Ha. Point very well taken.
Facility upgrades (stadium expansion ) in our case, attracts higher grade recruits, in theory leading to better on the field performance, leading to more wins, coaching can only get you so far, you have to have the personnel, and obviously on defense we do not, if facilities doesnât matter to potential recruits than why are all the major football powers constantly in a facility arms race upgrading their perspective programs, for some reason we seem to be the only college athletic program that doesnât seem to comprehend the art of recruiting
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Most of those major programs get $40 to $50 million or more per year from television revenue. We get about $1 million. They build stuff because they have stupid amounts of money available. I want us to expand our stadium. But i donât want to hear that as an excuse to keep Healy. Thatâs not what is holding us back. We had a top 30 or 40 defense in the country Lambertâs last season with Spencer as DC. Now we are almost dead last. We have recruited more defensive backs than any other position. Our coaches either canât teach & develop talent or canât evaluate talent. Coaching makes a huge difference at our level. We can expand the stadium & we will still only be getting 3 star players with the occasional 4 star & very rarely a 5. Thatâs around the same level Healy was recruiting his first 2 classes & he did nothing with it. As a G5 you need a coach who can get more collectively out of a team than their individual talent levels. We are getting way less than that right now. It could be 2 or 3 years before we have the funds to expand the stadium. No one knows how fund raising is going. We canât afford to wait & see if that will help Healy recruit better & win a few more games. Losing the first 5 years was easily excused because of our program being new. Now it is just becoming our reputation.
Unfortunately there isnât a magic thing that we can change and it means success. We have a list of things we need to get better at and they are all interconnected. When talking about coaching, recruiting, funds, facilities - itâs always chicken or the egg. What comes first? All I know is if we want to improve the program all of them have to get better.
I will say this - anyone that has toured the football center knows that our facilities are amazing. The size might be small but the quality is easily upper half of G5 level. The size of the stadium is just the issue.
This is to say that while I am sure stadium size is used against us and a challenge with recruiting, it is not an excuse for why we are struggling currently.
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Maybe itâs not all about the stadium. It is more about tv as attendance is on the decline
I think there is going to have to be a compromise between $ for coaching and $ for expansion understanding that we canât afford the best of both (at least not right now). I truly want to see our stadium be one that makes everyoneâs jaw drop, but I want to see a coaching change first.
Example: if Charlotte had a stadium comparable to Michigan and lost at the rate we are right now and have been since the birth of our football program, the size of our stadium would be irrelevant to most recruits. In contrast, if we had a smaller stadium but had a coach that continued to win conference championships, bowl wins and major upsets, the stadium would mostly be moot because the results would draw recruits. In other words, take the Alabama team today along with Saban, and put them at the Rich, the number of 5 star recruits will not decrease because of the stadium size. However, move Saban to Vanderbilt, and watch how many higher recruits they would get on Year 1.
I still think that NIL and other external personal funding is going to ruin both of the above factors, but we shall see.
Again, I think we need to find that nice balance of not pushing in all of our chips on a coach that we canât really afford and puts our expansion on hold. However at the same time, I donât want to keep a bad coach because we would rather put lipstick on a pig by masking the problem with eye candy.
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clt bets the recruits will only care about NIL money soon
Money to expand the stadium is likely a separate pool of donors from the money needed to move on from a coach. I do not think one drastically impacts the other. I think the challenge with Will is we arenât going to get much relief when he gets another job because he is unlikely to find a role paying him near what he makes here. With Ron I think we could almost get out from under everything we owe him as his salary is near AHC ast money in many P5 programs (UVA).
Iâm happy we have the Evergreen campaign now which allows me to contribute directly to football stadium expansion which is most important to me given the current state of the athletic program.
Will there be updates on our progress towards the goals for Evergreen? Would be really nice to know how things are going now that the plan has been released.
Depends on the donors. If they have a large donations or multiple ones those donors might ask that it is not shared or that it be used privately to generate additional funds or to only release news of it at a certain date. The update I have been told - it is going very well.
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I think those announcements are such PR events that they are carefully planned and managed. No doubt the ideal plan was to announce it after we got a bowl invite or something like that.
With the way this season is going, Iâm not sure when a good time would be. More imperative for the progress to be good news after a lackluster or bad season. Donât wanna double down on bad news.
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It feels like a lot of talk for what appears to be the answers are right in front of us. Stadium expansion has to and is going to happen. Thereâs no purpose to debating which should happen first. We lost to W&M at home and got drilled by FAU. We are clearly under achieving.
You know what is a big PR event? Hiring a new coach.
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Maybe we can work out a deal with Healy where instead of paying his salary after we fire him, we put his name on a part of the expansion. The shitters seem fitting.
Now, thatâs not nice 
I am not saying that we have the capacity or desire to enter a facility arms race against Alabama, Clemson, Notre Dame etc⌠but we at least need to compete with and stay on par with conference and regional foes, and we do have the financial capacity to do so, and I never stated that this was the answer to all of our problems in football or recruiting, but it is a part that will help in recruiting and with higher level recruits we should be able to put a more competitive product on the field, coaching only takes you so far, we dont have the same talent level as other teams, our defensive coordinator Greg Brown has experience teaching defensive schemes/technique at multiple SEC teams including Alabama and has NFL experience, and our defense still blows, we just dont have the talent, ( Healys fault), we have to recruit at a higher level and win some of these recruiting battles against regional rivals instead of taking the left overs, and as I mentioned previously, coaching staff, philosophy, tradition/history, and the university itself are all factors, but so are facilities, and that is one thing that we can do and have positive results, and Healys only had one recruiting class that ranked highly, I dont have the numbers handy but I believe that the class was ranked 70th nationally, the rest have been only marginally better than Lamberts and Healy has the benefit of the transfer portal which was not an option to Lambert, Healy or not, we need to recruit better in order to win at a higher level and we should do everything possible to do so whether it is changing the coaching staff or upgrading/expanding our facilities
2019 CUSA recruiting rank
2020 CUSA recruiting rank
2021CUSA recruiting rank
2022 CUSA recruiting
We went from getting 5 3-stars & being dead last in CUSA recruiting with Lambertâs last class in 2019 to 19 3-stars & 3rd in CUSA recruiting in 2020 which was Healyâs first full recruiting class. There was a huge jump in recruiting Healyâs first 2 years but then we kept losing & that along with a coach who is constantly exploring other opportunities has hurt our recruiting. This years class was still 6th in the conference with 11 3-stars which is more than Lambert ever recruited, but somehow we are probably going to finish nearly last in the conference.
I donât blame Brown for this years defense. I think too much damage was already done when he got here. They havenât been developed & arenât fundamentaly sound & that takes time to fix. Unfortunately the last time he was a DC his defense finished last in the country so there is no guarantee he will ever get it fixed. Healy should have replaced the entire defensive staff after the end of last season but he kept West around & by the time he found another job it was February & there werenât a lot of great replacements still available. Healy is the head coach so all of this falls on him. Itâs not our stadiumâs fault.
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I am starting to wonder if the rest of the college coaching community already knew last year what we definitely know now about Healy and we could not hire anything better than what we ended up with. I would not risk my reume for Healy if I had bigger aspirations down the line.