How does Tech rank financially? This is not a pretty picture

[Supersize that order mutt]

The football program is the lifeblood of the GTAA. It's like that for all of the football firsts in the ACC and SEC. You field the worst GT football team in over a generation and slide into what is now a nearly decade long slide into the cellar and that's what you're going to get. I would say if Clemson were in a decade long mire they'd look similar but they at least have IPTAY to fall back on. Whereas the A-T Fund at Georgia Tech has only recently been treated as something other than a legal structure for the AD to talk to the big money. Clemson's financial strength is built on the back of not just deep pocketed money but also the wide net of smaller donations like a Ron Paul / Bernie Sanders type political campaign. The A-T Fund has sucked massively until very recently at encouraging new small donors to connect and stay connected with the program.

This is the legacy of the no talent ass clown Mike Bobinski (who is thankfully ruining Purdue these days), Collins face planting his first three seasons on the trot, John Swofford having the worst TV contract in the P5 with the longest retention span which just so happened to benefit his kiddo at Raycom, and not having a properly loved and cared for A-T Fund to bridge the gap. Remember ... the Disney money alone is $4,000,000/month more deposited in Athens than Atlanta. Feelin' the love for our "partner" for the ACCN yet?



Picked Nits:
- Georgia Tech exports its alumni. You only need so many nuclear engineers in metropolitan Atlanta. As a result of GT alumni being far more scattered than your typical land grant, they have to travel quite a lot more to go to games. And that's travel to Atlanta which is like a double penalty on time. This knocks attendance down.

- Those who do stay in Atlanta have no shortage of entertainment options as opposed to say Oxford, MS or Columbia, SC where massive drinking before, during, and after a football game is all there is going on pretty much ever. This knocks attendance down.

- Due to the neglect of several prior Presidents and ADs, the gameday experience beforehand at BDS is scattershot at best. I suppose you could walk from the 5th St bridge through the Greek buildings to Bobby Dodd Way NW and call that "the tailgating area". Peters was suppose to be tailgating space in the last master plan done for the Olympics in '96. Note it still isn't f'n there. They should also consider turning the top of Centergy and other decks into a tailgate space. I'm largely ignorant on the specifics, but it feels like unless you donate bank it's damned near impossible to get an RV remotely close to the stadium. This knocks attendance down.

- Get some proper chairback seats and spacing. It's not a big deal for me, but it is a deal breaker for older family and friends. I saw some intrepid older fans attempting to "cane bleacher" their way down in the Upper East during the NIU game, so I can't be alone here.

Having said that winning cures all those nits. I was at the NIU game. I said I was not coming back until staff changes were made. I held to that and did not attend another game all season. No regrets, just applying the one piece of leverage I have that is well understood at the GTAA. And look -- changes were made. So now I'll be back in the stands for next season. I think you'll see *some* recovery with the staff changes in attendance. Think what NIU looked like -- 15k empty instead of 30k empty.




If Angel Cabrera has his mind rite, he would propose as part of the next capital campaign to fully endow the scholarship costs of all the GTAA programs. It's insane that the GTAA has to spend much of the year fundraising to cover operational scholarship costs. That needs to stop. The programs should all be structurally endowed like golf is. Think of paying for your sports teams more in the Stanford/Duke way (endowment) as opposed to the Tennessee/Michigan way (expensive football tickets to a so-so facility that houses over 100k). Georgia Tech needs a blend of the two and they only really half a sliver of endowment and depressed ticket sales to a non-ideally configured stadium that can't even seat enough to make the math work that way.

I agree with most of what you said, but a "nearly decade long slide into the cellar"??? A couple of less than good seasons under CPJ near the end still didn't put us in the cellar. Collins alone did that.

 

[THWUGA]

Google the "Stanford Easy A List" that was passed around to athletes. Stanford has lots of utterly bogus bull**** liberal arts majors to hide people in.

The point is they are elite because despite an A+ academic institution, the school prioritizes the athletic program and invests in it.

Also LOL @ calling any degree from Stanford bull----. Come on now. You can parlay even the bull----iest Stanford degree into a good living.

 

[GT98]

ou guys will laugh at me for this but there's nothing keeping us from being the Stanford of college athletics if the academic school wanted to make the athletic department part of its mission and make a real investment in it. And I've laid out here before that I think there's a strong case to do so. It's certainly capable of doing so, financially, I'm just not sure of the governance issues.

Sadly, I don't think that the Hill gives two öööös about any of this. Until GT cares and invests the money to do so, they'll continue to waffle as we've seen. Does the GT Prez care? Does it matter if he does?

