FroggieFever wrote:Water Pony wrote:If ADJD is TCU Athletic Director Jeremy Donati, the only Mustang reference in his bio is the Cal Poly University Mustang Club.
Hart and ADJD are close. I think what we get lost here often is how closely the two institutions are related. The Hunt fam. The Bass fam. The list goes on. We are closer than some would probably prefer to accept, but inevitably works out for the both institutions.
Everyone wants the world to be black and white when it is actually gray.
The PAC 12 schools certainly have conversations with Big12 schools. That doesn't mean they are interested in or seriously considering moving to the Big 12. They are playing out all of their what if scenarios. The Big12 and associated social media entities have really done themselves a disservice by taking small items, spinning them, and running with the spin publicly. Yes, some of that is just click bait to drive views and revenue, but the fact is that the Big 12 leveraged an agency to try and forment public uncertainty against the PAC 12 and disrupt media negotiations in an effort to drive those negotiations down to the point where PAC 12 schools would consider leaving.
It is an incredible campaign that the companies I have worked with would not stoop to execute against the competition. We certainly see it in the political world, but I am shocked to see that type of behavior exhibited by academic institutions.
Every Big 12 team is a [deleted] piece of [deleted] for allowing it to happen. And they deserve the outcome, which is that every other conference and academic institution is going to look down on them for playing dirty pool. SMU has been [deleted] on by those same schools since 1980, and I for one am excited to see them get their due.
ADJD's job is to make TCU as prominent as possible. One path to that objective he sees is pushing SMU away as a rival and moving to establish a rivalry with a larger school. Alumni have pushed back against him on this agenda. He might have a good relationship with Hart, but it doesn't mean that he is also trying to do what he thinks is best for the school, regardless of how that impacts SMU.
Kenneth Starr turned Baylor away from the moral and financially sound principles it once rested on. He convinced them that they were bigger than they were and needed to spend to be able to attain a higher standing. They had to borrow to build and grow because they don't have state support or a strong alumni base to pull from. In contrast, at SMU we force a high percentage of funding to be raised before we break ground on any project. As a result, Baylor is in mountains of debt, and with interest rate rising they are not in a great position. They depend on the Dallas area for student recruiting, and in order to attract better students and raise the profile of the school, they need SMU to be kept down. They are absolutely our biggest detractors (Tech is second on the list), which TCU and now Houston look the other way and don't try to fight to get us in.
But as I've mentioned time and time again, the best value for SMU and for each of our degrees is to be affiliated with top ranked academic institutions and get as far away from those backstabbing pieces of [deleted] as possible. Go PAC or go ACC, and tell the Big 12 to [deleted] off whenever they come asking.