Well, part of it is I basically post my opinion on every major-ish issue. Sometimes I am right and sometimes I am less right 😁. In this case, I was right. Pitt just isnt an athletic department that can have a new state-of-the art Olympics Sports venue. It was easy to see the waste of money it was. I dont want to hear that those athletes deserve a brand new facility. No they dont. They go to school for free and they generate no revenue for the department. It might hurt people's feelings but that's just the reality. We have 2 pro teams and every dollar and every bit of focus needs to be paid to that. Now, the irony is we may have to cut sports to pay for this: Lacrosse (shouldn't have been added)? Track/Cross Country? Heck, baseball maybe?
Heather dug a hole she could not fill
- Thread starter OmarMarino
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Well, part of it is I basically post my opinion on every major-ish issue. Sometimes I am right and sometimes I am less right 😁. In this case, I was right. Pitt just isnt an athletic department that can have a new state-of-the art Olympics Sports venue. It was easy to see the waste of money it was. I dont want to hear that those athletes deserve a brand new facility. No they dont. They go to school for free and they generate no revenue for the department. It might hurt people's feelings but that's just the reality. We have 2 pro teams and every dollar and every bit of focus needs to be paid to that. Now, the irony is we may have to cut sports to pay for this: Lacrosse (shouldn't have been added)? Track/Cross Country? Heck, baseball maybe?
Look at Scott Barnes. Self-sanctioned Pitt Basketball and got a promotion. The P12 literally died on his watch and while he doesn't share much of the blame, any AD of an Oregon St, Wash St, BC, Vanderbilt, etc has to do everything in their power to lobby for stability. How much did Barnes do lobby the P12 to take the initial ESPN deal that they turned down? That decision killed a historic conference. And somehow Barnes is still leading an athletic department.
Keep pontificating….I know for a fact that your view is not universally believed or accepted…..by people whose opinions count.
Yeah, I didn't say there weren't people that think a stadium is some panacea; mostly those who are motivated with hearts full of nostalgia instead of solid strategic thinking about resource allocation to actually address shortcomings and elevate program performance. But it is has not a priority for the university nor the athletic department in the previous and certainly the current environment where the financial realities of paying off athletes are the immediate problem. A football stadium is absolutely not a strategic place to throw resources at this stage, nor in a past stage. Talk about stadiums has been going on for decades in certain quarters. The money and other needed resources simply aren't there. That doesn't mean what if scenarios aren't constantly evaluated nor that it wouldn't be great to have some fantasy stadium, but frankly, the need isn't there. That hasn't changed.
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“Strategic place to throw resources”….in the next major realignment only one sport will be considered in determining who is in or out…..football. Anyone who believes that Pitt playing in a rented, oversized stadium where the vagrants congregate in Pittsburgh will not be considered a negative factor in this realignment has no aptitude for strategic thinking which is precisely what you can say about the chancellor who greenlighted tearing down Pitt Stadium. Add to that, anyone who doesn’t believe that Pitt playing in that rented stadium doesn’t negatively impact recruiting and Pitt’s image as a major player in college FB is clueless. People obsess over NIL when they ought to be concerned about factors which will increase the odds of Pitt having a seat at the FB table when the smoke clears…that’s strategic thinking ….not obsessing completely about factors which may increase Pitt’s ability to compete in the near term but which may not even be relevant or which may completely change 5 years from now .
And for the above reasons, Victory Heights shouldn’t have been a top priority capital investment….Lyke got this message loud and clear and ignored it.
There’s just no way I believe they thought winning would create more money. They didn’t have the channels in place to even collect the money. The NIL push was an utter failure under Heather. It was non existent. So if she was expecting money to flow in if Pitt won, she’s dumber than I thought.
Ok, prove it. You've insinuated at least twice Panther Alumni could donate around $500m. Where is anything proving that?
The vagrants? I go to every game and see maybe five panhandlers around the stadium. If you think that's bad, I don't know what to tell you.
Does it really need to be proven. Pitt alumni could easily do that. Same as most schools. It's just a matter of where their giving priorities lie.
She vanished from the public eye the last 12 months on the job. I suspect she thought she was going to get the OSU job the instant Gene Smith announced he was going to retire. She wanted that job badly. But OSU went to a guy who raises money. Heather out in the cold now has to hand in homework she put little effort into.
Why Pitt chose to move on from Heather Lyke — and the daunting challenge facing its next AD
When the University of Pittsburgh relieved Heather Lyke of her duties as athletic director Sept. 9, the move surprised many in Pitt’s athletic community...www.post-gazette.com
Literally
She sees the handwriting on the wall and interviews for the Northwestern AD, but gets skunked there.
She’s 0-2 and mentally checked out of Pitt 10 months earlier.
No more cards left to play and her plans get a F for not Fu__ing trying and turning in a POS to her boss.
I admire Pitt for finally expecting more than mediocrity.
Yeah, and a comparatively tiny on-campus stadium will have zero impact on Pitt's chances in the next round of realignment. Zero. It might actually hurt it's chances comparatively. The SEC and Big Ten have no interest in teams with 45K stadiums.
You think UCLA playing 20 miles off campus in a more than half empty rented stadium, that is significantly larger than Acrisure with less total attendance counts, impacted the B10's decision one iota?
If you think the problems with the attractiveness of Pitt for other conferences is its stadium situation, then the delusion is all yours. And if you think the stadium is what is causing Pitt to lose recruits, you are also exceedingly naive of the reality of what is going on.
Here's the thing about Victory Heights. 1) it was needed 2) in various iterations, the facilities to be built for some of these sports were actually contained in various prior university master facilities planning documents 3) it actually makes Pitt a facilities peer for these programs with Big Ten and SEC programs, and 4)...and this is the most important one...it was actually a realistic and obtainable goal.
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