jdubjacket
F*** Jeff Heaser, The Cheating Piece of S***
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We've been talking about that for years. If it hasn't happened yet, I really don't see why it will change going forward.
How to fix our team
- Thread starter Rodzilla
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We've been talking about that for years. If it hasn't happened yet, I really don't see why it will change going forward.
smokey_wasp
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Get a real DC and beef up the recruiting and other staff. All is dependant on Stansbury's ability to get pocketbooks open.
georgia_tech_swagger
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In decreasing order of how much of an impact the problem has:
1) Recruiting. It's been sub-mediocre for almost 20 years. Chan managed to put together a good recruiting class ... why aren't we paying whatever it takes to get that kind of recruiting results? If the answer is "you have to cheat" then why aren't we turning into J. Edgar Hoover and taking everybody down?
2) There is a catastrophic lack of vision on the philanthropic front. This is due to the last three Athletic Directors being poor fits. Braine was lazy, complacent, and incompetent. Radakovich was a credit card fueled spending spree serving only as a career stepping stone. And Bobinski was an unmitigated disaster in every quantifiable way. The A-T Fund couldn't hold IPTAY's jock strap. The TECH Fund is the punchline of a bad joke. The A-T Fund needs to be completely burned to the ground and rebooted properly. Look at how ****ing pathetic "Swarm Week" is. OOOOOOooooooooooooooo wow GUYS GUYS GUYS WE HAD ALMOST 300 PEOPLE DONATE. I'm pretty sure the Salvation Army Santa outside the local Wally World gets more action than that in a weekend. You've had your honeymoon Todd Stansbury ... I want to hear and see REAL analysis, REAL vision, REAL drive, and REAL change. You can't shovel bullcrap to an army of engineers ... we'll smell it coming. You want buy in ... start with selling a real product instead of nostalgia and wild optimism fueled vaporware.
Many many many of the following problems stem from a lack of money due ultimately to #2.
3) Inferior Staff. Due largely to money I suspect, but I also think PJ has excessive loyalty to his own offensive assistants.
4) Inferior Facilities. Isn't the GTAA still carrying debt for the horrific hideous expansion and renovation of BDS in 2003? That project **STILL** galls me. Hey guys, we have a school full of architects which created the skyline which surrounds us. How about we throw a giant endzone in with terrible views and a massive upper deck that will either be empty or full of the other team's fans. And we'll make those seats so high so far away you can't even hear the band. But we will provide a sherpa, two mountain goats, and O2 tank to help you reach your seat. Bobby Dodd Stadium will probably take at least $500,000,000 (based on Minnesota's new stadium and additional expense of dealing with all the buildings right up on and indeed even IN BDS thanks to that shitty '03 expansion. Stop dumping money on pretty band aids. Sell out and be a corporate whore and rename the stadium to Omni Black International Soulless, Inc. for 50 years if you have to to get the money. But stop chasing good money into this black hole unless you're pulling the plug and addressing the real problem.
5) Fans that cut off their nose to spite their face.... which is another way of saying too smart for their own good. GT fans, more than maybe any other fan base, love to withdraw their financial support to impress upon their own athletic department their dissatisfaction. I'd argue that's stupid. But I get the sentiment. I really do. When GT athletics is the unmitigated dumpster fire across all fronts like it is now, I too refuse to go to games. Why invest the 7 hours roundtrip driving and the 100's of dollars just to raise my blood pressure and give my cardiologist more grey hair? But DON'T close the purse strings. I instead take every dime I saved by NOT going to the games or NOT paying for cable TV to have incompetence beamed into my living room in hideously glorious high bitrate 1080p DTS 5.1 surround sound ... and give every bit of it directly to the A-T Fund itself. Because even Ted Roof can't f*** up an endowment. And the money I give to that endowment will keep working on behalf of GT Athletics every day even after I'm long gone. And that's simultaneously a middle finger to the GTAA showing my displeasure with the status quo and support for the overall mission. And unlike with ticket money, I get some say so in WHERE the money goes. The GTAA will always get my money. But they will only get my butt in a seat when I feel like they've taken it as seriously as I have. That isn't the case right now IMHO.
So remember .... feed the endowment, even if it is anger driving the giving. GT loves to look at Stanford and go "But they're doing it, and doing it with mostly an empty stadium and those left in the stadium are chics that don't shave their armpit hair and vote for socialists. How does that get recruits?" Do me a quick favor: go look up how big Stanford's athletic endowment is. Now go look up how big GT's athletic endowment is. Take both, and multiply by 0.03 to assume a modest 3% annual return. When you've picked yourself up off the floor at how much money that is for Stanford, now you have your answer as to how Stanford does it.
