clodney

On 11/11/2023 at 5:22 PM, enrique14150 said:

The price of winning in the MAC is starting over.  If it was easy to keep replacing coaches and stay good, everyone would do it.  We're paying the piper right now.

Agreed. The price of winning or losing in the MAC is starting over with a new coach. Why don't the same rules apply to the Athletic Director?

How many times do we have to watch a completely predictable dual QB system fail in college football before these coaches finally realize they’re overthinking their strategy?

1 hour ago, enrique14150 said:

It's miserable to go on here and read, after game 1 of the new coach's tenure, people re-living what went wrong before this. It's done, move forward.

Sorry but I can’t possibly ignore someone who calls us a “terrible fanbase” based on a bunch of Bull$hit.

1 hour ago, BullBoy said:

Sorry I know this is getting off topic, but I still wonder to this day, would people's minds be different if COVID shut down year one five days earlier and the loss to #12 Miami never happened?

It's a fair question. We wouldn't have felt the burn of our biggest failure in years.

To me it's all about expectations. We never won a MAC Championship in football with Lance Leipold but I don't think any of us would claim he was a failure. However, not getting a MAC Championship in any of the years we had Jeenathan, Segu, Mballa, and Skogman? That was unacceptable given where we were prior to Whitesell.

18 minutes ago, Bullsboys said:

Uh things like graduation. Things like conditioning a player to be NBA ready. It happens to tons of 4th year coaches. They just don’t have a terrible fan base calling for their heads every single year despite success. 

What success did we have exactly? We had won the MAC 4 out of 5 years, had perhaps our greatest recruiting class in the history of the school which included an NBA-level talent (as you mentioned), and we were filling our arena nightly with an energized fanbase. The future was bright and the program was poised to maintain its position as a national midmajor power, until we switched coaches and proceeded to: 

 - Year 1: Lose by double digits to the 12-seed in the first round of the MAC tourney

 - Year 2: Lose by double digits to the 5-seed in the MAC Championship, followed by a first round loss in the NIT

 - Year 3: Lose to the 4-seed in the first round of the MAC tourney

 - Year 4: Lose by 24pts to the 4-seed in the first round of the MAC tourney - after a sub .500 season

You cannot fault our fanbase for being completely pissed off at that downward spiral. He'll always be remembered as the guy who tanked our program.

2 hours ago, enrique14150 said:

1. The commuter portion of the fanbase is probably not coming all the way back to campus unless they live close by.  So for students, they probably get who's on campus.  However, since a third of the season falls during the elongated winter break, they desperately need to find a way to get some of those commuters to some games.

THIS. I feel like I've been shouting this from the rooftops for years. My experience at UB, which occurred in the days with HUGE student crowds, was that those who lived off-campus didn't go to games at all. This included commuters and the partiers down in the heights. If you wanted to get the students involved you simply had to go around to the dorms to drum up excitement and hand out a few free pizzas. Eddie Asbie proved this concept works. IMO There's no point in trying to win over local students. They'll never consider UB a true sporting event since it will always be in the shadow of Bills/Sabres games.

As for the game yesterday, I was pretty encouraged by our performance. I was a bit worried about our incoming talent but they looked like they fit the part. Now we have to see if they actually develop and play as a team - both things missing from Whitesell's era.

1 minute ago, Bullsboys said:

Yep a Whitesell player, just like all the top scorers. This team isn’t a rebuild, but last year’s was a complete rebuild. 

lol

4 minutes ago, rma said:

Band has practice for tomorrow’s football game. They have practice or games every day this week except Thursday and this past Sunday. 

lol. Skip the basketball home opener and first ever game for Halcovage for a friggin practice for a bull$hit Tuesday night, meaningless football game. 

4 minutes ago, rma said:

There’s about a full baselines worth of students here but they’re spread out in both of the general admission sections. No band either 

Are they on vacation or something? This is a sad crowd all around. 

I HATE that 4th down play. Worst call of the season. You have a brand new QB in the game that you can pin deep and you go gif it??

5 minutes ago, Sportsfan said:

Not a reflection on his potential, but this is not a resume of experiences of a Defensive Coordinator for team aspiring to be MAC Champions and was recently in the Top 25.

 

There are phenomenal analysts who can assess problems and find solutions, and then there are phenomenal coaches who can motivate and game manage. The fact that our Defensive Coordinator has no experience beyond senior level analyst might explain why our defense is giving up 120+ypg more than a year ago and now sits at 3rd from last in all of FBS. He may not have the coaching qualities necessary to lead - even though he's a great analytical mind.

24 minutes ago, 121Merrimac said:

The original (archived) site was much (easily 5x, maybe 10x) more active 15+ years ago.  This has been a shell of it’s former self. 

Some of that is likely due to message boards becoming outdated but it's true nonetheless. Ubfan is dead compared to when I was at UB. 

ADMA doesn't have a great history with premature contract extensions...

23 minutes ago, rma said:

There’s a lot of ways you can juice the numbers but we had a record year for donations last year

That is shocking. Was it for athletics? Or do you mean UB in general? And what drove it?

Over the past few years there have been people calling for Mark Alnutt's head (myself included) for focusing too much attention on football and letting the basketball program fall off a cliff. What are we thinking of Alnutt now that the football is also failing? 

IMO Alnutt is the one who needs to go and it's long overdue. He inherited a department that had Lance Leipold, Felisha Legette-Jack, and Nate Oats, and he replaced them with Maurice Linguist, Becky Burke, and Jim Whitesell. The jury is still out on Becky but the other 2 struggled mightily trying to maintain relevance. Fan support has dropped off and I'd imagine donor money has as well. We're back on par with the lowest teams in the MAC, we're losing to FCS schools, and overall it feels like 2003 again. Am I wrong here? Do others still have hope that ADMA can actually right this thing?

Either fire people or drop all funding to fcs-levels and put all of your money into basketball. We don’t have the funding for both and the football world is impossible to compete in. I’m the biggest college football guy in the land but this $hit will never work. 

Turning it off. 

Running to the edge to start the half was the stupidest play call I had ever seen, up until we decided to run it to the edge a second time immediately after. 

Finally, a pulse on this team. 

Just now, UBinMD said:

This is not the team we took to Wisconsin. Confidence is shot all around. That's on the staff.

Wisconsin lost to Wazzu by double digits last week and are currently tied with GA Southern. I don’t think theyre very good. 

This team sucks. We’ve regressed. 

17 hours ago, BrooklynBull said:

Time to move on

... to basketball season.

23 hours ago, ukbro00 said:

Albany lost to Marshall by only 4 points. They aren't the Albany of 15 years ago.

You mean they aren't the Albany of last year since they were god awful. 

Sounds like Wisconsin will be trying a new offensive system that strays from their typical ground and pound running. This could bode well for us in the first half given our defensive experience but I'd expect them to go back to their basics later in the game and start to run us over. I'm hopeful that we can keep it interesting for a bit.

13 hours ago, 1975 said:

I’m unclear how to find a player’s “worth”. Is that an objective or subjective value?  

If it weren't for student subsidies the vast majority of athletic departments in this country would be horribly unprofitable, so you could argue these players wouldn't be worth anything.