 

[georgia_tech_swagger]

Stanford University Accused of Giving Easy Class List to Athletes

Stanford University allegedly offered a list of easy classes to student-athletes, according to the Stanford Daily.

www.foxnews.com

Stanford Athletes Had Access To List Of 'Easy' Classes: California Watch Report

Stanford Athletes Had Access To List Of 'Easy' Classes: California Watch Report

www.huffpost.com

A quick glance at major offerings:
- Theater and Performance Studies
- Art History
- Art Practice
- Dance
- Symbolic Systems (aka an entire degree using the Occulus Rift)
- Theology
- Religious Studies
- Medieval Studies
- Iranian Studies (what, you're training the one future ambassador to Iran if we ever normalize relations?)
- Global Studies
- Feminist Studies
- Gender and Sexuality Studies
- Digital Humanities

Come on they've got bullshit places to hide dummies. So does any other major .edu with a comprehensive liberal arts offerings.

 

[andrew]

It all starts with Tech doing a better job of getting its alums to start supporting athletics both by going and financially. Tech is an efficient machine in collecting money for academics. More money mean better coaches, better facilities, and hopefully better players and results.

The problem is that the more you focus effort on pumping alumni for athletic donations, the less you'll be able to pump them for academic donations. It's not quite a zero sum game, but honestly it's probably close, especially for a school like GT where almost everyone cares deeply about academics, even the big football fans.

The academic side of the Institute is clearly intent on pushing our academic profile as high as it can go, and they're going to be very resistant to anything that gets in the way, or that they even think could get in the way.

 

[superjacket21]

The flags didn’t start until D-Rad. I know because I emailed him about it and specifically said the GA flag needs to be included as a reminder that Tech is a GA school. The immediate next week, players came running out with flags. Then it became Tech’s favorite photo - the team coming out behind the Reck with the US and GA flags flying.

I know we all hate D-Rad, but he did a pretty good job relatively to his predecessors.

 

[andrew]

I know we all hate D-Rad, but he did a pretty good job relatively to his predecessors.

And his successor. He wasn't ever going to be a Tech lifer but he did a good job while he was here.

 

[GT flunkout]

I'm O'Leary era, smart, out of state, and immensely wealthy. I know I'm not alone, and people like me would enjoy a competitive program just have better things to do than be humiliated by associating with our football program. It's sad, but true. I was hoodwinked into thinking we'd be competitive by coaches like O'Leary and to a small extend the NFL players recruited by Gailey. It's clear D1 has moved beyond Tech.

I have no idea why you're even here.

You're obviously not a Georgia Tech football fan anymore so why? Provide people justification for being a ööööty fan when we're at our lowest point in 100 years? Alumni who talk öööö about GT football are the ööööing worst.

Congrats for being smart and wealthy tho

 

[Allen Koholic]

Stanford is a bad comparison because we aren't and will never be a private school.

 

[vapspwi]

Lots of schools have similar problems and don't have these problems because their fans and alumni support athletics disproportionally to Tech's fans and alumni. Stanford, UCLA, Michigan - I'll exclude Notre Dame thanks to their TV contract - Cal... all schools more difficult to get into than Tech, all schools that have world-renowned engineering programs, etc.

Personally I get really tired of the "engineers don't waste money" argument to rationalize poor support of Tech athletics.

The facts are, even during the "pre-internet, before everything-is-on-TV-anyway" years we struggled to sell out BDS@HGF, and then we learned that it wasn't even 50,000 seats like we thought it was.

In my 22 years since becoming a Tech freshman, I've seen countless gimmicks to "improve the gameday experience" and they are all terrible because they are all manufactured. Our best gameday experiences are the ones that have stayed the same - The band, buzz and wreck visiting various tailgates before the game, coming down the hill together to enter the stadium, our fight songs and the budweiser song.

Just win. And everything changes. Fans come back. College Gameday comes back. The entire world is not against Georgia Tech. In fact ESPN, the AJC, everyone would love a contender in Atlanta.

But a bad program will be poorly supported, especially in major markets. We saw it at blue blood USC this past year, despite their fake attendance figures:



You guys will laugh at me for this but there's nothing keeping us from being the Stanford of college athletics if the academic school wanted to make the athletic department part of its mission and make a real investment in it. And I've laid out here before that I think there's a strong case to do so. It's certainly capable of doing so, financially, I'm just not sure of the governance issues.

I don’t have the energy to read all that, but let’s look at Michigan to randomly pick one of your examples.

