08-05-2023, 03:09 AM
The revealed preference has been there all along… BC, your essay is so right. It puts a little too little blame on the leaders at Stanford, however.
We have tolerated the refusal of so many Stanford folks to admit that a healthy football program is the key to a healthy athletic program at this level.
Now we sit here with a football program in tatters, with a figurehead athletic director who is not a change leader or even a factor as far as I can tell, with no university president, and with an institutional hierarchy mired in scandal and distraction. These are things that ringing up the next Silicon Valley billionaire for a check cannot fix.
This one has already played out for years in the worst dreams of all of us who knew Shaw was destroying the program through apathy and inaction even after milking it nicely for so long…all of us who knew that the Stanford brand and decades of directors cup wins mattered not if we couldn’t field decent money sports teams…all of us who knew that the magic of Stanford’s academic and athletic combination only mattered if the athletics were relevant in the big sports.
We decided to hire an athletic director with no cred in the big sports. To tolerate mediocrity or worse in basketball and football. We decided to get distracted by minor financial issues in minor sports. We decided to tolerate scandal and mismanagement revealed in Varsity Blues.
We didn’t realize that we were losing the culture while we were losing the games. Further to that, we didn’t realize that our irrelevance would be left naked, exposed, and rotting with a rapid demise of our erstwhile conference money train.
“We’re not Nebraska!”
Those were the good old days.
We have tolerated the refusal of so many Stanford folks to admit that a healthy football program is the key to a healthy athletic program at this level.
Now we sit here with a football program in tatters, with a figurehead athletic director who is not a change leader or even a factor as far as I can tell, with no university president, and with an institutional hierarchy mired in scandal and distraction. These are things that ringing up the next Silicon Valley billionaire for a check cannot fix.
This one has already played out for years in the worst dreams of all of us who knew Shaw was destroying the program through apathy and inaction even after milking it nicely for so long…all of us who knew that the Stanford brand and decades of directors cup wins mattered not if we couldn’t field decent money sports teams…all of us who knew that the magic of Stanford’s academic and athletic combination only mattered if the athletics were relevant in the big sports.
We decided to hire an athletic director with no cred in the big sports. To tolerate mediocrity or worse in basketball and football. We decided to get distracted by minor financial issues in minor sports. We decided to tolerate scandal and mismanagement revealed in Varsity Blues.
We didn’t realize that we were losing the culture while we were losing the games. Further to that, we didn’t realize that our irrelevance would be left naked, exposed, and rotting with a rapid demise of our erstwhile conference money train.
“We’re not Nebraska!”
Those were the good old days.