huntnfish wrote:Yeah, what was I thinking, I should not blame the Athletic Director for the failures of our athletic department over the past 10 years.

You like that Top30 Sears Cup though.
The admin rules that caused the precipitous decline in our abililities to recruit effectively occured YEARS ago, before Copeland. That's all I am saying. If you blame that, you cannot blame Copeland.
Now, if you are pissed because you THOUGHT they were rectified when Copeland came, and you somehow think he told you that, then you are simply mistaken.
The "COMMITMENT" was a plan that was initiated 3 years ago.
For some reason, alumni feel that once the commitment was anounced that all of a sudden we will have 2-deep Top10 talent on our football team. And since we don't, then there must not be any commitment.
It simply takes time to undo 10 years of strangling by our 'academic' administration.
Yes, Copeland hired Dement, yes, Copeland hired Cavan. But ultimately, they were all restricted by the Pye model.
You fire them to bring new blood in to spark some change...but in the end, if you don't have the facilities (Cavan at first), or the curriculum (just now have a few programs), or the agreeable admissions standards (just changed 3 years ago), you won't be very successful.
You can blame Copeland if you want, but you really need to go back in time to blame the Faculty Senate and Pye.
And, no, I don't think we are on an equal footing with aTm and all, we don't have 14 colleges with Aggie Econ, or PE, or Kinisiology, or Auburn's sociology program where 160 students in the entire campus take sociology as a major, and 90-100 of them are athletes.