(01-29-2021 06:36 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(01-28-2021 11:28 PM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  so kind of like the situation we had when we hired Wayne Graham?
Building facilities has not pulled us out. We have, IIRC, one of the top budgets in CUSA.
Somehow, we have to find a way to win, instead of sitting around crying "poor me". By win, I don't mean 7-5 and the Tomato Bowl. I mean 10-11+, consistently, and including some big names as victims. Get Houston interested in us again. I'm tired of hearing "if only we spent more money".
we have to win. The other stuff follows winning.

One of the first things Graham did was to develop his own supporting revenue streams. And the Reckling upgrade so that we could host regionals and supers was a key step on the way to getting to Omaha as many times as we did. Graham has said that we don't win the national championship without Reckling.

The reason that we have one of the top athletic budgets in CUSA is because our scholarships cost more--a lot more. We are not outspending people, although my understanding is that we have upgraded football spending somewhat under Bloomgren. We are obviously doing more national recruiting, for example, and that costs bucks.

The problem is that we totally neglected the revenue side for almost 50 years. We never really looked at revenue enhancement or new revenue streams, so income has basically dried up. Winning is clearly one way to address that, and without winning consistently there are no long term solutions. But we need some seed money from somewhere to jump start the process. The BOT is not going to write blank checks, and we have beat on the same loyal but small group of alumni donors about as hard as we can. Chris understood this better than any other AD we have had, but Chris was more a bricks-and-mortar guy than a butts-in-seats guy. And facilities alone won't do it. Look at the trajectory of football since we built Patterson. The only options that I see in the short run are
1) Play moneybag football games with the likes of aTm, TexasU, and LSU. Those are the only three opponents from the "SWC days" that ever actually drew crowds, and one of them wasn't actually SWC.
2) Play UH every year in every sport and turn that into a significant cross-town rivalry. We have always acted like we were too good for them, but now we need them more than they need us, and we have to get a lot better before we can even make it competitive.

What would really help would be if we somehow got basketball going. Right now it is a deep hole into which we pour a huge bunch of money, and that does not work. We need to get good enough in basketball to attract some moneybag basketball games. Gonzaga was willing to play games at midnight to get on ESPN, and look where that got them. We can't even get our fans to drive to Reliant for a football game without complaining to high heaven. It's two different mindsets.

What we need is a complete paradigm shift in athletics. We need to get totally away from, "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 know where we are going--winning until we are dominating--and we need to know that the path of least resistance is not the way to get there. All the rest is details. We can't get there with the current low ceiling in football and lower ceiling in basketball that WRC correctly describes. We have to fight through those things, and that is not a path of least resistance.

Wayne Graham had a vision and was a strong enough leader to take us down the path of great resistance to get there in baseball. Can Joe do it? At this point I don't think so.

Which is what?

Isn't increasing monetary support a paradigm shift?

There are things money can't buy. Rice does need visionary leaders who can look past solving this in a traditional manner. Of course revenue generation and resources are important. But you also need efficiency that isn't being seen. The difference between success and failure at Rice is razor thin and the paradigm shift needed is moving the results to the positive side within the constraints that Rice inherently has.