Delusional move. School nearly bankrupt, eats 2 years left on contract, believes NE Ohio is interested in Zips sports.

I like Terry--seems like a good guy. However, it is clear the school needs a dose of magic to revive the fortunes. Hiring a former SEC winner was a worthwhile gamble. However, he was clearly not building anything long-term. They could keep him until the contract expired, but nothing would change.

They need to start bringing in low-cost 32 year old up and comers until they find one that provides the spark. The hope would be that the coach would provide enough momentum and leave a good enough coordinator around to keep up the success.

I think they were hoping for a similar situation to what we have with Solich but Bowden was nowhere close to building that. Trouble is, even if he could've, Akron just doesn't care about Zips football. Nada. None. Buckeyes on Saturday and Browns on Sunday. The only time they go that stadium is for a high school game. They may as well go super young and hope to some exposure before said coach bales for a bigger conference because "long term" and Akron Zips football are antithetical terms.

True. I went to the ABJ website after we beat them and all they had was a three or four paragraph story that seemed to be cut short by the editor. No quotes from anybody. They even referred to our stadium as "Pederson" stadium. Made me wonder if they even sent a reporter to Athens for the game.

Wouldn't surprise me if they went after Carl Pelini. He did ok with what BG has and he's deep into NE Ohio.

He recruits the area well...

Akron's buyout of Bowden's contract is only $688,500.00.
He will probably hook up somewhere, unless he wants to hang it up.





GO BOBCATS

"Only $688.5K" You must be a lot more comfortable than me.

Unless Akron can hire the Archbishop Hoban coach, or perhaps lightning strikes twice and they are able to get another top quality coach who is passed his prime but still has a little gas left in the tank, they are in a world of hurt. The community gets behind it's basketball team, but not football. We won't even go into the myriad of of administrative decisions that resulted in a near train wreck for the university's budget, not to mention its academic reputation. We shall soon see.

I don't understand why Akron didn't do something with the JAR during their run with Dambrot. I know at one point that UA had something proposed with the city about building an arena near Canal Park but it would have been a tax increase and it got shot down. I'm sure somebody who lives there knows more.

Will be interesting to see who they go after.

Not to hijack this thread, but given the near bankrupt status of Akron, isn't it about time to revisit the merger of KSU and Akron? Think of all the reduction in administrative duplication that could be accomplished, as well as the reduced spending on athletics. If they took both athletic budgets and combined them and then cut that combined total by 1/4, it would still be more than either school is spending now and probably somewhere near the top in MAC budgets. This merger would probably have been accomplished more than four decades ago, if it hadn't been for the opposition of State Senator Oliver Ocasek. Gov Rhodes proposed this during one of his later terms in office. I wonder if incoming Governor Mike Dewine has the guts to try it again. To me it's a no-brainer. But, then again, Dewine is a Redchicken, so thinking out of the box might not be a forte. ;-)

I'm rather surprised that Rhodes wanted a merger. I thought his philosophy was always more and more campuses and who cares about quality. You get a campus....and you get a campus....Everybody gets a campus.

As for Dewine, he's not a big picture guy, so I don't see any innovation coming out of him. At best, i think he'll take after his mentor Voinovich and just neglect higher ed unless he needs to cut it to balance the budget. At worst, I fear that he might be another Scott Walker and launch an all out assault on it to curry favor with Kochs.

Governor Rhodes was a different era, when Ohio was growing and had a larger population than Florida. I have been told by old timers at the State House that when candidate Rhodes paid a visit to Marion and inadvertently gave the speech in intended for the next audience in Mansfield. He told the good citizens of Marion a branch campus of Ohio State was to be built. When his staff told him he had to go back to Marion and apologize and tell them a branch campus was not to be built there, but in Mansfield, He replied hell no, we will build one there too!

I have no idea if this apocryphal story is true, though I have heard people that swear it happened. Again, that was a different era when Ohio was a population leader not a decliner--as of now just growing in ten counties--those around Columbus and Cincinnati.

Jeez OuPride isn't Madison liberal enough? I mean it is one of the most liberal campuses in America. Because of Scott Walker, Wisconsin became a refuge for people fleeing the insanity that is the state government of Illinois and the the mess that passes for governance in Chicago. I was there last summer and the the Venezuelan cabbie who dropped me off at the train station told me it reminds him of the insanity that he left in Caracas. People in academia probably all know those who left the Illinois system for a another state where the pension system isn't bordering on collapse.

Getting back to the point at hand, I fully expect Terry Bowden to be a football pundit on a lesser tier sports network like CBS Sports network. Unless he has some sort of gambling problem, I think it is safe to say he will be in a far better financial situation than Akron.

A MAC East title for Akron is like winning a MACC for the regular programs in the conference. In light of this Bowden did a pretty good job with that low ceiling. People forget the program was in total disarray before he got there. This reminds me of when Akron fired Lee Owens who had them on the right track only to fall into a hole with a couple of poor coaching staffs.