oskithepimp said:
It breaks my heart to say it, but if college football means paying attention to annual media revenues, forcing our student athletes to constantly travel cross country instead of going to school, and allowing ESPN and Fox executives to make decisions that dramatically impact our university, then I don't want to be a fan of college football anymore. I'd rather convert Memorial stadium into dorms, flip Hughes stadium into the foitball stadium, and enjoy small market college football as it used to be: tradition, regionality, and fun, and say f&ck you to what college football has turned into.
Disagree. I'd rather we do away with sports altogether (like Chicago) than have the cloud of sports program failure hang over our heads. Let Berkeley be the "hardcore academic where super nerds go" UC and let UCLA be the "where the cool jock kids go" UC. I don't know the answer to this, but will Cal have been the first flagship public university of any state to go from P5 to obscurity/nothing due to apathy and mismanagement? That stink of incompetency and failure after decades of athletic pride lip service will not wash off for a long time.
Your statement above, to me, smells like unjustified elitism, which is exactly how we find ourselves in this situation in the first place.
Pay attention to annual media revenues? Yes. That is called budgeting, a necessary economic activity to merely be a going concern, and every institution does this, not just athletic departments.
Student athletes traveling? Yes! This is not new. The point isn't for us to say what student athletes should or should not want to do. The point is that we inform them of what the deal entails. You want to compete athletically with the best? Great! Guess what, "the best" don't all exist just in our own little region. If you really want to test your mettle, you have to go to where the best are. That means travel. That's the deal. They enter this relationship with Cal eyes wide open, and if they DON'T want to travel, then they can choose to enter this relationship with one of the many schools that DO only compete regionally. But it won't be against the best...
As a thought experiment, consider this. What if Cal is "relegated" to being a regional player, and we all hand wave the situation away saying "well, we didn't want to have to do all that stuff and listen to all those executives (i.e. stakeholders) and XYZ anyways because we're better than that," all the while Stanford goes independent or eventually finds a P2 home and continues successfully competing nationally? How is this perceived as anything other than failure on Cal's part? We are going to hand wave all that away, secure in knowing that we are Cal and therefore above all that, when just across the bay there is a shining example of success in all things in which we've failed because we believed we were above it? To those on the outside looking in, they are not going to look at Cal and look at Stanford and think Stanford is "worse" or "bad" because they DO engage with media and DO want to be the best they can be in athletics while Cal is "better" because they chose not to. They will see Stanford = success, Cal = failure. That's just the reality. To think otherwise takes a serious lack of self-awareness, in my opinion.
To be honest I don't really mean to direct this wall of text at you oksithepimp, but it's how I feel about the whole thing and the past few days have been an emotional roller coaster as I grapple with the possible reality of the team that I love and care for so much not existing or becoming a shell of its former self.
If it does, it will be because of institutional apathy. And there is no way I am going let those who WERE apathetic, and therefore caused this situation, step on those of us who weren't, while continuing to claim the moral and academic high ground for it when again, just across the bay, there is a shining example of success in the thing we deemed beneath us by an institution that most of the world still holds in higher academic regard.
If we are who we say we are, we aim to be the best in whatever we choose to do. We don't choose to do something just to be "okay" or "merely competitive" in it. Whether its academics, athletics, or whatever, we should be in it to win it or we don't do it at all.