dang....
- Thread starter crow4435
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Yeah I’ve been holding out hope but pretty hard to see a path forward.
I don't think you will need to hope...it will probably happen anyway. But I'll bet that "Dr. Do-Little" Gragg gives Monty another year.
Unfortunately, we’re not even currently relevant enough for the media to be talking about the future of our football coach after what is likely back to back ten loss seasons.
There’s no chance Montgomery leaves this program involuntarily unless it’s for cause. Zero. End of discussion. Even if they can do funny math with coaches sitting on buyouts like Graham, the optics and finances just aren’t there for a transition nor are we able to attract desired candidates with our recent payroll deductions and player pool
Nuts! There are multiple factors that could turn our record around quite significantly. Part of it is coaching part is talent or lack there of in certain positions but this roster in its current state is good enough to play in a bowl. The other part of the equation is assistant coach pay and moral. Its bad enough that we cant attract top assistants to the program due to pay but then you take money out of the already poorly paid and not so good assistant coaches and you have a recipe for disaster. Some of those coaches have been looking for a way out since August. Can you blame them?
What optics?
Colorado is firing a coach who won them ten games and took them to the PAC championship because he is 10-13 in the two years since then. We are 4-19 right now with two FBS wins in two years.
Bad optics is to continue with that course of action. For cause would be being so bad at your job. For cause is quiting in the middle of multiple games this year. Do we want future coaches thinking back to back two win seasons are acceptable here?
I know lots of people who lack money and connections but have desire and drive to win and make it happen every day. They aren't asking to be rich they just want a shot. That sort of person (the kind TU could really use now and in the future) will not come to a program that thinks 2-10 is ok.
Quit talking about money, this is the 1990s. Even with the pay cuts our staff and hc make right above the average for our conference which is a hell of a lot more the 90% of the g4. I know, I know, LSU's O-coordinator makes what are head coach does. Saban makes 8 million at Bama but you are talking the exception not the rule and about 10 schools capable of doing that.
That doesn't take into account increased pay outs from the conference or the increase from the new media deal. It also doesn't include the revenue lost from tickets and donations.
I also like how you just threw a buy out based contract out the window that lops off 1.5-2 million dollar in deferred payments for several years.
The truth is we need to fire our AD as well as the coach because neither have a desire to get it done. Make no mistake Monty getting fired has to be done, if you are doubtful count the fans in the stands on Saturday. It won't take long and you'll be stunningly accurate about the number.
Monty has made some bad coaching decisions, even worse he has quit.
That after the Temple game and the Arkansas game it was allowed to happen in the Navy game tells me Gragg didn't make it clear that was unacceptable. Gragg needs to be fired for allowing it.
Whoa, go to your happy place for a few minutes and relax. Huffy isn’t saying this is what he wants but what reality is. Don’t shoot the messenger. The optics I assume are saying we have to cut and tighten belts but football gets to buyout its coach, the internal optics of cutting everything to pay for football. Not that he agrees but that’s what he sees.
Being bad at your job isn’t “cause”.
The problem with these people is that 98% of them will fail. “lots of people who lack money and connections but have desire and drive to win and make it happen every day.” They’re lower tier assistants or FCS coaches. You might find a diamond in the rough but you’re more likely to dig up a cat turd. They’re under the radar and don’t have connections usually for a reason. If they were so easy to find, don’t you think we would have done it with the last 2 hires??
I don’t think anyone on here disagrees that Monty and Gragg should go. Should and will are often pretty different tho.
I'm talking optics here and you are talking internal politics. Those are two different things. Explain what happens when the student population dips down below 2000 because we are playing in the summit and no one knows who the hell we are? How many recruiters do we need to hirer to make up for the lost students who find us through 2-3hr commercials through out the school year? How much travel to get the same sort of coverage?
The athletic department is not the university, it answers to it's own rules. With our large number of athletes per student ratio you are playing with fire when it comes to limiting our ability to market and attract those kids alone never mind the other marketing and the connection to the city/community our athletics brings.
We don't need an up and coming coach now, but we have been playing football for over a century so I tend to take a long view of things. A coach should expect to get fired for going 2-10 two years in a row. It's absurd to think you would continue to pay a coach to lose. You get what you pay for in life and people will learn you pay for losing.
We may actually luck into the only situation that will allow us out of this crap hole. A coach who needs a program he can win at and who knows he can do it here, who doesn't need big pay right now. Several coaches fit this description because of buy outs and the fact that P5 programs love picking off AAC coaches.
