(10-05-2018 08:22 PM)Monarchblue Wrote: I'll give you a pass on Wilder, but JJ is our basketball coach BECAUSE they couldn't pay for the type of coach they should have been hiring. We should never be in the business of hiring a 10-20 coach from the Patriot League.
But who was out there? They wanted Enfield, then his team had that one dunk-filled weekend in the NCAAs and he was USC bound. Keatts was a candidate for a show cause, and then he ended up leaving for N.C. State so who knows what happens after that? Rhoades might still be the right call for VCU but he had a pretty rough first season. And he's getting $1.2 million a year right now. Do you want to pay him $1.2 million? It was, again, not a good offseason to be shopping for a coach. I don't know if JJ was the best they could have done, but they're not going to outspend power-conference schools and there wasn't a slam-dunk guy out there for ODU.
Now if it comes out that they had a more prominent name but talks broke down because ODU wouldn't step up to the mark, then I'll concede the point, but based on the lay of the land that season, I think it was more a matter of ODU finding a coach and then negotiating the price than it was ODU entering the market with a price and seeing what they could get for it.
(Funny aside: Jeff Jones isn't even the highest-paid Jeff Jones in the U.S. The vice president and CFO of Cohu Inc. earned $1.2M in fiscal 2017, while the H&R Block CEO earned about $1M that year — not counting a $950,000 signing bonus. Maybe one of those guys can take a crack at coaching.
Quote:As far as the teams you named in the American, that wasn't even half of their members.
I thought five examples were plenty to disprove your notion that a G5 sponsoring 20 sports was "unheard of" but if you insist: The AAC all-sports member with the LEAST amount of sports sponsored is Central Florida with 16. Everyone else has more than that (Wichita State has 15, but they also don't have football; with it, they'd probably be in the 17-18 range). Navy is a football-only member but hell, let's throw them and their 22 sports into the fray.
And since we're being technical: From the Mountain West, Air Force has 26, San Jose State has 22, Fresno State has 21, Boise State and San Diego State have 19. From the MAC, Akron, Ball State, Kent State and Miami have 19. From the Sun Belt, Appalachian State has 20, Coastal Carolina has 19. And among independents, UMass has 21, Army and Liberty have 20.
And ODU as of now only has 18. They won't hit 20 until volleyball (beach and non-beach) come online.
So I think this notion that 20 sports is some ridiculous luxury for a G5 school is dubious.