It's progress! 


Speaking of progress...

325 Active Visitors on BA at Midnight! 

http://www.thepost.ohiou.edu/content/post-letter-students-shouldn%E2%80%99t-feel-obligated-stay-games

What a DB.

I think many of the students leave after the band plays at halftime.  They love the band. The band is great.  No football game, no band. Dont get me wrong the, the band is an integral part of the whole football gameday experience and not the same without.  Who funds the band. Thats not a rhetorical question, i really don't know.  My guess is it comes from some sort of money the students pay to attend OU.  Thats ok.  My point is OU markets the College experience. A time when a student can mature, learn, find out who they are, make some mistakes that they learn from, etc.  That includes competitive athletics, leading academic programs such as journalism, engineering, sports management and even stimulating course on classic world religions.  After which you may have a beer on court street. Thats why OU is so great in my opinion. They seem to have a great mix of it all.  Finally, just to show that we are not that far apart, to some football is a religion to them.

I'm not saying he's a bad guy.  But a few things bother me about that letter.  First is context:  How do other schools, especially our peers (however defined) fund football?  And the letter seems a little all knowing, as if Hays has the answer and other opinions are wrong.  Also, there's no consideration of whether having a good football team is worth the cost in terms of student/alumni/friend/staff/etc interest.

Does Hays go to games?

A) We all paid the exorbitant fees when we were undergrads too so, in my opinion, it all comes full circle so that current students may enjoy an enriching alumni experience after their days in Athens come to an end.

B) Hays is a complete moron if he thinks that students left at halftime out of some form of protest for the high cost of student fees that fund the athletics programs. Everyone, including the students, knows that the REAL reason they left was to participate in a different Blackout on Court Street. I dont want to be a hypocrite because as a student, I rarely went to games and, when I did, I usually left at halftime.  However, I was honest about it when I left to go get drunk.

That being said, attendance is far better now than it was just a few years ago when I was in school (during the Knorr era).  Whoever said above that this will be a slow process is dead on. In my humble opinion, I don't think OU will be a "big time" program until they get out of the MAC.  Again, this might be 10 years from now. These things take time.  Us complaining nonstop about student attendance does not help.  If anything it makes us sound like bitter alumni who reminisce too much about the "good ol' days" back when we were all in school.  That letter symbolizes the collective rolling of eyes that takes place of the general student body when they hear alumni tell them to take the football team more seriously.  In the end we cannot guilt them into attending games and staying until the end. The team simply has to continue to get better and the university has to continue to create new marketing tactics (read: the Blackout game) to entice students to come.

Btw, I was surprised to read at the end that Hays is a professor at OU.  That letter seems like it was written by a kid in high school.

An all or nothing comparison is not realistic. You have to take into account the final outcome of having the fees  completely eliminated. If that were to happen, it would affect far more than just the football team, and the team itself would not just drop to FCS.

Besides, the students aren't complaining about the fees, one disgruntled professor is.

Three words: A Liberal Education.

Why would attendance at university-sponsored poetry readings and plays be considered in furtherance of "a liberal education" but attendance at university-sponsored athletic events not? Yes, the academic component is more defined in the former, but "a liberal education" is more than academics. I learned more outside of the classroom at Ohio University than I did in the classroom--and that includes my time attending sporting events as well as sitting in the window booths inside the Cat's Eye.

Go Bobcats.

Please take a look at the numbers before you start throwing around opinions. Ohio students subsidized roughly 18 million into the athletic budget through student fees. Roughly that is about 850 dollars a student per year for the entire athletic department, with a portion of that going unused and returned to the university. The university spent about 3.0 million in cash to run the football program. The Ohio student then spends 140 a year on football cash expenditures. Do you know how much football it would cost the Ohio student if Ohio made that fantastic move talked about dropping from FBS to FCS? It would cost the Ohio student.....140 dollars a year for FCS football. There is no cost savings moving down to FCS.

For one, that's simply not true. Participation by students in athletic events is higher than it is for any other extracurricular activity. For another, you're glossing over my point. Who's screaming about the waste and horror over two buildings costing $400 a year in fees? The reality is that prospective students -- right or wrong -- EXPECT great facilities and amenities. Ping went up in the midst of a rec center arms race in Ohio; every state school now has something similar. If we didn't have one, the quality of our student population WOULD decline. It may not meet the ideals of academics, but it's the truth. I think killing athletics, which seems to be the dream of some of the scorched earth crowd, would also result in less interest and an overall lower quality student body.

Steve Hays needs to take a survey about how many students would like to have a good football team in Athens. The vast majority would love to have a good football team even if they don't go to the games. The scorched earth anti-athletic talk has move from the team not performing well enough to not drawing large enough crowds. When are the crowds large enough to convince even the skeptic that football in Athens is here to stay?

Bottom line steve is a db who wants attention any way he can because the one kid who is majoring in classics and religion is not enough for him. If we are trying to make cuts why not cut that completely useless degree. He takes any chance he can to take a jab at this University.