The UConn Example

The risk that a college or university takes when it decides to "go big time" in men's basketball or tackle football (the two biggest cash cows) is exemplified by Connecticut. Because those two sports are so popular the school becomes defined by their success or failure. Connecticut has the finest women's basketball program in history, and the school gets plenty of good pub (which translates into enrollment and $) from it. It's men's basketball team won national championships (I forget what happened to UConn men's basketball.). Plenty of good attention.  And their tackle football program actually won a major conference championship and went to a top tier bowl game. That's the positive side, the "Flutie Effect." But now, and for the last decade, when people have "University of Connecticut" pop into their heads too many of them have the image of "it's joke of a football team." Small step from that to "joke of a university." 

If a school is going to go big time in tackle football, it has to be at least competitive. Middling seasons, 6-5, 5-6--you'll pass under everybody's radar and neither burnish nor tarnish your school's image. You're competing! Not lighting the world on fire but not starting a dumpster fire either. But 3-9, 2-10, 3-9, 3-9, 1-11, 2-10 (six of UConn's last seven seasons records)--the school is on everybody's radar as incompetent. 

Can you name the president of the University of Alabama? Neither can I. How about the president of Clemson? Ohio State? I can't. So how is it that I, with no more connection to the University of Connecticut than to those other schools, know who its president was from 2011-2019? Because, uniquely, Susan Herbst was the constant over the last shambolic decade of UConn football when all of the disastrous decisions were made. She brought ruin to the football program, besmirched the national image of the entire university, and disgraced herself as a competent administrator. "If you hire faculty like you hire football coaches, I'm not paying to send my child there."

The University of Connecticut needs to shut down this fucking dumpster fire of a football program.