Men’s soccer

[Ole Cabbagehead]

I said, "well that's not why the contract was extended." Which means for others reasons. Yes I know the wording in the original contract. Basically a slap on the wrist which would not hamper any coach from improving his team kicked in the last two years. Perhaps I should have worded my post more precisely. As I went straight into explaining what an extensions for a failing coach consists of.

I say doubling down on Ash for two reasons. Posters in private conversations who I trust and have been correct in the past have told me there was money available if the right candidate was selected. Even the mods on the RT hinted at such. Two Hobbs gambled that people would not give up their season tickets and he could sooth the fury with his letter. He lost. 6,254 season tickets were lost in a single year. Just on ticket price alone that's $2.2mil. dollars in revenue lost. Now you have to add in seat donations, parking, concession sales(beer now included) and merchandize sales lost. That more than covers Ash and his staff and probably the next staff. Your telling me Hobbs couldn't raise $3.5mil for a new head coach?

From what I have heard "the money that was there" was insufficient to hire the coaches that it was designed to target. They supposedly had $4mm committed to get Richt, but it wasn't enough because he (correctly) wanted a $6mm package for himself and coordinators. SO the donors were trying to cover his salary, but not the rest of the staff and not the buyout. Is that true? I dont know, but its basically all hearsay with Mullen, Richt and other "exciting names" that have come up. No matter how connected you are, no one gets the full story. The "money was there" is really vague. Just because you come up with $3.5mm for a coach, there are still millions to be spent. I am very confident that if donors came up with the money for the buyout and the new staff Ash would not be here right now. Frankly, I think that is obvious. Any fool would trade Ash for Richt if it wasn't going to cost you anything. So what happened is they came up with some of the money, and the school said it wasn't enough.

Now is the school being dumb and short sighted by not authorizing the spending to get Richt or Mullen here when they could have? I think so and I think hindsight makes that obvious. I also think that the Ash hire was potentially a good one, that was f*d by not having the right coordinators. If the school had committed more money to Ash's staff, and the young DC becoming a head coach was able to land a top flight OC for $1 - $1.5mm per year, perhaps it would all be different right now. Hiring Mehringer was a humongous and frankly irresponsible gamble. Its mind boggling to me that that was permitted to happen. You just do not allow that, even if its what Ash wants. He should have had an experienced OC forced on him for the 1st 2 years.

I don't think Hobbs gambled on anything last year, because I don't think he ever had authority to fire Ash. This is just my guess. What I do know is that anything Hobbs has said, publicly about Ash is just noise. What do you expect him to say? That we are just biding our time until we can fire him? Of course not. In fact, you know Hobbs appreciates the situation, because by all accounts he has been talking out both sides of his mouth for 2 years now - publicly supporting Ash, while working to get donors in line to hire a replacement.