CIIF
- Edwardsville
I feel the same way about the entire DIA in general. I guess the administration just won't get it until donors stop donating.
The Illinois AD Search
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I feel the same way about the entire DIA in general. I guess the administration just won't get it until donors stop donating.
No, my logic is "boosters were willing to stump up an immediate $2.5 million lump sum payment just to get rid of a guy --> if there's someone available they want to lead the DIA, a fraction of that money is not going to be an issue"
The booster wish list appears to have been:
1. Rick George, who they assume shares their interests
2. A patsy they have total control over
The administration is not and has never at any point had any degree of control over this process whatsoever.
Well, pop the champagne, because that's exactly the world we're living in.
mattcoldagelli
- The Transfer Portal
I get the logic here, but remember, this is Illinois. It's just as easy to believe that the people making these calls thought $2.5M worth of CYA is a steal, but not that a new AD should make bank.
I mean, if you really believe that Barb Wilson or Tim Killeen authorized that expenditure out of the DIA's general fund of their own accord, I've got some empty loge boxes in SFC to sell you.
IlliniOX08
- Bucktown, Chicago
So which is it? The boosters that ponied up the $2.5m to buy out Thomas or the administration is cheap because now the donors have stopped paying up magically after Thomas was fired?
We're a joke man. Our admins are a joke, and if our boosters are that moody then we need new boosters. Good damn riddance to the whole lot. This ECI mentality has to stop in its tracks. It's an absolute joke to every alum, fan, or anyone with interest in seeing this school succeed. There is no defending any of them. I don't care who is on the inside or not. It doesn't matter because it is being executed with amateur precision and a casual observer can perceive that.
The boosters are willing to pay up only to the extent that it consolidates their grip on the program. Mike Thomas was a threat to the ECI cult and they Ned Starked him. And they totally got away with it, because they play their local media mouthpieces (and message boards) so well.
A strong AD is impossible in this situation. Rick George is smart enough to realize that, and I bet Tiley is too.
You want hope for the future? Hope for a strong Chancellor. Killeen clearly wants nothing to do with any of this, and will let the Chancellor run the campus, and if that person has the support of the faculty bureaucracy, the local business community, and broader campus donor community, they won't stand for the kind of crap that's going on now. Even if they aren't sports-crazy.
And believe me, the campus needs a strong leader in that chair for a lot more reasons than just the DIA.
Maybe it does. But if it does and he wants the job, he'll be at a podium in Champaign in the next week. Money will not be a factor.
IlliniOX08
- Bucktown, Chicago
I could pray for nothing more than a strong Chancellor. But that would largely mean a BOT that didn't have their collective heads shoved so far up their own butts.
I agree 100% the Chancellor is needed for more than just athletics. I've been beating the tone at the very top drum from the start.
Not to get too political, but the "up their butt" caucus on the BOT is losing votes rapidly.
Yet, here they are making illini fans and alums sick
I think your gut is probably accurate.
I check forums periodically, and I'm just waiting for the Tom Michael announcement. At which time, the last small shred of hope I'm holding out for IL athletics will blow away like a dandelion seed in the wind.
*sigh*
:tsk:
mattcoldagelli
- The Transfer Portal
Of course, I never said that.
But 100% pure booster decision-making is an impossibility, even if they're the ones driving the bus. They're not all equal, but there are multiple cooks in the kitchen.
No matter where the money is coming from, the University leaders involved are still the public faces of the decision, and have to consider the optics and risk/reward of the hire and the salary even if they couldn't pick Dick Butkus out of a lineup.
Why would boosters need to cover the $2.5MM buyout? It looks like he's going to get paid his salary through 2019 which is <1% annually of an $80MM+ annual budget ($500 - $600k per year). Wilson said it's coming out of the DIA budget. We have other priorities we should be focused on with boosters (selling seats in the Assembly Hall, football upgrades, etc.), so it'd be sort of foolish to ask them to fund a buyout that can be easily managed in the budget.
Again, I don't think the buyout says anything about what we can do for the new guy except for the fact that the budget might actually be tighter due to the buyout.
Maybe you're really right on all of this, or maybe your theories about the behind the scenes politics are a bit off. In either case I appreciate reading your posts.
ChainsawRevItUp
- Chicago
...Tom Michael
IlliniOX08
- Bucktown, Chicago
Anyone know where Mike Thomas is living/what he is doing these days?
Spending his $2.5 million?
So out of the list that's been mentioned by Ryan, we have Heeke and Frazier both stating that they aren't coming to Illinois. Heeke actually confirmed he was interviewed, so we are making progress in narrowing it down. That leaves Tiley, Chun, Mertens, Whitman, Michael - assuming her list was accurate.
