure, but I never saw it. Did any of you? I had hoped that Joe would come onboard with something like the Rice version of the Stanford vision--maybe "Stanford lite"--and that we would be well along on implementing it by now, but that hasn't happened either.
Here's the way I think I would approach it now.
1) We are going to make a significant effort to increase the athletic endowment massively. This is a big part of Stanford's success, and without something similar we can't hope to be Stanford, or even "Stanford lite." This is going to require substantial modification of the current university position regarding corporate donations to athletics.
2) At the same time, we are going to make a substantial effort to increase butts-in-seats and other current revenues. I would propose some sort of matching by the BOT--for every $X in additional revenue, the BOT will agree to increase the annual subsidy by $Y. At least in the short run, this is going to require what some call "body bag" football games. There simply isn't anything else that will yield revenues. I prefer to call them "money bag" games because a) we desperately need the money, and b) I've not really seen compelling evidence that we bring many more people home in body bags from such games as we do from others. I'd do two year with LSU, TexasU, aTm, or any of the SEC schools who schedule breathers in their penultimate weekend before their rivalry games. I'd also plat UH every year and make a massive effort to build that into a cross-town rivalry--sort of USC-UCLA lite. With 8 conference games, that leaves one date to fill, and I'd alternate between local FCS teams who can bring a crowd and similar academic institutions (Duke, Stanford, Northwestern, Vandy, service academies). I'm not that big on former SWC mates--having them come in and blow us out doesn't help recruiting, and they never drew that much when we were in the same conference, and really haven't done very well since. I'd love to play some of the Ivies, but that would almost certainly have to be a road trip because of their travel restrictions.
3) In the arena, the goal would be to dominate CUSA. The ultimate goal is, of course, to get out of CUSA. But we're not going to attract any attention going 3-9, 1-11, 2-11, 0-12 in CUSA. To get out we are going to have to a) average 9-10+ wins per year in football, b) go to the dance--men and women--in basketball at least every other year, and go as far as sweet 16 frequently, c) get baseball back to Omaha on a regular basis, and d) maintain at least what we have (thank God we have that) in women's sports. Conceptually, I'd say get football to where Navy has been over the past decade, get basketball to where Gonzaga has been over the last decade (although the last couple of years may be hard to match), get baseball back to where Wayne had it from about 2000-2010, and keep women's sports where they are now. No Rice teams have ever done this--nothing even remotely approaching it. But that's where we have to go. We can't do it exactly the way those schools did, or the way TCU did, but we can learn from every one of them.
For too long, the paradigm has been, "Losing is okay if you have a good enough excuse," and, "If you don't know where you are going, the path of least resistance will get you there." We need to have goals, we need to be willing tonight through resistance to get there, and winning has to be a huge part of those goals.
Joe is a competent administrator. We need one of those, but he/she needs to be the #2 person in the department. At the top we need a visionary leader who can formulate a plan and make a business case for that plan to the BOT. We don't have that, and other than possibly Chris we never have had that, at least not since I have had any association with the university. Stanford, Duke, and to lesser extents Vandy and Northwestern, had those visionary leaders back when the landscape of college athletics shifted dramatcially. We had Bo Hagan, Red Bale, and Augie Erfurth. Bobby was better than them--he was at least a competent administrator--but he was not a visionary.
Remember when our big plan was the EZF? How many football games have we won since it opened? What about the bubble in the west parking lot? Will it ever open?
(This post was last modified: 10-27-2019 02:03 PM by Owl 69/70/75.)
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