1) Recruiting. It's been sub-mediocre for almost 20 years. Chan managed to put together a good recruiting class ... why aren't we paying whatever it takes to get that kind of recruiting results? If the answer is "you have to cheat" then why aren't we turning into J. Edgar Hoover and taking everybody down?
2) There is a catastrophic lack of vision on the philanthropic front. This is due to the last three Athletic Directors being poor fits. Braine was lazy, complacent, and incompetent. Radakovich was a credit card fueled spending spree serving only as a career stepping stone. And Bobinski was an unmitigated disaster in every quantifiable way. The A-T Fund couldn't hold IPTAY's jock strap. The TECH Fund is the punchline of a bad joke. The A-T Fund needs to be completely burned to the ground and rebooted properly. Look at how ****ing pathetic "Swarm Week" is. OOOOOOooooooooooooooo wow GUYS GUYS GUYS WE HAD ALMOST 300 PEOPLE DONATE. I'm pretty sure the Salvation Army Santa outside the local Wally World gets more action than that in a weekend. You've had your honeymoon Todd Stansbury ... I want to hear and see REAL analysis, REAL vision, REAL drive, and REAL change. You can't shovel bullcrap to an army of engineers ... we'll smell it coming. You want buy in ... start with selling a real product instead of nostalgia and wild optimism fueled vaporware.
Many many many of the following problems stem from a lack of money due ultimately to #2.
3) Inferior Staff. Due largely to money I suspect, but I also think PJ has excessive loyalty to his own offensive assistants.
4) Inferior Facilities. Isn't the GTAA still carrying debt for the horrific hideous expansion and renovation of BDS in 2003? That project **STILL** galls me. Hey guys, we have a school full of architects which created the skyline which surrounds us. How about we throw a giant endzone in with terrible views and a massive upper deck that will either be empty or full of the other team's fans. And we'll make those seats so high so far away you can't even hear the band. But we will provide a sherpa, two mountain goats, and O2 tank to help you reach your seat. Bobby Dodd Stadium will probably take at least $500,000,000 (based on Minnesota's new stadium and additional expense of dealing with all the buildings right up on and indeed even IN BDS thanks to that shitty '03 expansion. Stop dumping money on pretty band aids. Sell out and be a corporate whore and rename the stadium to Omni Black International Soulless, Inc. for 50 years if you have to to get the money. But stop chasing good money into this black hole unless you're pulling the plug and addressing the real problem.
5) Fans that cut off their nose to spite their face.... which is another way of saying too smart for their own good. GT fans, more than maybe any other fan base, love to withdraw their financial support to impress upon their own athletic department their dissatisfaction. I'd argue that's stupid. But I get the sentiment. I really do. When GT athletics is the unmitigated dumpster fire across all fronts like it is now, I too refuse to go to games. Why invest the 7 hours roundtrip driving and the 100's of dollars just to raise my blood pressure and give my cardiologist more grey hair? But DON'T close the purse strings. I instead take every dime I saved by NOT going to the games or NOT paying for cable TV to have incompetence beamed into my living room in hideously glorious high bitrate 1080p DTS 5.1 surround sound ... and give every bit of it directly to the A-T Fund itself. Because even Ted Roof can't f*** up an endowment. And the money I give to that endowment will keep working on behalf of GT Athletics every day even after I'm long gone. And that's simultaneously a middle finger to the GTAA showing my displeasure with the status quo and support for the overall mission. And unlike with ticket money, I get some say so in WHERE the money goes. The GTAA will always get my money. But they will only get my butt in a seat when I feel like they've taken it as seriously as I have. That isn't the case right now IMHO.
So remember .... feed the endowment, even if it is anger driving the giving. GT loves to look at Stanford and go "But they're doing it, and doing it with mostly an empty stadium and those left in the stadium are chics that don't shave their armpit hair and vote for socialists. How does that get recruits?" Do me a quick favor: go look up how big Stanford's athletic endowment is. Now go look up how big GT's athletic endowment is. Take both, and multiply by 0.03 to assume a modest 3% annual return. When you've picked yourself up off the floor at how much money that is for Stanford, now you have your answer as to how Stanford does it.
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JJacket
Gettysburg. Wow.
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One of those QB keepers was gonna break
JJacket
Gettysburg. Wow.
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Played an offense players wanted to play in.
Gailey also had contacts in the NFL that players probably looked at when picking Tech
floridajacket
The Real DB Cooper
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Gailey's Rivals Recruiting Rankings, for 2003-07, were #50, #56, #62, #57, and the good class, which was #18.
The 2008 class was #49. It had 10 players, out of 20, which committed before Gailey was fired. They were all 2* and 3*. Some players like Renfree decommitted, but there was no sign the 2008 class was going to finish at 2007 levels.
