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"NIL" is simply another word for buying players. These guys/gals are simply pros now. The idea of "amateur" is long gone within college athletics. Those with the most $$ will win over time. They'll become the Yankees, dodgers, etc, while we'll not even be the Pirates, but will be closer to the Bisons, sadly. Since there is no salary cap, it's nothing less than a free for all at the schools with the deepest pockets of donors.

I replied to you on Twitter but here's a more comprehensive view of my take of his performance: Accomplishments: Kept Felisha Legette-Jack in Buffalo for 3 more years. It was reported by credible sources, but never 100% confirmed, that in 2019 Penn State offered Jack. Alnutt got the support to get her one, two, three contract extensions and one final offer after the 2022 season that she was never going to accept. There's no doubt in my mind that if the Syracuse job did not open up, she would still be here. Oversaw upgrades to S-A facilities. He did not get a lot of the work done on fundraising it, but the field house was started and completed under his watch. The football team is upgrading their training facilities from a garage, and the Nan Harvey Natatorium can finally be renamed back to Nan Harvey Field and is capable of holding softball competitions instead of deep sea fishing competitions. The UB football locker room is at the P5 level now after not being renovated in a long time. Made a good Olympic hire, and made a commitment to another good Olympic hire. Scott Smith (Alnutt hire) has done an an amazing job with UB volleyball, a team that was a perennial doormat. This year UB volleyball (co-)won the MAC East for the first time ever and was the #2 seed in the MAC volleyball tournament. UB beat Big East DePaul and SEC Mizzou in straight sets, both of which finished their season .500 or better in conference. Alnutt also got longtime UB soccer coach Shawn Burke on a multi-year contract shortly before UB got their first ever team win over an Ohio State program. I'm personally not a fan of multi-year contracts for coaches (specifically football and basketball) but if there's no chance of him getting fired in that timeframe (there is not) he earned it. Got the UB Athletics Hall of Fame Back into annual inductions. I'm not exactly sure what happened here, but late in the Danny White years the annual inductions into the UB Hall of Fame ended. I don't know if Alnutt specifically started it back up, but under his watch it is back, which is good to see. Tiny, minor, upgrades to the fan experience. Things like beer sales, a food truck in UB stadium, and better football concession stand food this year are a good start. Concession stands are also cashless (in contract to other Big 4 programs) which makes things go faster. The Coca Cola fan zone this year was nice for the few people that were there, and I liked that it had a big screen showing other college football games. There's a lot of UB fans that are UB (the school) fans and don't follow other college football. I'd like to see some more college football fans at UB games that are rooting for UB. Hard to do in the northeast outside of Pennsylvania though. Not really much of an accomplishment, but one thing that I did like about him is he seemed to be one of the most visible ADs in recent times. He is at a lot of UB athletic events. One year he was out selling 50/50 tickets before a football game because it was during a break and there was no team to sell them. During the MAC tournament in 2018-19 he was out with a very non-donor UB crowd. The anti-Danny White. Shortcomings: I could beat to death the Whitesell hire but you all can do that better than me. But my problem with the coaching search was that in both instances the coaching search was being done through agents and on Twitter. Whichever search firm we used sucks. Candidates that didn't get offers said in public that they were declining it. When Leipold left we had this. Regardless of if the searches were a mess or not it looked messy to outsiders. During the Danny White years, all of the searches and hiring processes would have been quiet if not for an enthusiastic niece. Bobby Hurley was leaked as the hire an hour before he was introduced as the new head coach. I really can't complain about the Linguist hire because I was a huge fan of it when it happened. But the nonstop rotation of coordinators is concerning. Lack of upgrades to the fan experience. I listed above the small upgrades. These move the needle a tiny bit, but there's still large capital improvements that need to happen. Alumni Arena needs air conditioning. Our scoreboard is an abomination, which over two years ago was "first and foremost." What happened since then? We still have a track stadium that has a football field, and next year UB is set to be the only FBS football team that plays in a track stadium. Even worse than football in a track stadium (on a field with soccer markings) is soccer on a football field (with football markings) in a track stadium. Shawn Burke deserves a ton of credit for getting some of the top soccer talent in WNY despite the stadium situation. Which brings me to... No facilities master plan. In the Athletic article I linked Alnutt said “We have a master plan that’s been put together and we’re going to go public with in the near future” and so far the "near future" is more than 26 months. The most recent master plan is almost 10 years old and includes facilities for varsity programs that do not exist anymore. Since that Athletic article was posted the Bills secured a new stadium location and got $850 million of taxpayer money. And New York taxpayers paid for about half ($20 million) of the Syracuse Dome renovations. It seems like everything is the Wal-Mart/downgraded version of what it was during Danny White. Nothing in particular that's huge, but a lot of small stuff. The UB Hall of Fame, though it has been revived, went without inductees for a few years under Alnutt. Gameday: Things like not being allowed to bring outside food into Alumni Arena, that seemed to never be a rule or enforced previously. I complained previously on here about being told that I had to sit in my men's basketball seats for a women's side of a doubleheader. Advertisements. Awesome, we're running TV ads during football games to get people to UB Stadium! Not so fast my friend, the ad that is being run as recently as Thanksgiving day was for the CMU game almost 2 months ago. The football season is over. I thought this was just a network screwing up but I've seen the ad on multiple networks multiple times. As I am typing this now, watching the Ohio State-Michigan game, the same ad aired AGAIN (now twice in the same commercial break)! What the hell. This year during the first couple football games we tried something new and innovative by having a shout from both sides of the stadium (think WE ARE! PENN STATE! or LET'S GO! MOUNTAINEERS!) but it's clear that both whoever planned that and the PA announcer had never experienced something like that. The PA announcer said all three sides of it multiple times-so nobody knew if you were supposed to say what he was saying or say it afterwards. And "Go Blue, Go White, Go Bulls!" is much harder to execute than "Let's Go! Buffalo!" It's small, but another example is the cheap crap they gave away to STH last year as a concession for having only 5 games. One of them was a license plate cover. A year later it's pretty faded. I'm sure there's a ton more. The merchandise situation has not improved. I really want a UB football jersey that is more recent than the one I have signed by TG. I refuse to buy the cheap AliExpress crap that is being sold because I can get one from AliExpress for half the price. If you don't want to deal with NIL find out some way to sell Mack jerseys. Or for basketball I think a lot of people would buy a good quality 5, 33 or (WBB) 24 jersey. The retro bull shirt was great but the roll out took too long to get it online. I shouldn't have to be buying shirts and shipping them to UBFan members, though I gladly did. I think there was a lack of due diligence done on the Becky Burke hire. I'm speculating a bit here but it's an absolutely terrible look when your new coach only has one returner from the previous coach, seemingly on purpose (another cryptic tweet from a WBB mom the day her daughter went into the portal). Then one player quits during the season citing mental health in a now-deleted instagram post. And all of your coaches leave, one not loving basketball and wasn't happy. And most of your roster leaves after that first season (toxic environment?). This seems to be similar to what happened at USC Upstate too. Not a lot of that roster stuck around. It also says quite a bit that only one (1) player followed Burke here. The new Bills stadium is going to price out a ton of western NYers from live football. I've always touted UB as the family and budget friendly alternative to the Bills and Sabres. UB will never replace the Bills, but you will have Bills season ticket holders that will move to attending a few games a year. Bills fans that might attend 3 or 4 games a year might drop to 1 or 2. Ticket prices are already up. There has to be a way to get people that are now watching the Bills from their couches on Sunday into UB Stadium on Saturday to watch live football. But you can't do that with a track stadium and a scoreboard that is worse than the one in RWS over 20 years ago. Time is of the essence and I really don't have a ton of confidence in Alnutt to not fumble the opportunity out of the endzone for a touchback. It really sucks listing all this stuff out, but right now there's people that care. And that's much better than not having people that care.

