State of the Group of 5: The challenges facing smaller conferences
- Thread starter SpaceRaider
- Start date
Memphis cleaned house from top to bottom (President and AD) after the 2013 loss (fifth) to MTSU (after series was renewed since the 50’s). I personally heard “never again” from a major Memphis booster who was there.
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That is part of our problem. I mean each one we have feeds on or from the other.
We have no true professional schools to develop high earning alumni. While we absolutely have a few that have done well for themselves, it is different from having multiple law, medical, etc graduates. Those we do have are more athletic than academic.
So many of our alumni and donors know no other way for things to be. They've never had another president, AD, or even football coach. They've been here so long there is no guage for them to be compared to as a D1 FBS school for true pressure to be applied.
That's what makes the board so frustrating on the academic and athletic sides both, especially with Smith's Blue Raider athlete background.
Way too much buddy buddy and not enough business minded decisions.
What's extremely sad to see is the zero participation by the 20,000 students enrolled at MT. The few fans who do show up to football or basketball are the older generation who still remember when things were better.
A successful commuter school has it tough enough. A commuter school that has a losing identity with a lost history is incredibly difficult to recover from.
You can't get any of this going without a strong foundation. James Walker was a "foundational" president. Sadly nothing we have at the administrative level currently speaks to me of that "foundation".
I appreciate the Build Blue initiative, but the fear is it was so late in development how many years will it take to aid in rebuilding the fan base.
A successful commuter school has it tough enough. A commuter school that has a losing identity with a lost history is incredibly difficult to recover from.
You can't get any of this going without a strong foundation. James Walker was a "foundational" president. Sadly nothing we have at the administrative level currently speaks to me of that "foundation".
I appreciate the Build Blue initiative, but the fear is it was so late in development how many years will it take to aid in rebuilding the fan base.
McPhee is not respected enough to acquire those type of school. Then we have schools like Tennessee, Memphis, Vandy, hell, even Nashville School of Law, lobbied against getting the law school. They want potential law students to either move to Memphis or Knoxville, pay the private school prices, or go at night. Money and clout talk, and we have neither.
It's insane there are no public university law schools in the largest metro area in the state, with same going for medical schools. The state is doing the entire metro area a disservice.
The Valparaiso fiasco was what showed me we have zero political clout. Zero. And that starts with McPhee. I've seen WVU and Marshall pull stuff off using pressure from the University Presidents getting state senators on their side, business alumni getting others on their side, etc. Essentially lobbying both the legislature and higher ed boards.
We can't do any of that and it shows.
The way that we tucked our tails after the decision without a fight and litigation was enough for me to understand what you said. I couldn't believe that we were being given a law school and a UT student was a deciding vote in losing. Unreal and unacceptable.
No kidding, a student at a competing university is making the deciding vote. We know good and well that was a heavily influenced vote; say free tuition for a year, if not longer.
How messed up can our state education system be?
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