FWIW, GT is also #43 in average attendance. Then you have the various academic issues on top of it. If Gailey stayed through 2008, 2009, etc. classes, I really don't think classes would magically stay at 2007 levels. There is no sign of that. And if a new coach really was that magically good at recruiting *and* he was a great coach on-field, GT couldn't afford him for very long anyway.
BTW, CPJ's classes, from 2009, have finished #49, #43, #41, #56, #84, #47, #67, #41. The 2013 class WAS bad. It was penalized for only having 14, but it should have been better. Other classes have generally been in the 40's, like Gailey's classes.
The 2008 class was #49. It had 10 players, out of 20, which committed before Gailey was fired. They were all 2* and 3*. Some players like Renfree decommitted, but there was no sign the 2008 class was going to finish at 2007 levels.
FWIW, GT is also #43 in average attendance. Then you have the various academic issues on top of it. If Gailey stayed through 2008, 2009, etc. classes, I really don't think classes would magically stay at 2007 levels. There is no sign of that. And if a new coach really was that magically good at recruiting *and* he was a great coach on-field, GT couldn't afford him for very long anyway.
BTW, CPJ's classes, from 2009, have finished #49, #43, #41, #56, #84, #47, #67, #41. The 2013 class WAS bad. It was penalized for only having 14, but it should have been better. Other classes have generally been in the 40's, like Gailey's classes.
HurricaneJacket
Flats Noob
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What he said,plus an iptay style program as I've mentioned in other posts. Fund the AD and the school through many small donations and tell the BOR to **** off or we'll take our money elsewhere.
LongforDodd
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I'm printing this and mailing to Todd on Monday.
georgia_tech_swagger
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If you're going to do that, let me flush it out all the way. Append this to the end:
6) Politics. The Georgia Board of Regents controls what majors are offered by public universities and what financial support they receive. The GABOR is controlled by UGA. This is due to UGA having a law school and political science offerings and GT having neither as well as UGA having a large network of satellite campuses and GT having just GT-Savannah (literally GT has more international campuses than GA campuses). This is to the point where UGA was given an engineering school despite the public system already having GT and Georgia Southern for that. But when GT tries to broaden the curriculum to something not purely STEM the GABOR shoots it down. This is a problem because....
7) STEM doesn't matter, and education doesn't a whole lot either. Our society really only gives lip service to STEM. When the rubber meets the road we just don't care all that much. GT still takes education seriously and that's a problem in a game that is less and less student athlete and more and more farm league by the day. Most recruits care more about having a laser tag pavilion than they do about a diploma that guarantees them, on average, a million dollar income. Let that horrible truth sink in for a moment. Marinate in it. The truth isn't always pleasant is it?
Now to be clear, I still think GT can compete. But what it takes to compete is:
- An aggressive Stanford-esk endowment push
- Facilities built for the long haul to maximize home field advantage instead of constant patchwork, which again means more capital needed
- A commitment to be willing to pay enough to get a good crack at bat when hiring coaches, and to then have no ceiling (other than contract years) if they demonstrate consistent high level achievement.
- A forward thinking athletic director who doesn't just have the vision for all this but the drive to do it and the ability to articulate that vision in a way that unites a fan base that is much more individualistic and prone to stepping back than most.
- A willingness to fund a LARGE, EXTENSIVE, AND NATIONAL recruiting effort in light of #6 and #7. You HAVE to search nationally to find the people who do care about the diploma AND are high level players. NFL 1st rounders that are ALSO smart enough to see the value in the diploma AND be willing to work for both don't just fall out of trees.
- A buy in of that vision by the university President, which means removing hard rigid rules and replacing them with guidelines. You can keep the spirit of the rule without killing your damn self in the process! Everybody doesn't need calculus. Rewards ($$$$) should be given out though if everybody DOES, with even percentage based rewards. Why not give athletes the ability to take calculus over the summer on a no-credit basis? Or really any hard class they don't have to have for their career path? You get the full class, and a grade, but it doesn't count. Then you know where you stand without sinking your GPA. And that also means the class will be WAY easier for you when you take it and it counts.... when you're preoccupied with football at the same time, rather conveniently.
