Jeesh...just reading Arkley's tweets. WTF is he doing? Bitter dude.

I respectfully disagree. You must have missed the schoolgirl crush article Arkley published for the Messenger.

You rarely see beat writers for teams responding to fans at all on Twitter. To see him respond to fans with rage is pretty disturbing but also reminds us what we knew all along.

Why not say something positive about the hire from his standpoint? Just parroting what Shaus says he wanted when he’s on record of disliking his previous actions is faint praise of the hire. He couldn’t say anything nice, it seems to me.

Arkley has led on that there are problems deeper than our coaches. Like a lot of us here, we wanted to see Saul work and thought it could if given the right resources. As I have alluded to for a while, revenues are down big time in combination of Schaus looking for other jobs the last 4 years (hell his one Sr. Associate AD put it out there that they "thought" they were going to Purdue in one of my classes). The fact that Saul didn't have a contract after years 2 and 3 led to a lot of problems in that recruiting kids was not going to be easy and the fact he was staring at a lameduck year meant he had to get JUCO's instead of letting his process play out. Especially considering Along with the Kirk recruiting affair (which was shot-gunned and off the record from the coaches, they wanted him to transfer this year and had his papers ready) and Doug Taylor being a culture problem until Vander Plas woke up, there were some rooted problems along with dealing with the initial kids from the Christian era, such as Bean Willis and mutiny island that existed. I think Treg did a pretty good job alluding the problems under Christian.....

Nonetheless, the reason why his compliments are faint are because these same problems are going to exist given the current administration. Now maybe our new Sr. Associate AD for Development along with the new Asst. AD for Sales (who I know has been hired and is a former intern of mine) can turn things around. Problem is it's going to be a 3 year process to rebuild to where we were prior to Drake Bolon getting fired. Sorry I keep harping on that, but that situation along with the day they didn't name Drew Ossakow Asst. AD for Development are the days we messed up on heavily when we could have been building from within instead of developing revolving doors. If you want to question me it's going to take that long, go ahead. Feel free to PM if you disagree with Arkley's assessment, but the reason for his back-handed compliments are legitimately valid.

If Arkley is right, JS has had 18 months to think about it. Anyway, people here are saying that ADs have a short list all the time. I’ll give JS credit for striking fast for what many think is a good choice.

That's a poor excuse if, in fact, his intent was to criticize the department as opposed to lionizing a 40-50 MAC coach. Public universities can't ban journalists they don't like. Even private Bradley University just got embarrassed by trying to pull that.

That department has deserves open and honest scrutiny and I'd be all for seeing that from Arkley, but that column was just a compendium of excuses that ignored the stark reality that our recruiting was sub-par and it led to a losing MAC record and severely declining interest in the program.

He's a professional and put his opinion out there. It's hardly out of bounds to respond to it. And "don't read, and don't follow" is a much less helpful response than offering constructive criticism and hoping for better while still paying attention and subscription fees.

I get all of the excuses for Saul. Trust me, I used them and wanted nothing more than him to succeed at Ohio because he did indeed feel like the perfect fit.

It didn't work out. Saul did not rise to the challenge and grab the bull by the horns in the five seasons he was at the helm. Recruiting and wins we're not there. It is sad it didn't work out, but this is a business. Anyone with any sense can see this.

Casting Ohio athletics and Schaus as the villian here the way Arkley does is a bad look. The entire opinion column is pretty sobby and I would say borderline unprofessional and outside the scope of what should be going on at the Messenger from their beat writer.

We've gone down the rabbit hole when it comes to beat writers being given the latitude to write analysis pieces. It's so tough to pull off.

So many writers think they're Zach Lowe.

There's a reason Zach Lowe is Zach Lowe, whose analysis pieces are so devoid of emotion that they're airtight and fair.

The Athletic has made it worse, empowering their beat writers to go full-on opinion piece mingling with the beat writer stuff. We can never put the toothpaste back into the tube.

I completely agree with him.

The only thing surprising about this statement is that it took this darn long for you to say it. ;)