(05-02-2018 02:27 PM)BSWBRice Wrote: I was a big fan when he was hired (had the pedigree, said all the right things), and he's far from a Greenspan-level atrocity, but as time moves on I've come to terms with the fact that he's not the "savior" I'd hoped for.
(05-02-2018 04:33 PM)flash3200 Wrote: Just based on this board, I think people ride the AD too hard and do not place enough blame at the feet of Leebron and the BoT for not committing appropriate resources (ie money) to D1 sports. We are building a $100million opera house than only seats 1,000 people (just think of that in terms of what the $/sqft construction cost is and $/seat cost)...not like we can't launch gobs of money out the window for frivolous pursuits of notoriety because that is happening all over campus for the last 10 years. If they can't commit to an appropriate funding level for D1 athletics and participate in athletics at a level that our peers do (Stanford, Northwestern) we should shut the athletics down and spend the money and real estate on something else. This poor boy approach just looks bad.
Cosign both of these. Rice is frustratingly unique amongst its private and public Div. I peers in both actively disdaining the very real and positive institutional benefits that can come from having a healthy and highly visible (read: in a P5 conference) athletics program, and yet also declining to associate with a just-as-renowned group of peers in Div. III at far lesser cost. Instead we opt, whether by commission or omission, for this limbo of Div. I in-name-only with high cost and no return.
Limbo, if you remember your Dante, is actually a part of hell, not separate from it. There is no earning your way out of hell, and there is no winning our way from CUSA back to respectability. This level is nothing but a negative feedback loop. Think you can create a powerhouse football team from here? Well, the structure of the system literally would prevent even a 13-0 CUSA team from making the playoff, so talent will always gravitate toward higher levels and we will forever simply oscillate around mediocrity. Think you can jumpstart things with basketball? Not when this level will always be a net loser in transfers, a de facto farm system. And baseball (to say nothing of the other sports), no matter how successful, simply cannot move the needle in terms of conference alignment.
We've let the P5 train go so far off down the tracks that it would take our equivalent of a Manhattan Project to go chase it down, and yet even now it's actually not the money that would be lacking for that but the will. This place is so deeply ambivalent about how to "do" athletics. And really, it has been so for a long time -- even when I was in school (1987-91), pre-SWC breakup and the nuclear winter that has ensued for us, there was something almost counter-cultural about going to games and generally caring about sports. It certainly wasn't something a majority of kids did, and clearly it's gotten worse over time. And frankly, I don't blame today's kids for not giving a flip about whether we beat schools they never heard of and have no connection with.
What we really have always needed was somebody to grab this place by the lapels and shake it out of its stupor and make it see the light. One way is for a billionaire alum to do it but we haven't gotten lucky in that regard (yet - hope springs eternal). The BOT is divided. Leebron isn't that guy -- "supportive," yes, but not a passionate advocate.
Then along came the young go-getter from Stanford, the absolute paradigm of what we could hope to achieve, and I hoped he brought the secret sauce recipe with him but at almost 5 years in I think we can call it and say he didn't.
And maybe it was always unfair to expect any AD to be "that guy" given the AD's relatively low place in the power structure for Rice University -- since our problem is only solvable at the Rice University level, not the Rice Athletics level -- but at any rate he just is not a transformative figure. He is at best tinkering around the margins and otherwise is destined for a legacy as nothing more than a caretaker. (Cue the Simpsons "
caretaker presidents" song! "Adequate, forgettable, occasionally regrettable...")