There isn't much choice in this issue, Monty coming back for another year means our AD has quit and to be honest so has our President when it comes to athletics. Our program will be in huge trouble.
Fire him this year or pay him next year to have one of his assistants finish the year as our interm after a 1-6 start, having sub 10,000 avg attendance even with OSU turning our stadium orange for one game, and lost donations. Which will lead to total apathy and no real hope of pulling out of the nose dive of 1 winning season in 7 years in a tough conference on it's way up and no prospects but fcs coaches to turn it around.
Dude seriously you need to learn the difference between someone telling you their opinion and someone telling you what a different person thinks. You’re preaching to the choir on this message board but the people who matter don’t think like you do. And the suggestion that the athletic department operates separately from the university is ridiculous.
The reality is we can kick around like we are now for a few years and not have any real impact on our ability to renew the program later. That sucks for those of us who want to win now but it’s still true. The idea that letting Monty stay for another year or two will somehow dramatically hurt the program is also ridiculous. It sucks for us but the key driver in whether we renew the program isn’t keeping Monty for a year or two but is the financial well being of the university. Fix that and you’ll be better able to fix football. Firing Monty and giving a long contract to a castoff or wet behind the ears assistant is more likely to cripple us long run.
At the end of the day we all want Gragg and Monty gone and a high profile qualified coach. But I also want a yacht and private jet. Boo boo for me.
So it's ok for everyone else to have an opinion but me expressing mine is a problem?
Got it.
First you are assuming a lot in a very dangerous time. The fact that realignment is a real possibility over the next three to four years and that football drives the bus means we can't wait with out seriously jeopardizing the athletic program.
Conference USA makes about 400,000 dollars a team a year. Many of them taking a pay cut from what they made with TU in the conference. Our conference mates are not waiting around and will have no time for a program with one winning season in ten which is about to be a real possibility. Especially one trying to get by on the cheap.
I don't know how to make this more clear to you. The university comes with one set of demands and rules. Athletics comes with a different set we are not meeting the Athletics side at a very important time. A split is coming, hell is almost here already. Right now TU is borderline on making the cut, you will not want to see what happens if Tulsa ends up on the wrong side.
In the past our basketball has kept us up in conferences. Our basketball won't cut it here, UConn, Memphis, Cincy, Temple, Houston have no need of Tulsa.
When a surgeon who is a Texas alum called us a high school team...I had nothing to say except that about 10 years ago we were the only team ever to have a 5k passer, 3 1k wrs, and a 1k rb. That's all I got now thanks to bb and Monty.
Every job has advantages and draw backs.
He succeeded in keeping a program alive with out a game for two years, I think he could find a way to succeed at a tough private academic school.
There are options, the apathy about our program has set in so deep even the fans don't dream anything else than what Tulsa currently has is possible. That's a clear statement about where our program is.
We're like an abused dog who sees some one raise their hand and cringes. No way could someone be going to pet us.
Omg the melodrama. We won 10 games just 3 years ago. Of course people dream of more than 2 win seasons, it just happened!! Everyone knows it’s possible here, fans and coaches, because we literally just did it a few years ago! This is like watching a Mexican soap opera.
No that's an egotistical lack of understanding of other people's views and opinions from what I assume is a youngish person.
And by the way, he had advantages on the transfers on top of it.(with no transfer year) We couldn't even get the transfer players in to TU, even if they were not going to have the transfer year.
Everything is not as easy or simple as you seem to think it is. We could end up in debt with somebody as bad or worse, if we did things the wrong way at the wrong time. It is not the end of the world(program) if we don't replace him this year, as you seem to believe.
Done.
Again you seem to have no understanding of where in the Athletics world we are. This isn't about what TU is doing but what the world is. By 2022-23 there will be another major realignment period including a likely separation similar to the FBS/FCS split. If Tulsa wishes to continue to compete in athletics at the top level it must be winning at football by then.
Having one winning season since 2013 in 2021 is going to put a lot of stress on the new coach to prove the program deserves to be on the right side of the line. That by the way is two football seasons away. Next year's recruits will be seniors when this all happens.
Tell me again how it won't hurt to keep him around? Or how being in debt is worse than having no program?
The clock is ticking tocing away and it will not wait for us. When it hits zero in one game and four seasons we will be where we need to or we won't have a choice about where we go.
Tic toc, tic toc. . .
Also just for fun. Colorado has a ten win season and way more wins than we do in the same time frame, guess who is getting a new coach?
But I know no way could someone else be successful at Tulsa.
Keep insulting me and not addressing the issues, clearly I'm the one with maturity issues.
