(04-18-2019 05:35 PM)Zorch Wrote:  I don't understand why some people simply do not understand that the first ten years ARE SIMPLY NOT RELEVANT to any discussion of whether Shaver should have been retained in March 2019.

This is what it all boils down to. If you want to evaluate the program within the confines of the current conference, Shaver has certainly performed well as of late. I'm sure he would be a fine bet to continue to perform at his current level.

The problem is that this needs to be a much bigger conversation. That Shaver, Driscoll, and Reveley presided over W&M's effective relegation to a vastly inferior conference ought to be a huge black mark on their resumes, not something to excuse a decade of performance. More importantly, we need coach, AD, and President to be fully aligned on a strategy to better our situation going forward. We need to be looking for success beyond the confines of our current situation, not within it.

These analogies to professional sports are not useful. This quote is from my favorite Navy football writer, Michael James:

Quote:Most of the media coverage on [issues of conference realignment] comes from sportswriters, so stories are framed as sports stories. They are not. They are matters of higher education. When colleges and universities choose to participate at the Division I level, they are making a strategic decision to position themselves as mainstream, national institutions. The nation knows its colleges first through athletics, and being left out of the highest levels of the most popular sport means being left out of that conversation. It is vital, then, to keep that from happening.

I feel like most people in Williamsburg have seen the jump in winning percentage and rise in attendance and conclude that things are getting better. Things aren't getting better -- we're the frog in the proverbial saucepan. The last 16 years have been a disaster.