Notice ... many of my solutions are essentially MORE $$$$$$. Wonder why the GTAA is so in debt? But GT has a wealthy fan base they just have to be won over by a demonstration of achievement and competence go to with an articulated vision. Also GT has some other advantages it can tap into such as it's foreign campuses leading to foreign media markets and foreign fans. There were actually a fair number of local Georgia Tech fans at the GT-UCLA game in China because of GT's Singapore campus and their Shanghai Initiative with SJTU in Shanghai. The sales pitch here needs to be GT is going to be the world leader in STEM focused higher education including online. And we're just going to take over manufacturing the most wealthy people in the world .... engineers. And from that we will derive an enormous piggy bank that will fuel not only the athletic program ... but the academic one as well. It's the Stanford model without any of those pesky social sciences and the degenerates they spawn.
texstinger
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Sewak is a dirty coach who should have been fired long ago. Does not belong at GT.
Bet he keeps his job. Does he have something on somebody at GT?
We as fans have to do our part and raise more money, but nothing is going to get better on the field in this regime after 10 years of zero adaptation.
texstinger
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As regards #6, it is still my understanding from talking to my district rep on the BoR, that any additions, etc, to curriculum are to be initiated by the schools themselves and presented to the BoR.
What additional majors, classes, etc. have we presented to the BoR that we want added to GT?
I ask because I truly do not know. If none have been submitted then the problem comes not from the BoR, but from peterson and the HillNerds.
georgia_tech_swagger
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No idea. But as somebody who had a former political life, it isn't easy to imagine a scenario where GT would be told very sternly no:
It makes sense for GT to offer, for instance, a modest law program with a focus on patent and intellectual property law. That has a huge STEM crossover. But that would mean GT would start making lawyers, and that means they'd also start making politicians. That's something UGA has a comparative monopoly on right now, and so that wouldn't go over well. Read: NO.
There's a reason #6 and #7 are at the bottom of the list. They're factors, but factors which are easy to mitigate with the right leadership.
18in32
Petard Hoister
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Sorry, but your posts are no good. A modest law program focusing on IP? I don't think you have any idea how law school works or how law is taught.
And your suggestions for change boil down to "be rich and spend it." That's not advice but a dream. (It's akin to offering the investment advice of "buy low, sell high.")
Where GT currently is in football is the result of fifty years of academic, political, geographic and cultural change. If we want to very, very slowly start changing things, we gotta walk before we're gonna run.
georgia_tech_swagger
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A modest law program, yes. Not a factory pumping out 400+ lawyers a year like George Washington. Modest can refer to size as well as scope you know. And I specified intellectual property and patent law because it's an easy double dip. Law works like medicine or computer science. You get the base degree then you go ACTUALLY learn something relevant in the real world to specifically practice in. So you get your Juris Doctor in undergraduate. Then your Master of Laws in IP/Patent/etc as your masters. And if you want to start turning out judges as well then you pile on the Doctor of Judicial Science at the doctorate level.
It is be rich and spend it. And it's not a dream. It's just in a perpetual state of not happening because there isn't sufficient leadership to rally everybody together. Only at Georgia Tech can you constantly manufacture people smart enough to change the world but with so brutally low self esteem as to have no confidence in their ability to do it.
18in32
Petard Hoister
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What are you talking about? To be allowed to take the bar in most states (including Ga) you have to have both an undergraduate and a graduate degree. It's called a juris doctorate *because* it's a graduate degree. Seriously, the idea that GT should have a modest IP law school is a horrible one for many different reasons. I've got no objection to a law school at GT, but it shouldn't be modest nor should it focus on IP — as if such a thing were even practical in law school administration.
What an utterly bizarre thing to think, that our AD needs to be told to raise and spend more money. That issue occupies probably about 80% of his mental energy already.
LeonardWood
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Georgia Tech starting a law program is a new level of bad idea in long string of weeks' worth of bad ideas. It's basically the "we should run a pro set" argument for academics.
LeonardWood
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However, @georgia_tech_swagger is correct in that controlling the BoR should be GT's number one goal.
georgia_tech_swagger
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JFC, I'm not suggesting it's the new mission, I'm just saying it's low hanging fruit if you wanted to expand the curriculum. And the whole patronizing "raising money is 80% of what the AD already does" response isn't the right way to quantify that. Bobinski spent 80% of his time raising money (in theory). What matters is how successful you are at doing that. And at GT that requires having a vision and articulating it to the fans. While I don't like that Radakovich used GT as a career stepping stone, at least he got that the serious fan was more or less an investor, and if that's the case you need to keep them informed and have a running dialogue with them like any other organization with investors, even charities, do.
Basically most of what I've said is an overly elaborate condemnation of Mike Bobinski, and to a lesser extent Dave Braine. But it could just be the Captain Morgan Black talking at this point.
Basically most of what I've said is an overly elaborate condemnation of Mike Bobinski, and to a lesser extent Dave Braine. But it could just be the Captain Morgan Black talking at this point.
DressCheeseSideSeaboard
Cyborg
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I’m almost certain we could have won an FCS national championship or two in the past ten years.