Big state school (more like the Dwags or Bama). Twice the undergrad enrollment as Tech. Much broader curriculum with a lot of non-STEM majors. There are probably a lot of Tech-type students there, but there are also a lot of “normal” students there, I would imagine enough to greatly impact the sports culture on their campus.

JRjr

 

[Supersize that order mutt]

The football program is the lifeblood of the GTAA. It's like that for all of the football firsts in the ACC and SEC. You field the worst GT football team in over a generation and slide into what is now a nearly decade long slide into the cellar and that's what you're going to get. I would say if Clemson were in a decade long mire they'd look similar but they at least have IPTAY to fall back on. Whereas the A-T Fund at Georgia Tech has only recently been treated as something other than a legal structure for the AD to talk to the big money. Clemson's financial strength is built on the back of not just deep pocketed money but also the wide net of smaller donations like a Ron Paul / Bernie Sanders type political campaign. The A-T Fund has sucked massively until very recently at encouraging new small donors to connect and stay connected with the program.

This is the legacy of the no talent ass clown Mike Bobinski (who is thankfully ruining Purdue these days), Collins face planting his first three seasons on the trot, John Swofford having the worst TV contract in the P5 with the longest retention span which just so happened to benefit his kiddo at Raycom, and not having a properly loved and cared for A-T Fund to bridge the gap. Remember ... the Disney money alone is $4,000,000/month more deposited in Athens than Atlanta. Feelin' the love for our "partner" for the ACCN yet?



Picked Nits:
- Georgia Tech exports its alumni. You only need so many nuclear engineers in metropolitan Atlanta. As a result of GT alumni being far more scattered than your typical land grant, they have to travel quite a lot more to go to games. And that's travel to Atlanta which is like a double penalty on time. This knocks attendance down.

- Those who do stay in Atlanta have no shortage of entertainment options as opposed to say Oxford, MS or Columbia, SC where massive drinking before, during, and after a football game is all there is going on pretty much ever. This knocks attendance down.

- Due to the neglect of several prior Presidents and ADs, the gameday experience beforehand at BDS is scattershot at best. I suppose you could walk from the 5th St bridge through the Greek buildings to Bobby Dodd Way NW and call that "the tailgating area". Peters was suppose to be tailgating space in the last master plan done for the Olympics in '96. Note it still isn't f'n there. They should also consider turning the top of Centergy and other decks into a tailgate space. I'm largely ignorant on the specifics, but it feels like unless you donate bank it's damned near impossible to get an RV remotely close to the stadium. This knocks attendance down.

- Get some proper chairback seats and spacing. It's not a big deal for me, but it is a deal breaker for older family and friends. I saw some intrepid older fans attempting to "cane bleacher" their way down in the Upper East during the NIU game, so I can't be alone here.

Having said that winning cures all those nits. I was at the NIU game. I said I was not coming back until staff changes were made. I held to that and did not attend another game all season. No regrets, just applying the one piece of leverage I have that is well understood at the GTAA. And look -- changes were made. So now I'll be back in the stands for next season. I think you'll see *some* recovery with the staff changes in attendance. Think what NIU looked like -- 15k empty instead of 30k empty.




If Angel Cabrera has his mind rite, he would propose as part of the next capital campaign to fully endow the scholarship costs of all the GTAA programs. It's insane that the GTAA has to spend much of the year fundraising to cover operational scholarship costs. That needs to stop. The programs should all be structurally endowed like golf is. Think of paying for your sports teams more in the Stanford/Duke way (endowment) as opposed to the Tennessee/Michigan way (expensive football tickets to a so-so facility that houses over 100k). Georgia Tech needs a blend of the two and they only really half a sliver of endowment and depressed ticket sales to a non-ideally configured stadium that can't even seat enough to make the math work that way.

Regarding the possibility of endowments from the school, I don't know for sure if endowments fall under the category of budget, but the state of Georgia prohibits more than 10% of the budget to go to athletics. HOWEVER, the Alumni Association is not part of the school, and there are no limits there. The Alumni Association are the ones who should be doing more for athletics, but are they ??? I think not.

 

[BigDanT]

I don't know about Stanford. As far as general athletics, they are a premier program, not sure if a realistic goal for Tech. As far as football, they are way down from the Harbaugh / early-Shaw years:
2019 Stanford 4–8 3–6 T–5th (North)
2020 Stanford 4–2 4–2 3rd (North)
2021 Stanford 3–9 2–7 6th (North)

Hey! We are closer than we think!

 

[PressManCoverage]

Google the "Stanford Easy A List" that was passed around to athletes. Stanford has lots of utterly bogus bull**** liberal arts majors to hide people in.