The word to describe most of the UB fanbase right now is apathetic which is the result of football and basketball going from having their best seasons in program history within the past five years to now being among the worst teams in D1 at the present moment.

UB President is nearing retirement AD has underachieved across football and basketball Change will come, just not until President retires

I really appreciate your response RMA. That’s probably the most thorough, well put explanation of what Alnutt has done so far as Buffalo’s athletic director. I am guilty of putting a heavy emphasis on football and basketball. In the end, I don’t think Alnutt is going anywhere anytime soon but wanted to address it on here with it being a topic brought up on social media often among the UB fans I interact with. As you brought up, there’s points backing up both sides of the conversation.

The one optic that was obvious right when we hired GH was his connections. NBA players and the likes of Jay Wright in the basketball world pulling for him. So it seemed he had all the right places to get edges on recruiting and exposure. I still expect that to shake out. People are getting a bit upset after each loss, understandably, but we definitely need to give GH time to see what hes got planned long term here.

He is absolutely correct

He is spot on your competing for talent and NIL is another means of separating programs. Some don’t like it but it is what is.

I think coaches should be given 3 years to prove themselves. If by year 3 you haven’t shown you can recruit/coach or showing an positive trend with wins increasing each year then change is needed. The AD should have 5 years to show results trending in a positive direction or conference championships from his own hires. Have we seen this? Do fans feel excited to watch Bball or football anymore?

People on here were were acting as if there would never be a coach or a team. Internally, it was a lot smother that it appeared on this board. Most of the stuff floated did not come from UB.