whaler11
Head Happy Hour Coach
- Joined
- Aug 27, 2011
- Messages
- 44,353
- Reaction Score
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It's also some serious rewriting of my post! I said that the "basketball money helped propel" our football. It wasn't a given that we were going to be as good as we are, of course not. We didn't know if we were just going to be another version of the old Temple. But I think that most people felt that we were going to be noticeably better than the low tier 1-A programs; otherwise, why would they have dumped all that money into the Rent??
It was of course the expectation of our program to be better than a bottom feeder! 90 million dollars (or however much that project was) is not easy to part with, not even for the state of Connecticut...
Ah, I misunderstood you. A big part of the motivation was protecting the basketball program, to many of those involved success was just a nice bonus.
Even the optimistic people have to be surprised how quickly they went from doormat to competitive and beyond. It was a bit of a stroke of luck that they turned the program results around 6 games before the move to Rentschler.