I really don't think Mertens is a true candidate, so we're down to Tiley (my top pick but seems unlikely given the dispute over whether he interviewed or not), Chun, Whitman, and Michael. Plus the 5% chance there really are ongoing discussions with George.
I was going to predict odds, but I really have no freaking clue at this point. But it does seem like we're getting closer to the end - maybe an announcement by Monday or Tuesday?
I really don't think Mertens is a true candidate, so we're down to Tiley (my top pick but seems unlikely given the dispute over whether he interviewed or not), Chun, Whitman, and Michael. Plus the 5% chance there really are ongoing discussions with George.
I was going to predict odds, but I really have no freaking clue at this point. But it does seem like we're getting closer to the end - maybe an announcement by Monday or Tuesday?
BZuppke
- Plainfield
When I read some of the doom and gloom here and the cynicism that we will probably screw this hire up, my first reaction is that people are voicing their worst fears. We really aren't that stupid - waste all this time to hire Michael!?! But then too many times these worst fears become our reality. Ugh.
IlliniOX08
- Bucktown, Chicago
Thomas' firing was likely inevitable and happened a couple of months after it should have - when the whole Beckman thing broke as credible.
I think the back story that has circulated most prominently is that conveniently after P. Wise resigned, the ECI crew got through to the interim Chancellor and got him fired. Now, I don't agree with either scenario. I think Beckman should have been canned when he was and I think there was enough to let go of Thomas for cause at that point. When Thomas actually was fired, it appears to have been out of political reasons with the Beckman story as the cover.
I don't want to get in to a match over who was a better AD between Guenther or Thomas b/c IMO they both had plenty of faults and are not what the school should be looking for in their next AD.
Okay, a couple things. First of all that article is from 2011. Not sure what your point is there.
Secondly, you have to understand that the explosion in TV rights for sports comes from two distinct pools of money that were both rapidly expanding at the same time. The first is the fact that live sports became for awhile the only reliable way to put an ad in front of an 18-49 year old male, the most coveted advertising demographic. That advantage is declining slowly, as changes in on-demand ads and various advancements in mobile phone ads are increasingly making advertisers more comfortable with non-traditional metrics of ad penetration. It's not that watching live sports is the only thing young men do (except me
), it's that people couldn't figure out other ways to get an ad in front of them. That's changing, little by little.The second piece is the cable rights fees scam. Grab some content that is absolutely essential to a small number of people and hijack it, demanding a ransom from every customer from a cable system, rather than just the ones willing to pay for it. It was brilliant when it worked. It is now crashing down and fast. The big catalyzing event, the "popping" of the bubble seems to have been ESPN's decision to undergo enormous cost-cutting. A lot of the big deals being made were overpays in order to lure content away from ESPN. You don't have to overpay to do that anymore and everyone knows it.
So there are two different kinds of exposure for sports entities: to the drip-drip-dripping over 18-49 male exclusivity for advertisers, or to the collapsing house of cards of cable rights fees.
The NFL is almost entirely exposed to the former, and their enormous real viewership, as opposed to "in-demo relative to other things" viewership, insulates them somewhat. Even so, they gave out more inventory to multiple partners just to maintain a modest increase in their Thursday night rights a couple of days ago, which reflects the fact that those broadcasts are loss leaders for the networks at this point.
The Big Ten, on the other hand, is almost totally exposed to the cable bubble. There are some broadcast pieces to the Big Ten's TV inventory, but the TV revenue mainly comes from BTN dividends and rights fees from ESPN. The BTN equity (The Big Ten owns 49%, FOX owns 51%) is in big trouble, a telling harbinger of what's coming was the SEC's decision to take no ownership stake in the SEC Network and just sign a pure cash rights deal. When the SEC Network goes bankrupt (and it will) it won't make any difference, but the conference won't be bled dry in the meantime. And ESPN isn't going to stump up the money they used to for another college conference to throw on their overpriced inventory. Fox is probably the most likely outcome, but they have overcrowding of their own, and they know they don't need to beat an enormous ESPN offer.
The exact mechanics by which this all comes crashing down are unclear at this point, but the crash is at hand. In 15-20 years sports fans will watch live games exclusively through paying for a la carte services similar to NFL Sunday Ticket or what the Premier League does with Sky Sports in the UK. It will cost an eye-watering amount of money to be a general-purpose sports fan. It's gonna suck, and it's going to hurt the popularity of the games. A golden age is ending.
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IlliniOX08
- Bucktown, Chicago
This scenario we are in right now is what converted me from an eternal optimist around the program. It seems with every situation lately the message boards concoct crazy theories about doom and gloom that end up being pretty close to the reality that plays out.
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