NCAAbbs

It's pretty clear most of you hate our conference.

The Southern Conference wasn't going to let you stay. Didn't they throw ETSU out in the cold all by themselves basically?

What if the A-Sun didn't exist, or was maxed out? Where would you guys have gone? You guys might be lucky to have the A-Sun around.

The bonehead decision of our President and AD did lead us to being kicked out and the A-Sun was probably our last resort. Hopefully we are getting smarter and can get football back and a new AD.

If the A-Sun hadn't been around as a safe fall back maybe the Pres and AD wouldn't have acted so hastily in dropping football and if they had an ETSU hadn't been able to land in a conference there would have been a much bigger backlash and maybe they would have been forced out.

All in all the A-Sun gave Stanton and Mullins an easy out. Kinda makes me wish you hadn't been around and taken us. Like the A-Sun wouldn't take an established Div 1 team after years of losing members and filling up with Div 2, the A-Sun needed us as much as we needed them.

R

While not ideal, there are some of us that believe that an independent status would have saved lots of money on travel expenditures and also would have been better for the student athlete's classroom performance.

I suspect I am certainly in the minority with that thought, but an independent status with hopes for a better conference in a near future might not have been a bad idea, although it would have been an AD's scheduling nightmare. There are just TOO many D1 schools within a 5 hour drive of TRI to justify a Florida based conference. (Va Tech, Radford, Eastern Ky, UNC-A, UNC-G, Wake, Clemson, UTC, UTK, Kennesaw, Wofford, Furman, App State, Western Carolina, Gardner Webb, Highpoint, Winthrop, Belmont, Lipscomb, Tennessee Tech, MTSU, Charleston, Charleston Southern, South Carolina, VMI, Citadel...[that's 26 schools I thought of in about 3 minutes]).

Two to three seasons out from joining the A-Sun, honestly, how has the A-Sun helped ETSU? Two NIT slots, that's about all I see.

Being an independent sounds like a recruiting nightmare as well.

Independent...are you freaking serious. Noone would want to play here. No spot in the NCAA's or NIT. Yeah great idea...

The Big South ultimately would have taken us I think. Even though they want football playing schools, if we really made a push for it, they would have took us, and there would have been the possibility that the Southern would have reconsidered asking us to leave, but that was a small possibility. I always find it funny how ETSU fans have magic memory when it comes the A.D. job at ETSU. Fact is Dave Mullins isn't a bad guy, he's a "yes" man who saw an opportunity to take a massive pay raise and pad his retirement. When our last A.D. left, NOBODY WANTED THAT JOB, NOBODY. Fred Warren turned it down, Ed DeChellis turned it down, they could barely get anyone to apply for it, so they made Dave the interim A.D., then just left him there. He's a tennis coach, bitter at the coverage that everything but tennis was getting, and we have a President WHO AT THE TIME wants to drop football, so Dave gets a raise for saying yes to a couple of things, and there ya have it, we're dropping football, and I'll be honest as I sit here in my bucfootball.com shirt, they have a compelling argument. The facts are the dome was expensive to operate, the turf WAS going to cost over a half a million dollars to replace, we typically drew less than 4,000 fans a game (yea we had magic attendance figures in football too, not just basketball), and the program did in fact LOSE MONEY, football is expensive, there's no denying that. It also didn't help that the one good team we had is widely recognized as some of the biggest thugs to ever set foot on the campus at ETSU, to the point that people I"ve talked to that went there in that era actually HATED the football team because Cavan let them get away with whatever they wanted.
The whole deal is craziness, I'm glad we ended up where we did, it could have been better, could have been worse. Being in the A-Sun is allowing ETSU to establish their programs as WINNING, all the while working on facility upgrades, raising the money to bring back football, etc...
I also find it funny when the A-Sun is called a Florida conference when the majority of the teams are in Tennessee/North Carolina/Georgia.
Stetson, JU, UNF right now. Funny thing is there are three schools from Tennessee in this conference too, and three from the Carolinas. Magic memory, I love it MercerFan, don't you?

That's a great perspective buclover. I didn't know your "hated" AD wasn't really supposed to be permanent. Also, basketball in the A-Sun is anything but Florida based. Baseball on the other hand... Every A-Sun baseball tourney in the last 10 years or so has seen a FL team win it. However, I see that changing real soon.

I stand by the points I've made regarding A-Sun travel and it's impact on the Athletic budget and academics.

And if someone can point me to some numbers that show that the ETSU Athletic Department is in the black since we joined the A-Sun, I'd appreciate it.

No athletic departments are in the black unless they have fundraising departments who actually do their job instead of throwing parties and coaching soccer, or whatever it is the Pirate Club does instead of RAISING MONEY.
And yea MercerFan, Dave Mullins was hired on the interim basis, nobody wanted the job. ETSU had been through something like three A.D.'s in five years.
They also like to blame Stanton and Mullins for the sorry ass planning of our presidents and A.D.'s dating back into the 60's. Fact is we've been so far behind the other schools in Tennessee for so long its ridiculous

Thank you, VolLover, for saying everything I have been saying for four years.

Now, remember when Mullins was hired as the interim AD I said "this is the sort of guy you hire to kill football."

After all, non-revenue sports background, guy who had been on campus for a long time so he could sell it to the public- it made perfect sense.

And I don't blame him for taking the job.

However, what I have a problem with is the statement "nobody else wanted the job."

What about another search? What about looking for guys outside of ETSU to come lead the program- like they had done every time before (and Stanton ran them all off)?

I'd heard the rumors about DeChellis and Warren being contacted- and I think you could see why they wouldn't with Eddie D packing his bags for Penn State and Fred Warren essentially not wanting to share.

But don't you think Karen Kemp would have taken the job? People were pushing for Jerry Robertson- I can't believe he wouldn't have taken it.

I am willing to believe that Mullins was a puppet for Stanton. In fact, I wholeheartedly agree.

So what does it say about Stanton that when he meets with Robertson and then he brings back football supposedly, he does so without consulting his hand-picked athletic director?

It wasn't the first time Stanton had gone behind Mullins back. Remember when I wrote how DeChellis' interview with Penn State was kept hush hush by ETSU (which is the real reason Mullins took away my credentials- and you folks know it) in an award-winning column in Sports Talk?

It was Stanton who told the Centre Daily Times (State College newspaper) that DeChellis had interviewed after Mullins' department had kept mum (and in certain cases actively told media that he had not interviewed) on such questions for a week.

And while you can talk about fundraising mistakes made by past administrators or what not- when push comes to shove its Stanton signing off on the demise of ETSU athletics.

We can talk about the pressures the faculty senate gave him or Wayne Andrews or anything else.

But at the end of the day, Stanton pulled the trigger.

Don't put words into my mouth *******. I'm about over your dumbass comments.

OK. I'll bite. How could it have been worse?

Which conference, that ETSU is eligible for, is worse than the ASun?

I'm not baiting you. I'd like to know how people think ETSU could have ended up in a worse place than the ASun.

Wait a minute- the guy who said that App wouldn't make the NIT- and then arrogantly INSISTED that I should therefore bet him they wouldn't make the NCAAs- is accusing ME of putting words in his mouth?

HO! HO! HO!

Hypocrisy- THY NAME IS ANDY LARGE!