Sorry those dice are long since cast. Unless you can get our attendance to 35k per game or make Tulsa have 3 million people, it won’t affect things. Having 17k fans instead of 14k for a year or two isn’t getting us anywhere. No conference is looking at next year’s performance to judge how competitive we can be. These people aren’t dumb, they know lipstick on a pig when they see it. One coaching change won’t gloss over the lack of investment in the program and giving a guy a year won’t make them judge us worse. Our problem for conferences is not our coach. You know who changes coaches a lot? San Jose state and look what it got them. Moving from one road to nowhere onto another may feel good but don’t confuse it for progress.
My guess is getting rid of Gragg would do more for us than getting rid of Monty.
Dang Chito, you & Leon have been quite lucid lately. Good on ya! If Monty gets the boot first, guess who hires the next guy. BTW, Skelly only holds 30K, but I get your point.
There is truth to both arguments - I, along with several others here, know how bad the financial situation is at TU right now. It will definitely hinder athletics decisions that could or should be made. I also know that as soon as the GOR for some of these p5 conferences expire, there will be another shift to maximize $$$. This will leave us on the boarder again.
I wish TU had a few more mega donors and an AD who understands the current college athletics landscape, but I’m not holding my breath on either.
We’re fighting an uphill battle inside and outside the university. The whole situation is unfortunate for those of us who bleed blue and gold.
I wish TU had a few more mega donors and an AD who understands the current college athletics landscape, but I’m not holding my breath on either.
We’re fighting an uphill battle inside and outside the university. The whole situation is unfortunate for those of us who bleed blue and gold.
You're fighting the last war. TV markets are about to be meaningless. In fact TV is about to be meaningless.
There is a reason why you see the other members of our conference so on top of their game. With the demise of TV and the rise of the internet steaming; performance not location, size, or market will become the single most important factor. Tell me a feel good story about a tiny school competing at the top level won't sell?
It's about keeping the viewers engaged that will decide who is in and who is out. Live broadcasting advertisment is one of the most profitable forms of corporate marketing in the world. If Tulsa is doing what it has traditionally been good at we will make the cut. If we're just mosing along playing it cheap we're as dead as the freshman who fell off the moon tower and hit his head on every rung down.
Tulsa football is fast, high scoring, smart, put the ball in the air and let's go get it. That's the sort of football that is made for entertaining people. Our underdog story and small size is plenty of pull as a story line. We're a clean program with good kids. When we are playing Tulsa football we are the exact sort of team to make the cut.
And yes Gragg needs to go, as soon as he fires Monty he should turn around to see the president holding out a pink slip.
Well I certainly hope you’re right. Sounds a lot like pretty blond girl from Midwest arrives in LA for big acting career, finds 10,000 in line first. Hard to break through
That's not me saying that, it's the market.
ESPN+ wasn't just some whim. Its the middle stop from cable packages and the dying tv market to the ott streaming revolution.
By 2026 just over 60% of viewership will be done strictly by streaming making live events especially those with inherint breaks the most valuable advertising in the world. Already 60% of people under 30 use streaming as their primary source.
The cable market is almost exclusively baby boomers and is experiencing loss even in that group who pays out of habit. They have tried to compensate by moving over to providing internet. The progress of 5g internet capabilities (most of which will be wireless) means they are a slowly dying dinosaur.
At&t (cell phones) and Comcast (satalite and content production) through their secondary enterprises might survive. Others like spectrum and Cox are done for.
Everybody knows this but it doesn’t support your argument that this creates some new market opportunity for TU. First there are structural reasons that establishing ourselves as a player in the post cable world is a high risk bet. First there are dozens of schools vying for that role and its a zero sum game. The competition for that space will be intense. Second the powers that be are highly motivated to make sure nobody gets that role. They would much prefer a rotating Cinderella rather than a school that established long term brand. Cinderella’s are nobodies and stay nobodies and that means they don’t get any power or leverage. They’re cheap and don’t make a stink. So the entire establishment is set up to prevent from happening what you say. It also requires the ability to maintain success which means keeping coaches, etc. we know that isn’t easy.
There’s also very little proof that the viewing market is interested in what you are saying.
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This plan reminds me of financing pitches I hear all the time from naive entrepreneurs- 1) market has changed, 2) customer need and pain, 3) our solution, 4) magic happens, 5) we have 100 million subscribers; 6) swimming pools full of cash. It’s like “thanks that’s very interesting, I wonder, could we dig into step 4 in a bit more detail?”
