If you want to bring up attendance, the most relevant anecdote you can highlight is also the best post-spring example of why Amanda Braun needs to lose her job, pronto.
Eric Becker started his current job as Assistant Director of Ticket Operations at Pitt on August 15th. If we assume that Braun had the minimum two weeks notice (it was longer), that means she knew we needed a new Director of Ticket Operations on August 1st.
Since then, Braun has failed to fill the position of selling tickets. Center to the problem is that many jobs are switching from salary to hourly, and the AD is fighting to hire someone in the position at a salary. But they haven't won that fight in the six months since Becker started at Pitt, and the job opening is posted through the end of this month.
So instead of hiring someone to cover the job for the year (almost all AD employees are on an annual basis), the AD failed to fill the job of selling tickets to the fan base for LaVall Jordan's first year.
Essentially, the AD failed to capitalize on the excitement of a new coach by filling the job of the person who is
What should make this even more infuriating is the fact that Becker himself was a fill-in. He came on board as Assistant Ticket Manager to Brian Morgan. When B-Mo left for Marquette, Becker took over the job duties on an interim basis. But he never got officially promoted, and he never got bumped up on pay. So really, the Director of Tickets has been vacant since Brian Morgan started at Marquette. So the job has needed to be filled for over a year and a half.
Ticket manager. The guy who sells you the tickets.
So believe it or not, it's not just Braun's incredible bungling of the basketball program that has gone into the ridiculous drop in ticket sales. She's also screwed up the ticket office, and in doing so has done LaVall Jordan an awful disservice by fumbling the transition.
Athletics didn't capitalize on the transition to sell tickets because there wasn't anyone in the ticket office to do it. They've had a student doing the lion's share of the work. Other work has been heaped on Leah Thyne, who has gotta be stretched thinner than just about anyone in that department. I feel terrible for her.
Fact is, the moment Amanda Braun is fired, we'll go a long way toward bringing a lot of people back. Mark Mone needs to go catch Pokemon on some other campus, because he essentially gave a big middle finger to David Nicholas, athletics' biggest donor and someone who is suddenly the patriarch of his family. I'm sure David has no plans to keep writing the checks Ab was writing to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but he won't be writing any to Milwaukee until Braun and Mone are history.
This university deserves better leadership. Once those two are gone, we can all get behind LaVall Jordan and make sure he has all the support and opportunity to take this program to unprecedented heights. Rob Jeter dealt with a lot of stuff standing his way, but the truth is there were even things that held back Bruce Pearl and Bo Ryan. Those things had to factor into the decisions from both coaches to depart earlier than a lot of fans would have hoped.
People want to keep pivoting the argument to Rob Jeter. That's the past. We need to learn about our program's shortcomings and missed opportunities from Rob Jeter's tenure off the court if we're going to support LaVall Jordan and the team on the court.
Games are won on the court - this is true. But so much more needs to be done at the mid-major level to move forward. Part of the reason people wanted Rob Jeter gone is because they wanted the team to achieve at the level of Butler, Gonzaga, VCU, Wichita State and George Mason. That's a noble goal, but the problem is that our fans are conditioned to only consider the play on the court. They don't see the immense effort that goes into building an elite mid-major. They think an AD hires a basketball coach, the coach hires a staff, they recruit players and they build up a winner. There's so much more to it then that.
Look at Bruce Pearl's program. He took a mid-major on the rise and continued building on that foundation, turning the team into a winner before leaving for Tennessee. How did he do that?
It wasn't started when he was hired. It started when someone else was hired - that person was Nancy Zimpher. She was the one who had the vision for the future. She was the one who understood what athletics could be, which is something that inexplicably escapes most university CEO's. She knew basketball was about outreach - to the students, to the alumni, to the community - and that basketball was how we could drive the future of the university.
What do you guys remember from Nancy Zimpher? I was still in high school when she left, but the stories I've been told by others who were there - of her gold power suits, her ceaseless cheerleading, her constant positive presence - paint a pretty clear picture of who Zimpher was as chancellor.
She was the one who made it possible for Bruce Pearl to do the things he needed to do to build a winner. We don't need to get into all of those, and to be honest there are a couple that I think we'd all prefer don't get written into the annals of the internet - but the point is that Zimpher did everything she could to support Pearl's work. Basketball was never far from her mind.
After she left, Pearl left. But her impact was felt. The ~$60 million Klotsche Center Pavilion was an enormous positive move for athletics, even with its bevy of problems in serving the program. It's the servant of too many masters - athletics, kinesiology, parking, recreation - and probably would be built differently today. That doesn't change the fact that Zimpher got it done.
In fall 2005, the first semester after the Sweet 16, we had 26,000 students. Our selectivity rate was at 92% - more than 9 in 10 students who applied to UWM got accepted. In just a couple years, UWM topped out around 32,000 students and had a selectivity rate of 65%. Not only did we add around 6,000 students to the enrollment, but we actually accepted a far smaller percentage of applicants. Out-of-state enrollment skyrocketed.
Why is that relevant here? Because they hadn't built the new dorms yet or added the Schools of Public Health and Freshwater Sciences. They didn't have any major advancements in research or academics that grabbed national headlines. Why was UWM all of a sudden an option for so many more students?
It's because the success of basketball put this university on the map for so many people that never would have considered us before. But after Zimpher left, Carlos Santiago and his successors failed to continue the push from Chapman Hall to support athletics.
That push is incredibly important, because that's where champions are built. All departments of a university not only need to be involved, but they need to feel that they're integral to the success of the basketball program. They need to know that if basketball succeeds, it will help them succeed.
If the people in admissions believe basketball is going to help them recruit kids from out of state, then they need to make the exciting basketball program a bigger part of their recruitment. If the Lubar School of Business needs a rather large donation - let's say, $5 million f*cking dollars - then they need basketball to succeed. They sure as hell don't need the athletic director to go and screw things up for them. They don't need the athletic director to sabotage the program, because if that donor found out their donation might be in jeopardy.
This is true up and down the entire university.
People talk about how they loved Bruce Pearl because of how he made them feel. The winning is never the first thing people bring up about Bruce Pearl. He made them feel attached to the program, like they were part of something bigger than themselves. Pearl made every single person with whom he came in contact feel like they were not only a fan of the team but essential to the team's success.
But guy's like Bruce Pearl are few and far between. Mark Few, Brad Stevens, Jim Larranaga, Shaka Smart and Gregg Marshall are not like Pearl. They're not cut from the same cloth. They're not used car salesmen.
At Butler, none of them were like Pearl. Barry Collier, Thad Matta, Todd Lickliter and Stevens were not the Pearl personalities. They were coaches and builders.
How did they build Butler? They didn't do it alone. Pearl and Zimpher were larger-than-life personalities, the kind of people that you couldn't help but be drawn toward.
Without people like that - and keep in mind, LaVall Jordan does not absolutely not have a Bruce Pearl-type personality - you need to have leadership who can convince people throughout the community that Milwaukee Basketball is essential, and that we need them to succeed.
It takes a village to win at a mid-major, and that means all hands on deck. If half of the village is completely detached, you're not going to be productive. If they're detached because the witch doctor poisoned some of the crops to get rid of the head farmer, and they want the witch doctor banished from the village, WHAT THE HELL IS THE CHIEFTAIN THINKING BY KEEPING THE WITCH DOCTOR?
That's why we can't move past this. That's why Amanda Braun needs to go. Mark Mone, he can join her. But they need to start with Braun, and they need to start as soon as humanly possible.
