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Message: [QUOTE="nelsonmuntz, post: 2512696, member: 833"] This decision needed to be made 5 years ago. We are already dead. We have had to take some risks on football coaches BECAUSE OF our conference situation. The Diaco hire was desperate, and there were a lot of warning signs that he was not head coach material. A lot of schools had passed on him before we hired him. I think that Benedict might be more aggressive with Ollie's meltdown if he thought we could bring in a significant improvement if he canned Ollie. Unfortunately, Benedict is looking at a 2nd tier P5 assistant or a twice fired retread as our next basketball HC, which is probably the reason behind giving Ollie a few extra second chances. There are 3 big factors that can not be ignored: A) The media rights situation is incredibly unstable due to streaming and the decline of the networks. It is hard to see a scenario where rights fees increase for the P5, and given that situation, they will not be looking to add members. The Big 12 decided to add no one over adding UConn, and there was some extra revenue there if they added us. How much more information do we need that the P5 door has been slammed shut? The "P5 Fantasy" posters want the school to continue to lose money hand over fist because somewhere in the distant future some derivative P5 league might add us. That is a bad investment. B) State budget - There is no easy fix for our state budget situation, because there is a massively underfunded pension behind all of it. I do not see any way out of the budget problem other than the state massively cutting pension benefits for retired cops and teachers and whoever else. When that happens, do you think there will be an ounce of political support for continuing to lose $10 million a year on an athletic department so that 20,000 football fans can drink on a runway for 2 hours, watch a half of football vs. Tulane, and go home? I am one of those 20,000, and I realize that this is crazy from a budgetary perspective. [LEFT][FONT=Georgia][COLOR=rgb(20, 20, 20)]C) Football has probably already crossed a tipping point in the northeast due to concussions and CTE. Participation is dropping dramatically at the youth level. Youth leagues are folding or merging with neighboring towns, and even high schools are pooling players across districts. Participation is only going one direction, at least in the Northeast. The best case for the sport is that the drop off stabilizes at some level, but remains strong in the South and Midwest, at which point you have a regional sport. Worst case, southern and Midwestern parents decide that they don't want their kids' brains turning to mush either, and the entire sport falls off a cliff. Is this the kind of trend we want to bet against? Even in the best case, CT football is dead dead dead. A dry recruiting area will become Saharan, which means we will be trying to convince an entire roster full of Florida kids to move 800 miles north (what was the temperature this past weekend?) when there are 11 other schools in our conference closer to them and with warmer weather. My advice: 1) The Football First fans have been wrong every step of the way, so the first thing to do is stop listening to them. 2) Make the athletic department breakeven within 3 years. This probably means going to the Big East and football independence, but the Big East door may be closing. We can not afford to lose money at the level we are losing money. It will damage the university before long. We are in a very dark place right now, and we got there by making a big bet on football that has not been paid off. We can get into an "I told you so" debate about the events of 10 or 16 years ago if you want, but the only thing worse than making a bad investment is to continue to double down on the bad investment long after it has proven to be bad. Sometimes you need to cut your losses, and I think it is that time with the AAC. [/COLOR][/FONT][/LEFT] [/QUOTE]

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