Interesting article on the clearing of house that's taken place within Georgia Tech Athletics over the last year, and the goal of transforming an (urban) institution traditionally known for academics into an athletic power, and the top-down commitment to excellence such a transformation requires. GT has certainly had much more on field success than Rice in recent decades, but the parallels still exist IMO.
https://www.espn.com/college-football/st...stoudamire
Some quotations that stand out to me:
"[President Angel Cabrera] stepped forward and said, 'Hey, we're going to make athletics as good as the academics of this institution.' And that was truly a huge part of it for me," Batt said
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"People have a vision of what Georgia Tech is," Key said. "They think engineers and architects and numbers and all this nerdy stuff, and old, and the industrial age of all those things. I said, 'Well, guess what?'
"Imagine the old locomotive going through the tunnel and it busts out the other side, and it's one of those bullet trains coming out going the speed of sound. That's my vision of what Georgia Tech was and is. People walk in here, I don't want to think the old things. I want it to look like an Apple store."
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"We're looking for partners," he said. "You know, stepping in as the new AD to Georgia Tech, the president stepped forward and linked arms with me and said, 'Hey, we're building this back.' I think it had us looking for people that were going to build it with us.
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"A lot of people come up with a lot of ideas and sayings and all this kind of crap. He gets things done. He works. And when your boss is working that hard, it keeps you rolling now.
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"And people talk about playing to a standard and our standard. We have no standard. There's none. We have to create it. Nick Saban didn't have a standard in 2006 at Alabama, he had his personal standard. You have to create those things.