I've always wondered, and now that you make that statement, why...
exactly WHY did we "suck so bad"? How did we get that way?
Thanks for any opinion-s.
I think that the main problem was that Charles J. Ping, a man that I admire very much, did not really have much of an affinity for college athletics, despite a nice piece on the value of athletic competition that he wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education shortly before he became president at OHIO. The other thing, directly related to Dr. Ping, was his decision to hire Cleve against the recommendation of the AD, Mack.
I hadn't heard that Mack was against the Cleve hiring. If so, that's one more chit in favor of an AD who had an awfully small war chest with which to compete. Ping saved the university in many respects but was shortsighted as to the value of ICA. In his book published 3-4 years ago, he asked why it was too much to expect a D1 football recruit to understand Kierkegaard. In his defense, he admitted to making life very difficult for Mack's predecessor, Bill Rohr, who considered Ping "very naive."
I've often wondered what ultimately got Brian Burke fired - the endless string of 5-6 or 6-5 teams or the academic and behavioral performance of his players. I'm guessing the latter. Either way, we descended into 12 years of darkness at Peden Stadium. It was downright embarrassing.