Dark and depressing, I still find myself shouting at trees, “We did everything right! How can we get screwed like this!??”
Bad things happen to good people( athletic departments) sometimes.
The thing that always gets me is that we were basically told by the Big East that it was time to upgrade our football program. So we did, and we built a stadium, and we even accelerated our timeline a bit to fill in a hole in 2004 when BC, VT and Miami left. Then we begin to succeed immediately. By the mid-late 2000's, UConn was excellent in men's and women's basketball, and a good program in football. No holes in the armor.
But less than 10 years later, the Big East gets flipped on its head by further conference defections to the ACC, and then the basketball schools decide it's time to end the alliance with the FBS schools. And suddenly we're being asked to downgrade football again if we want access to a good basketball situation, a demand that's gotten even louder now, because our AAC experience (which was, for UConn, the Island of Misfit Toys - G5 conference, less money, almost no geographic/established rivalries, hard to recruit) apparently proves we can't succeed at football in a good situation either (like the Big East was, where we did succeed).
But of course, we were being pressured to downgrade football even before the AAC misadventure, once other programs didn't need us.
Talk about being jerked around. It's literally maddening to think about.