Below is Massaro's response to me E-mail:
Thank you for your email. I am pleased that you are a committed Blue Raider fan and it is always good to hear from our former lettermen. I share your frustration that we have lost our last two games. Saturday’s first half performance was especially maddening. We did not play well and we should not get beat by a 0-9 team, especially on our home field. We will not offer excuses as that should not happen and is not to our standard. I am pleased to take this opportunity to articulate to you some of our goals, aspirations, and items that I use to help evaluate our sports programs.
It has been a tough season, no doubt about it. One of the reasons for our recent inconsistency is our rash of injuries. We currently have 28 scholarship players who cannot play. There are 85 scholarships so this represents 33% of our team. We need to overcome these hardships but they do help explain some of the inconsistencies we have seen. We have been forced to play some players before they were fully ready and at times have been exposed.
It is my belief that our football program is still on solid foundation and we are having a bad year. We played for a conference title last season and had the best record in the conference regular season allowing us to host the championship game. I believe the historical numbers below help illustrate my point that our program has been very good since especially since we entered the league in 2013. I judge our sports programs first on how they do inside the conference. Generally speaking, the schedules are the same and each schools’ resources are fairly equivalent. Non-conference schedules can have a wide variance in every sport. This makes conference vs conference records a very valued comparison. Going into this season the following were the top winning percentages of conference opponents vs conference opponents since we joined Conference USA.
MTSU 33-15 68.7%
Marshall 33-15 68.7%
La Tech 31-17 64.5%
WKU 33-20 61.7%
UAB 18-14 56.2%
USM 24-24 50.0%
N Texas 24-24 50.0%
Everyone else is below 50%
Including this season’s results thus far
Marshall 38-16 70.3%
La Tech 36-18 66.6%
MTSU 35-19 64.8%
WKU 33-20 62.2%
UAB 22-16 57.9%
USM 29-25 53.7%
FAU 28-29 51.8%
N Texas 27-27 50.0%
Just to give you a point of reference, Kermit Davis’s winning percentage vs conference opponents was 69% and Boots Donnelly’s was 65.9%.
Let me be clear. I am not happy with our current year and we want to push the conference record into the 70’s and above. You and I may differ on our solutions on how to improve the program, but we both can agree that we all want to win more. We have identified short term items in which we can do better and are a reason for our current slide. Coach Stockstill and I will certainly continue these discussions in the offseason. Beyond the health of the football team we will also look at personnel for his on field staff as well as the ones behind the scenes. We want to make sure we have the right people in place and that we have enough people in place to compete annually for conference championships.
However, I believe to move us off our current plateau the single biggest thing we need to do is to improve our football facilities. Most of the schools in our conference have dramatically improved their football facilities. The facility improvements will signal to the rest of the athletic world that we are committed to our football program and working to upgrade our national brand.
The facility improvement has been Dr. McPhee’s and my focus for many months and we have worked very hard behind the scenes to get this project moving. The University is very aligned with this goal of improving our football and basketball infrastructure from the Board of Trustees, to the President’s Office, to Campus Planning, and finally to Athletics. Our collective desire to our facilities one of the best in the Group of 5. We look forward to having Coach Stockstill and his staff have the opportunity to recruit to this better infrastructure and I am confident we will all see the results.
We are also very proud of our academic achievements, particularly from our football student athletes. Our current Graduation Success Rate was 95% ranking third best in the country and it was the number one ranked public school. We are very proud of that. Only two schools in our conference had been to 4 straight bowl, so yes, I think that is an accomplishment. I wish it were five straight and then 10 straight. Yes, we would rather play in New Year’s Day Bowls, but when that doesn’t happen we are certainly let recruits and our public know we have had success.
We have worked very hard this year on three major initiatives to help with our home attendance. With a partnership from our University Fermentation program, we developed a Craft Beer Garden in our south endzone. This has been a major hit particularly with our younger fan base. We also enhanced our family fun zone which enjoyed over flow crowds our first two games. Our re-creating of the student Blue Zoo was very successful early in the season and as our record and weather declined, we have seen a drop off in this area. I would point out that our last four home games have been played in terrible weather conditions which has hurt our crowds as well. The Marshall game was unbearably hot, particularly for October, with temperatures in the mid 90’s. Our homecoming was spoiled by a weather forecast all week of heavy rains, and it proved to be true especially beginning at half time. Last week was unseasonably cold, with it only warming slightly by Saturday.
Tomorrow, we will once again deal with rain.
Despite these obstacles, we can do a better job of drawing more fans to Floyd Stadium. I am very hopeful that we can draw well early next year as our first two games are Indiana State and Virginia Tech.
Go Blue Raiders!
Chris Massaro
Notice there was no mention of attendance...