Get out of here with this BS, every school has "free electives" - you can't graduate from any school with free electives being 100% of your transcript.

This might be a stronger argument if we were a Team that played smart FB but got out-athleted , but we play dumb and we make dumb mental mistakes and have for the better part of 30+ years.

I'm tired of hearing about the Academics of our Players when we play with poor discipline and poor understanding of smart, sound FB.

We play too stupid and make too many stupid mistakes in Games to ever mention Academics, ever again!

 

[Dhatura]

Get out of here with this BS, every school has "free electives" - you can't graduate from any school with free electives being 100% of your transcript.

This might be a stronger argument if we were a Team that played smart FB but got out-athleted , but we play dumb and we make dumb mental mistakes and have for the better part of 30+ years.

I'm tired of hearing about the Academics of our Players when we play with poor discipline and poor understanding of smart, sound FB.

We play too stupid and make too many stupid mistakes in Games to ever mention Academics, ever again!

When you hear the average Tech player talk against the average other team football player talk, you can tell there is a major difference. However, you may not be able to quantify that too well, but I do remember a SAT score release showed that our players scored around what an Avg uGA student scored and was a few hundred points higher than the avg uGA football player's score. Our players are generally significantly smarter than the average football player. I'd like to see your determination on how regurgitating plays and appropriate gaps and blocks means one is smart. Yes, I agree we've always made some of the dumbest mistakes of most teams, but maybe that is why we make them. Who knows?

 

[vapspwi]

When you hear the average Tech player talk against the average other team football player talk, you can tell there is a major difference. However, you may not be able to quantify that too well, but I do remember a SAT score release showed that our players scored around what an Avg uGA student scored and was a few hundred points higher than the avg uGA football player's score. Our players are generally significantly smarter than the average football player. I'd like to see your determination on how regurgitating plays and appropriate gaps and blocks means one is smart. Yes, I agree we've always made some of the dumbest mistakes of most teams, but maybe that is why we make them. Who knows?

I’ve always suspected that there’s a difference between “football smart” and “regular smart.” Like our guys are 75% on each, and Dwags are 90% on the former and 30% on the latter. Maybe “regular smart” leads to better spoken guys but not to appreciably better on-field performance (unless you’ve got Navy code breakers stealing signs from the other team like I heard about a while back).

JRjr

 

[clapper]

You can't blame this on Collins, because it's been like this for a long time. At least part of the blame for this lies at the feet of selfish fans. Time to pony up, boys and girls, whether you like the current state of things at Tech or not. If we don't, and it TStan can't get a helluva lot bigger corporate donations, the we might as well write Tech athletics off, and not just football.

That's a mighty big turn around from "the major donors need to step" from just a few days ago. Congrats.

 

[clapper]

Here's an idea for everyone to kick around...

The Georgia Tech Stingtalk.com Football Head Coach Endowment.

They want $7.5MM to endow the football coach. It can be spread out over 10 years of payments. That's $750,000/year. Get 200 of your finest posters (or even the morons and a-holes) to pledge $3,750/year for the next 10 years and we can be the change we need. Tell me you $80kers can't pull that off? Probably get some cool swag out of it too.

 

[Womenandcookies]

I really hope the lesson we learn from this is to stop signing contract extensions, and just sign head coaches for 2-3 years max unless they prove to be a Saban type once in a generation coach.

If Oklahoma can lose a head coach that won 4 straight conference titles, 3 playoff appearances and multiple 12 win season, then we have no hope of ever holding onto a coach. Buyouts are useless. We are just now getting to a point where men's basketball is out from under Hewitt's shadow. We paid for that 04 run with 17 years of ACC basement dwelling. It may take us another decade to crawl out of this basement for football without a O'Leary and Hamilton type turnaround.

 

[georgia_tech_swagger]

Here's an idea for everyone to kick around...

The Georgia Tech Stingtalk.com Football Head Coach Endowment.

They want $7.5MM to endow the football coach. It can be spread out over 10 years of payments. That's $750,000/year. Get 200 of your finest posters (or even the morons and a-holes) to pledge $3,750/year for the next 10 years and we can be the change we need. Tell me you $80kers can't pull that off? Probably get some cool swag out of it too.

That was a really long winded way of saying "The A-T Fund should start doing what IPTAY started doing 30 years ago."

 

[Supersize that order mutt]

That was a really long winded way of saying "The A-T Fund should start doing what IPTAY started doing 30 years ago."

Actually, the alumni association should start chipping in too, which they have never done.