So he's really good at fundraising. I'll be 1000% honest here, I could have come up with the Crimson Standard and sold it to the same people he did with all of the resources he had available. He was given every resource possible, Nick Saban, architects, the budget to shock and awe investors, a black book of big investors, the backing of the university, he was already given the keys to the Ferrari from Moore and Battle. It is not hard to maintain a company like Home Depot or Coca-Cola if you keep everything simple and don't ruin a good thing that was setup by good people before you. You just need to not screw it up. My question was if we are honestly progressing in ALL of our athletics since he came on? I don't care if he freaking Tweets, or tickles the necks of recruits and fans. I don't see it as talent to just ask people for a lot of money to create a luxury only experience. Most likely none of us will experience the accommodations on a regular basis. We might get lucky and get a pass from a friend of a friend, but we aren't staying in the $5M boxes or even the $150,000 ones. All I know is that they increased my tickets to cover the expense of the upper deck seats they were taking out to add to an initiative that I benefit <1% off. I don't live in Tuscaloosa, so it's going to be extremely tough for me to get to Coleman, for me to get to Rhodes, and for me to get to The Joe. I made it to one football game this year, so it's even hard for me to get to Bryant-Denny and enjoy the one aspect outside of my family that I truly love, football. Not his problem, I understand that, but I'm getting to a point here next.
As I told
@TerryP , I don't feel our athletic programs are any better off right now. Sure, campus looks like a damn Ponce City Market rather than a college campus, which to me has honestly ruined the look of Tuscaloosa, but I just don't feel the production is there. I'm not saying I don't like Byrne, because I have never met the guy and he appears trying to do his best for the school. I just don't see the extra value is all. If fundraising is the Board's #1 concern, then I guess they have their man. I understand as well that staying on top takes money, but losing character and the people that got you there from the standpoint of all the little people is not what a true leader does. A lot of the smaller people are fed up and quiet frankly I see a lot of Reynolds Plantation (Lake Oconee high end neighborhood here in Georgia) kicking in where Alabama is getting to a point that if you don't agree with them and have an open checkbook then they don't care whether you stay or leave.
We wonder why college athletes seem to be losing their way and want to be paid and all of the other perks, yet here we are looking at an AD and a university backing him that wants the clout of being a higher end university by looking good and taking almost a billion dollars from their investors, boosters, and other resources and putting it into facilities just to say they are on the top end of the arms race. Character is lost, tradition fades, and we are left with a town that is in the area of nowhere now looking like a metropolis, not something I was hoping to see. I am probably getting away from the simple point of, are our teams any better, but this is more of why I questioned it and it led me down a rabbit hole, so I apologize for the rant.
