RE: Boca, huh?
Paul Bryant, Jr., Bear's son, has hated UAB for thirty years or better. He is one of the richest and most influential men in the state, and was on the Board of Trustees until he hit the age cap and was forced off. That age cap has since been removed, but he is not back on the board. OTOH, about 1/3 of the BoT is employed by Bryant Bank and do what they're told. He has screwed us over a number of times, most notably when we had Jimbo Fisher hired for 600k (half of which was to be paid by our boosters) and the Board stopped the hire as "not fiscally responsible". This was when they were in the middle of hiring Saban, and since Jimbo had been his OC at LSU they wanted him to be available if Saban wanted him. And so it goes, at least until they finally went too far, too blatantly, and it blew up on them.
Our athletic program was started by Gene Bartow, the MBB coach who succeeded John Wooden at UCLA. He was the guy who followed the legend, and nothing he did was good enough. He started our MBB. If the UA Board of Trustees had in their wildest dreams thought that we'd start a football program, we'd have no athletics at all. Bartow was known as "Clean Gene", because he didn't cheat at recruiting or curse. He was a darn good coach and a fine gentleman.
In any case, after a couple of recruits of ours were stolen by Wimp Sanderson at UA, Bartow wrote a letter to the NCAA in which he said that there was a culture of cheating at UA which was part of their culture under Bear Bryant. He pointed out a number of Bryant assistants who had become head coaches and promptly got their teams on probation, guys like Charlie Pell, Danny Ford, and Pat Dye. The letter got out, and PBJ has never let a chance to screw over UAB athletics go by since.
That's the "in a nutshell" version.
UAB was once an extension campus of UAT, and became a full university in 1969. UAT tends to treat us as though we were still an urban commuter school. We're also a very diverse school, while UA is still very much an old southern school. We are part of the UA System, along with UAH in Huntsville (PhD heaven, NASA) and UAT. UAB is the largest employer in the state other than the state and federal government, and brings in about 70% of the system's cash. Thus we'll never be allowed to leave the system and have a board of our own with our best interests in mind. It's corrupt as hell, but 2/3 of the state legislature graduated from UA Law, so...
(This post was last modified: 12-04-2018 12:04 AM by UAB Band Dad.)
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