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Hopefully the new AD can take a look at basketball and baseball also because those programs are mired in the same disgusting mediocrity that annoys the **** out of fans. Miami may not be a traditional powerhouse in basketball but baseball should perennially be in Omaha. blake james took AD lessons from DiMare's hitting lessons.. watch two strikes down the middle and then swing at the next pitch in the dirt.
 
Great article and well-written eulogy on what the last 10 years at Miami Athletics have been. The writer spends a lot of time on Blake James' unwillingness to spend available $. Does anyone here in the know have more details / examples of how James held back? It's obvious from POV that he was an incompetent AD but I'd be curious to have tangible examples of what the writer was touching on.

Go Canes...
 
My2Sense said:
Great article and well-written eulogy on what the last 10 years at Miami Athletics have been. The writer spends a lot of time on Blake James' unwillingness to spend available $. Does anyone here in the know have more details / examples of how James held back? It's obvious from POV that he was an incompetent AD but I'd be curious to have tangible examples of what the writer was touching on.

Go Canes...
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You beat me to it, same questions. Great piece but more so a timeline piece.
 
MovingZen said:
Hopefully the new AD can take a look at basketball and baseball also because those programs are mired in the same disgusting mediocrity that annoys the **** out of fans. Miami may not be a traditional powerhouse in basketball but baseball should perennially be in Omaha. blake james took AD lessons from DiMare's hitting lessons.. watch two strikes down the middle and then swing at the next pitch in the dirt.
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If we ONLY hire an AD focused on football, we failed.
 
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Not sure (obviously), but someone like Blake refusing to use available money smacks of “please like me” syndrome. In other words, when in over your head and can’t show progress in on field success, control the hearts of the decision makers by showing them that he’s fiscally “responsible.” It’s a mirage of course, but it’s all he had. Same thing with Manny in a way. He’s in over his head, so he acts like a player’s coach and creates a “get them next time” culture. Neither approach breeds success. It just bought them more time by appealing to as broad a number of decision makers as possible.
 
The optimism is held back by the fact that we've been burned so many times. But with Blake James out of the picture, maybe?
 
Five Reasons Sports Network is so underrated. Good content all around, best Heat content by a mile.
 
Angry Ibis said:
If we ONLY hire an AD focused on football, we failed.
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Not necessarily. Part of being a good AD is the ability to surround yourself with quality people. If he's a football guy that fixes football, who's to say he can't be smart enough to hire good coaches for each of the respective sports and let them do their thing?

Having a good coach in place is about 90% of what determines success in college athletics. This isn't the pros full of grown adults, these are kids out of high school that need to be led. The biggest problem with this school is the majority of the coaching hires are lazy and don't constitute good coaching hires from the get go.

The baseball program, in addition to football, are perfect examples of this. Just get me a guy in that AD role that is smart and experienced.....whatever smart people don't know themselves, they tend to be smart enough to delegate to those that are. That's a big part of what makes smart people look smart, in ANY walk of life.
 
Vish is a thoughtful dude and has been since all the way back to trivial debates about Basketball on Canestime's Lounge message board.

The piece is a nice summary, and its thesis seemed to be:

This was a program that was built on hubris, bravado, and unwavering belief in self combined with talent and an unquenchable thirst for excellence. [Vish]

That's not what built this program. That's merely what it looks like from the outside once the winning began. This program was built on competent leadership taking innovative steps to do more with less. I'll acknowledge Vish definitely mentions the lack of ambition and I wish he had unpacked that more. Because that's where our current opportunity sits. This excerpt was really strong:

His hiring was the shift away from an athletic department and towards a marketing scheme, intent on convincing the public at-large that winning was priority one while behind-the-scenes the dedication was to cost control. The decision was made that on balance, rather than the risk spending big and perhaps still not winning big, it was preferable to run things on the cheap, knowing that doing so would all but eliminate the possibility of winning. [Vish]

The hype over substance angle is an entire article on its own. I'm not sure it was so much about cost control as it was about broad risk mitigation, which I thought he'd go into when he mentioned the risks of spending big. The appetite for risk - way beyond financial risks - at the University plummeted because its leadership did not value the potential benefits that would come from more innovation and potential failure. The success of any program or organization is based on what it values.

