Wyovanian wrote:SnowyRange wrote:Yes. If there are issues other than HC, then I assumed a logical decision would be to try to fix those.
Honest question, do you think our only problem is the HC?
I guess the honest answer is that I'm not on the "fire Burman" bandwagon.
He's got a tough job. He has to, just to name a few things, run a clean athletic department, deal with one zillion NCAA rules, supervise the academic/athletic interaction, so that our student-athletes graduate with meaningful degrees, constantly negotiate contracts, fund raise, satisfy boosters and, yes, keep the teams on the field on the right track...all within budget constraints that have been very difficult.
Sometimes I think being an AD at a D1 school is the most difficult job in all of entertainment...as, make no mistake, for the fans this is -- or should be -- just entertainment.
Now, as for success on the field, I'd say he's got all sports in a decent spot (with the exception of golf, which I both think will never change and we shouldn't have in the first place).
Which leaves football. For that, I'm sure Burman would love to wave a magic want and have unlimited funds. But he can't...and I know the Foundation and he fund raise like crazed weasels. Short of that, then, he's got to try to make a good coach hire, give that coach what he can give, support him as he can...then hope the coach and a bunch of 20 year olds manage to score more points than some other coach with his 20 year olds.
So, he hires DC. There's not a fan in this state who thought that was a bad hire. And DC can't pull it off...and I saw no evidence that it was the recruiting budget, or that DC couldn't get assistants he didn't have confidence in.
What I saw was DC failing.
And now he's hired another guy. This new guy is well within the parameters of a coach who could be successful here. We'll see...but Burman doesn't have the advantage of seeing in advance. He has to pull the trigger when in his judgment he has the best shot he's going to have.
So, fire Burman now? Not in my book. But is the reality that Burman will be fired if this football coach doesn't pan out? Yep. That's just the way it works, and maybe the way it should work.
And what, do you suppose, were the roots of that failure?
I remain convinced that the University of Wyoming is similar to a Little League baseball player trying to pitch in the Major Leagues. We want to keep up with the big boys in this game but we are trying to do so from a position of extreme weakness. I think it is a numbers game and every year that Wyoming sends forth another graduating class that is less than half the size sent forth by the high major BCS schools, the gap between the alumni base for those schools and our UW expands.
Our stadium capacity and the population of Laramie also make a difference. According to
http://www.gowyo.com/facilities/jonah-f ... adium.html War Memorial's capacity is down to 29,181 people. Compare that capacity to the population of Laramie as of the 2010 census (30,816). When I was in school, I seem to remember that those numbers were reversed with the stadium actually holding 32,000+ people and I think they sold over 33,000 tickets for a CSU game during that time.
Compare that to another college town, Ann Arbor. Michigan is indisputably one of the big boys historically, despite the economic and demographic mess the state is in. According to the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor's website
http://www.mgoblue.com/facilities/michigan-stadium.html Michigan stadium was expanded in 2010 to a capacity of 109,901. (Note: the stadium was expanded--not downsized). The City of Ann Arbor had a population of 113,934 at the 2010 census.
In many ways, each of the two schools and programs are very similar. Both are located in the far southeastern corner of their respective states and also slightly west of the largest city in the state. Both Ann Arbor and Laramie are predominately known as college towns and both have stadiums that are only slightly smaller that the population of the whole host town. The difference, however, is in the sheer scale of the local population, local alumni base, job opportunities for graduates, and the size of the local recruiting base. In addition, Wyoming can only reliably sell 15,000+/- tickets to any one game compared to the reliable 100,000+ that Michigan can sell. MIchigan does this while also boasting an academic reputation that Wyoming can only dream of. I would even say that the gap between Michigan and Wyoming is wider on the academic reputation front than on the athletic field.
I think that the reason that Wyoming historically struggles to attain the dominance enjoyed by the major programs boils down to demographics and the money that comes from a larger population base, whether that population is measured in fans, students, alumni, local recruits, or local townfolk. Note, I have not even talked about TV contracts, but they reflect this trend too.
What we are asking for is a coach who consistently outperforms statistical probability. In all probability, we should have the record outcomes we have experienced. I would even go so far as to suggest that if one picks any school at random and must predict what the overall football record over the past 50 years has been for that school, the most intelligent guess would be .500. There are certainly outliers, but in general .500 would be a great guess.
We have advantages to work with at Wyoming in the context of the MWC. However, I will not hold an AD culpable for failing to attain the dominant performance over time that we see at other major programs. The real tests to me are whether the AD responds appropriately to changes in ticket sales and whether the athletic program harms the academic or public reputation of the University. I also expect to see teams compete, but that is ultimately reflected in ticket sales. To me, the travesty of the current AD is that his solution to our inability to sell out games is to downsize seating capacities. That, to me, shows a lack of ambition more than the eventual win-loss record of two football coaches that looked like impressive hires on paper when they were hired. In the end, both coaches performed about as well overall as the data suggests they should have except that each of the last two coaches won bowl games. It had been decades since that happened at U.W. I will take those, enjoy them, and hope for more to come.
