Trey Williams, JC Press, April 15, 2007:

President has lacked coherent sports message

If you ever watched Charlie Brown attempt to kick a football with Lucy holding, you have a good ideal of how East Tennessee State football fans feel about trying to field a program while dealing with university president Paul Stanton.

Actually, it's a good metaphor for trying to run an athletic department under Stanton. The athletic directors under him have left a trail of tears, which current AD Dave Mullins surely considered when Stanton blindsided him with the news of potentially bringing back football last summer.

Stanton seemed to decide out of a clear blue June sky that ETSU would probably be better off if it brought back football --- at least that's what he said.

It took not having football to realize what it was worth, he said. I think we're going to go for it he added.

Was all the hubbub --- the task force, the stadium renderings, and favorable student polls --- just one long 10-month march toward "I told you so" from Dr. Stanton, who amputated football in 2003? Did he really believe ETSU students would vote in favor of taxing themselves for a product that wouldn't be on the field until most of them have dropped out or graduated?

Who knows, maybe he did.

But the fact that football broke 40 percent surprised some of us. It's often said that students will vote down anything this side of a cure for cancer if it's going to raise their tuition. In this case, essentially nothing was going to be raising their tuition for the next three years.

Were students given the same choice to deny two other such athletics fees that have been implemented since football was dropped? Were they given the chance to vote on adding men's soccer?

The football vote was closer than the one held when students rejected the notion of paying for the Center for Physical Activity. They got it anyway -- and love it, by the way.

The CPA is one of many jewels the Stanton era has produced. You've got to give it to the guy when you think about the pharmacy school, the medical school, library, digital media center, etc. He's done a lot for ETSU.

But to suggest the athletics department has done anything more than flounder on Stanton's watch requires blue-and-gold-colored glasses......and floundering sure seems like an overstatement.

The way football was killed, some two months after signing 15-20 players to scholarships, some of them locals, underscores the lack of vision under Stanton, and the way football coach Paul Hamilton was done during the process drastically hurt their cause when trying to get the votes to remain in the Southern Conference.

Hamilton has deep ties to The Citadel, Appalachian State, Wofford, Furman, and at least at the time, apparently at Elon. That would've been more than enough votes to secure the Bucs' SoCon pink slip.
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Architects' designs are about the only real facility additions that have materialized before Stanton's eyes. Indeed, as one sportswriter said, it's become an athletic department of renderings."
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[that's all I gots]