If you want to blame Pollard...
- Thread starter Havs
- Start date
Our budget woes have little to do with "Average-Joe" fans like you and I, and little to do with our ticket prices.
They are 3-fold:
1. Our enrollment is 8th out of 12 Big XII schools, and we are in one of the smaller population states to boot. We are outnumbered in terms of both alumni and local fans. Nothing we can do about this.
2. We have few big donors. And when I say big, I mean really big. Along the lines of T. Boone Pickens at Oklahoma State. Obviously he is an exception, but all the "haves" in the Big XII like Texas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska, have lots of donors who will write 5-figure and even some who will write 6-figure and bigger checks for projects. Our "biggest" donors like Jacobsen and Krause give more to Iowa than they give to us. Cultivating big donors is one of the most important things an AD should do, and our recent AD's (including Pollard but not just him) have not done it.
3. The Big XII splits TV, bowl, and NCAA tournament revenue inequitably -- more for the haves, less for the have-nots.
Evidently those people are NOT fans...they're just the majority of fans!!!!
dont be cheep...........buy football tickets!!!!!!!!!!!:yes:
And that's part of the problem.
I've got a buddy who can afford season tickets, but never buys because he can scalp them cheaper at the gate. He's also not a NCC member.
He get's a lot of value for his dollar. No doubt about it.
He could do a lot more to help ISU however...
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Wrong. Mizzou had a couple of nice seasons with Corby Jones at QB in 97-98. KU had some very strong teams in the 90's as well under Glen Mason. The bottom didn't drop out on them until the Terry Allen years.
As for Wayne Morgan, I get tired of seeing the "If he's so good, why isn't he coaching now" argument. Maybe he has a successful business in Ames, is 60 years old, and has just decided not to pursue it anymore. Ever think of that?
I agree 100%. The fact that Wayne Morgan isn't coaching is probably more his choice than the fact that nobody will hire him. After all, fired ISU coaches don't get head coaching jobs at Duke or Kentucky. Most likely he would be looking at a small college head coaching job, or a job as an assistant coach/recruiter at another major college. I can't blame him for not wanting to go down that road at his age -- he may not want to move or do the traveling those jobs require (as I recall he has a son with special needs and built a custom house for him in Ames) and he doesn't need the money. Don't forget that Jamie gave him $1.5 million of our money and he can probably make as much as an assistant coach/recruiter makes from his own business without having to travel -- plus he gets to be his own boss.
Just to throw fuel on the fire, or you know, it's because he's a great recruiter, and awful coach. NIT Final Four? Yippee. NO reason that team shouldn't have been dancing. None. It was sickening how bad we played to our competition. Beat Kansas one game, lose to Colorado the next. That shouldn't happen.
Pollard wanted to take a risk and hit a home run. He got a D Coordinator that nobody knows unless your in the inner circles of college football. Cheezits resume is impressive and the long shot was that he would be at
ISU as well. Pollard knew if he was right Cheezit would be here for 4 maybe 5 years. But he got a buzz going within Cyclone Nation which is what we needed, ticket sales increased. I respect the fact that he got up to the plate swung and missed. It beat the Wayne Morgan last man standing hire by vandevelde.
We asked Pollard to raise up all of our programs. That doesn't happen overnight. He got rid of one good (but stuck in neutral) coach and another "problem" waiting to happen coach.
The "he's not coaching anywhere else now" argument does hold water. How many coaches worth a lick do just fade away after getting fired? Yeah, exactly, he wasn't a good coach period, end of story. We are just now crawling out from the hold Floyd left for us when he jetted for the Bulls.
The "he's not coaching anywhere else now" argument does hold water. How many coaches worth a lick do just fade away after getting fired? Yeah, exactly, he wasn't a good coach period, end of story. We are just now crawling out from the hold Floyd left for us when he jetted for the Bulls.
This is true however if he was passonate about coaching he would coach. Coaching is a ton of work. The way it works is, if Morgan gets another job he must pay back the $$$ to the university and ISU picks up the excess. So Morgan makes 750,000 a year he gets a contract with another school for 500,000 ISU Liability is for 250,000. If he gets a job for 750,000+ ISU does not pay. I think this is how it works for fired coaches. Chuck long is the same way. He is now a researcher for the SDSU. Dan McCarney took the high road because he loves to coach our liability for Dan should have been much less. He earned his cash.
Exactly. The people who makes that argument simply don't get or igonre the main pont: What Wayne is doing now has no tangible bearing or effect on how good of a job he did at ISU or on any of the decisions the AD did before or after he was fired.
His current career decisions are a non-factor and say nothing about the issue as it relates to ISU.... though I wish him well on his current endeavors and would rather have him out of the coaching business than competing with us.
Ahhh...one of the things many Cyclone fans seem to have a mastery of...excuse making!
What is interesting about this list from 1-10 is that it holds no one that is currently in place at ISU responsible for anything and many of the "goats" listed above are either long gone from ISU or have never even had anything to do with ISU.
Crazy.
You could not be more wrong.
You did not have to be in the "inner circles of college football" to know who Gene Chizik was. He had been the DC for two undefeated teams (AU and UT), he had been selected as the top assistant in the country, and his name was routinely bandied about (on ESPN and elsewhere) when new jobs opened up (some of them very high profile jobs) around the country because of what he had done at AU and UT.
His hiring by ISU was considered a stunning success for our program when it happened by nearly everyone around the country. I was disappointed with the record on the field...especially in year two but his time at ISU is better graded as an Incomplete than a Fail. He certainly appears to have had us moving in the right direction from the standpoint of improving the talent (especially speed) on our roster...which is the number one thing in building a successful college FB team.
I always viewed him as someone that probably would not be at ISU very long. And I was OK with that because I thought he would have to do something great at ISU before another higher profile program would give him the chance. Unfortunately, he left prematurely because AU gave him that chance before he finished the job of turning ISU around.
Umm....we did go dancing. We made it to the 2nd round and lost to the eventual national champion.
Pollard has done something for ISU that hadn't happened for a long time--he created a focus on winning. Except for wrestling, it is arguable that focus was lost. We are walking but the cadence is increasing....soon it will be a full gallop.
Right on the money here. It's funny how many "objective" arguments out there fail to ever blame anything internally but as soon as the person leaves ISU they were the reason for all of our problems. Can't have it both ways.
