Post by bearfoot on Sept 20, 2014 9:49:40 GMT -8
Dude was told to go up on the mesa and write a story about what folks on the campus have to say about football. He did. Things changed.
There was a huge movement among the faculty to dump football. He wrote about it.
Why hate? Why hate someone doing their job?
He's a stanford grad, soccer fan slumming it down here. If you think for one second that that article was just some journalistic exercise then you are deluding yourself.
The SOB wrote an article that he has never backed-down from, nor explained/rationalized seeking to severely cripple your university and you want to hold hands with him because he writes a sweet article about Steve Fisher every late fall? That's insanity.
So, you're not denying that what he wrote was true, you just hate because of the topic. I'd guess that you probably are not a fan of Brent Schrotenboer either?
I read Webber's response, and when he addressed the facts of MZ's story he used the non deny denial form.
I read most of the original article to see what was happening in the athletic department and on campus when it was written. Football was a mess, the department was going broke, the state U system had just cracked down on gender equity, and the dope Schemmel was still AD. The department was 4 mill upside down. We had just hired Brady because though Chuck Long was a good dude, he was a horrible head coach. Our team was regularly loosing by anywhere from 20 to 60 points. We had a home attendance under 20K for the #7 Ranked Utah Utes. Webber (who I really liked because of his effort to protect the athletic department from most of the rest of the leaders on campus) had made loans from his budget to football just to keep it afloat.
We all know how far football and the rest of the department has come since those dark days, but we shouldn't forget football had been crap for a really long time.
How long had it been that we weren't even bowl eligible? We had been on a serious probation for numbskulls and thugs in football.
Webber had just laid a big fee on the students to help athletics, and lots of students were PO'd. I think that setting those fees was a brilliant move, and stabilized the department. Perhaps it was one of the best things Webber did. Students were not going to watch football, they didn't like it.
It is a lot different now, and it is possible that MZ's article woke up the department and our local fans.
On top of the mess that was football, the tone on campus was worse. I worked in the school of Ed, in a department that frequently interacted with the other departments. We met once a month with other departments and there wasn't ever a meeting when the question of why football gets so much $ and support wasn't an off the record topic. Most of these dorks hated football and when I tried to explain the reasons we needed football, they would remind me that mu arguments might work at a school that had a reasonable football program, we didn't have one.
You have asked for a retraction, what you may not have heard was that MZ said he not only didn't write the headline, he didn't think it fit his story and didn't like it.