I will begin by stating that all of the whining, the crying about how we should just give up on FBS football reminds me of the early to mid 1980’s. Before we hired JC there was an army of fans, journalists, academics and politicians claiming that we needed to drop our men’s basketball program down a level as we could never compete in the Big East.
One thing that I am concerned with is the school’s approach to admitting football players. There was an op-ed piece posted here shortly after RE announced his retirement (written by someone who appeared to have knowledge of the internal situation). He claimed that during RE’s first run he was basically being penalized for his success in graduating football players as the school continued to make it more difficult to get recruits admitted. There were a number of prospects (going back ~15 years) who wanted to come here but ended up at competing schools (I can think of three who played for Rutgers) who were at worst our academic equal. I also know for a fact that around the time that Diaco went off the reservation he firmly held the belief that as long as he continued to bring in good kids who stayed out of trouble and graduated, he would be head coach forever. Somewhere along the way it had to have been communicated to him that academic performance was clearly the priority. It seems that there are forces within the school using this as a means to limit the program (I don’t see how it is possible that all other scholarship sports face similar admission scrutiny).
When Lou Holtz was discussing the head coaching job with Notre Dame (3 1/2 decades ago) he made it clear that in order to compete for national titles the school had to be willing to accept players that peer universities (Michigan, USC, Stanford, UCLA – all top academic schools) were accepting. He also demanded to be able to have one carte blanche recruit on the roster at all times for competitive purposes. We will never get anywhere as a football program if we cannot admit players who somehow can get admitted to schools at equal academic standing, but perhaps that is the point.
There are a lot of people, scattered throughout the press, the school, in public office and even our fan base who through their words and actions would prefer we just give up. Some are even pushing for it (which for the life of me I cannot understand).
There have been quite a few posts debating whether we need to offer a lot of cash in order to get where we want. I believe that it is pretty safe to state that we could land a quality, up and coming HC for $1.25 million - $1.5 million per year who could turn this thing around and we could land a bigger name at $2.5 million - $3 million per year who would fail. I’m not sure that money is the issue and I am convinced that money is far from the biggest issue. We need to school, the press, our elected officials, our fans and the general public to be in favor of an improved product. For far too long there have been too many people who feel offended by any success the program has seen. This baffles me but I’ve seen in in more than football. For reasons beyond any logic, we’ve always needed to hide the idea that we wanted to be good at anything. When we built Gampel we needed to lie about the size of the venue. When we were lobbying to move up in football it needed to be presented that we weren’t going to try to be competitive at a national level, just have a team so we could be classified with top basketball schools that also happened to play (albeit badly) football at the highest level.
I’ve heard from some good sources that finding money for the next regime won’t be an issue. My concern is entirely with how the school supports the program, primarily in terms of admissions. If a kid could land a scholarship at one of our academic peers there is no excuse for him not to be admitted here.
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