Its really simple. We made tremendous progress from trailers to 2010. JH coasted through that. He took good times and growth and sat on his hands doing nothing horribly wrong while also not being forward thinking. He decided to play his career safe as his boat was lifted in the tide. Then 2010 happened. We needed to hire a rockstar and take this to the next level both on and off the field. PP was a bad hire. Ultimately JH's inaction and lack of forward thinking was bad for UConn but it didn't kill us.
Warde was hired, billed as a rockstar and a football mind. What he needed to do was fire PP after year 2 to keep the fan base together and be able to still latch on to the momentum from 2010. He didn't. That ticked the fan base off and turned into a awful year 3. Then he doubled down. He rebranded. By going to "uconn" its a play on the power of the name. It makes sense, but in doing so the school forgot that a majority percentage of its paying customers are state residents who personally didn't attend the school. Connecticut people. Connecticut football. All Warde had to do was keep the block C but change it to the C in the UConn watermark(no outline) and leave that on the helmets and things would have been fine. Instead he killed the C. State residents don't see the same identity they once did and the years of losing combination made it easy to think of UConn football just like they think of the Whalers. A lot of fun and poof its gone. Also lets not talk about helmets. Sorry for mentioning them. Anyway, for years and tradition purposes we always had a stripe of red somehow involved in uniforms. Under Warde, red became important for some reason. Rutgers is red, UMass is red, BC is red and Temple is red. Maybe, just maybe, a little to much red. The new dog is a bit of a clip art creation. Forward looking is a bit tough. It sells on t-shirts under the age of about 30 it looks like. Going to games now the majority still wear old gear because the new stuff just flat out honestly didn't win the fan base over. The younger people like it, let me know how they are killing it for the school buying tickets, donating and all that other jazz. Hint, they don't. So again just pissing off more of the fan base. Will they 10, 20 years from now? Hopefully, but you need a athletic department and that just died. It was more important to target the 30-60 age to keep the boat floating at a dire time. He did the opposite.
When it came time for Warde to shine, he went to the Virgin Islands to sip cocktails with a handful of womens basketball fans instead of begging ACC schools to check out our football facility and huge spending budget vs LV and Cincy. We all know how that turned out. Warde Hired Diaco after BC passed on him a year earlier. Think about that for a minute. Warde also was behind the Diaco extension. DB was new and just a signature for it. Warde also okay'd the Diaco football staff. The budget has never been more out of control then what Warde put on the financial statements.
Warde took pictures and signed documents for Hockey East. Thats about it, that development was long before he was here. He just had to smile and shake hands. He then turned around and talked up a nice new rink only to give our games away to the pretty town of Hartford. Hows that new rink he always talked about? oh, sore topic. My bad.
At a precious time in our basketball lives, Warde rooster'd around with KO with a serious contract. It actually got to a point where Shabazz Napier in a post game conference called Warde out for the bs going on. People forget this. Warde was always to busy attending womens in sports NCAA meetings. Those were important to him.
Those are some of the major issues with Warde. The list of small issues is crazy long. Jesus in the huddle, allowing the civil confilct, no furniture in the new basketball pf, dog eyes helmets, rent parking got worse somewhow and on and on....
Summary, JH may have slowly dug us a grave to die in. Warde had the choice of killing us and resting the body in that hole or filling the hole back in and rising above the grain. Warde killed the UConn AD. He did it to benefit on his own resume and get to Michigan. He was able to show on his resume he rebranded a major university, hire a ND coach and other obvious things. Meanwhile he knew UConn was going to die from his decisions. He looked great, got out before anyone outside of hardcore fans with common sense could see whats going on.
If you ever looked at HFD back in the day and separated his CR nonsense posts away from his football and recruiting stuff, he was on the ball. It was what led to him going crazy and getting kicked off here. He saw the fraud Warde was, He saw the product being sold and he saw the football fan base slowly eroding based on decisions made. Yet people here act like Warde was a savior for us. In the words of HFD from back then "take off the blue glasses".
At some point you have to realize every fan in a fan base has different turn ons and offs. For some its competent coaching, for some its a brand identity, for some its basketball and so on. What happened was Warde touched literally everything with bad decisions and it spread the fan base a million different ways. Just slowly turned one person after another off. Connecticut is a highly educated state. So when you make bad decisions people take notice. When you hire a guy selling a piece of plastic with a alarm clock attachment that kids have in there bedrooms talking about a commuter school in FL, people take notice. More and more people saw the show going on and decided it wasn't worth watching any more. Warde Manuel everybody.