We didn't fall ***-backward into an "unquenchable thirst for excellence." We hired a competent, visionary leader who hired more competent leaders. Really, go back and look at who helped support the athletic department during our rise. A lot of quality humans and real leaders who commanded respect (and they weren't even the head guy!). If we're going to take advantage of this opportunity, it's the primary thing from the past we have to reference and repeat.
 
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Hoyacane1620 said:
Great article by Vishnu Parasuraman, one of the cohosts of the Sixth Ring Canes podcast and contributor to the Five Reasons Network.

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Vish's stuff is always solid.

To add a bit more color to what Vish wrote, the hire of Blake was slightly more complicated than what Vish wrote (though I ******* laughed at his summary of it). For Shalala's first 10 years, she was much more involved and supportive of Athletics, from things like standing behind Willie Williams after he was arrested to fighting for us to join the ACC. But then UM bought Cedars in 2007, and those first few years of losses really swung Shalala's focus from U-Ath to U-Health.

So you have to consider the context. During the recession years, Shalala was super-focused on getting UHealth back to profitability. In 2011, the Shapiro scandal broke while lightweight Eichorst was at the wheel. So the combo-platter of diverted focus, recessionary times, and Nevingate caused the collective UM sphincter to pucker. On the Athletic side, yes, we "got cheap", we did everything we could to look like we were not diving around in the Scrooge McDuck money vault. And in THAT environment, there was actually a small amount of logical sense (though I still disagree and hate the decision) to hire a "mind-the-money" AD, in that he had experience on the sales/fundraising side, which was under serious stress between the recession and Nevin.

Problem is, year after year, Blake just kept tightening the screws. Today, in 2021, there is almost no budget for promotions or events that are open to the public, there is almost no outreach to the SoFla community beyond the "connected" UM community (students, faculty, staff, alums). Nearly every e-mail that I get is a come-on for a contribution or sale of a "collectible" item. And as @SpikeUM has pointed out, Blake's go-to line when you make a suggestion to him is "And how much are you willing to contribute to make that happen?".

I know people like to complain that "UM has always been cheap" or "UM has been terrible for 20 years" or "Donna is responsible for everything". But the reality is, the Shapiro scandal did far more damage than most will ever admit, and it changed the way our Athletic Department ran for the past 10 years. If Blake had more vision and leadership, he could have corrected it. But he was content to keep doing the same rotten things year after year, Donna lost focus in her last few years, and Frenk hasn't known a **** thing for six years.

Sad.
 
Hoyacane1620 said:
Great article by Vishnu Parasuraman, one of the cohosts of the Sixth Ring Canes podcast and contributor to the Five Reasons Network.

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Very good.

@SWFLHurricane

I'm sure this resonated with you as you've been saying it throughout Manuela's tenure...

"... Best practices and standards developed over time by trailblazers can be borrowed by followers, much like the difference between a chef and a cook, with the chef inventing the recipe, and innovating, and the cook following the recipe..."
 
if the proven model for success built and sharpened (by Howard,JJ,Erickson, and Butch) had simply been continued
and maintained by the right coaches Miami could very well have as many as 10-15 NCs by now
 
Empirical Cane said:
Very good.

@SWFLHurricane

I'm sure this resonated with you as you've been saying it throughout Manuela's tenure...

"... Best practices and standards developed over time by trailblazers can be borrowed by followers, much like the difference between a chef and a cook, with the chef inventing the recipe, and innovating, and the cook following the recipe..."
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Manny wasn't even cooking. He was serving us his pre-heated bull crap that got him fired at Texas by Mack. He had no clue how to change and resorted instead to throw cheap baubles like the turnover chain on top of his 3 day old left over rancid freezer clean outs.
 
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