CAA Expansion

[uofalbany]

I can't wait until I see the danes challenging the top dogs for a championship with full scholly rides.

That's my idea of fun.

[uofalbany]

Stony brook came riding into town a year or two ago in the Big South, now the CAA.

UAlbany is on the outskirts of town, with 38 schollies, already challenging top dogs, but is heading into

TOWN with max schollies. I'd say, the FCS should be forewarned, the NYS state schools

are ready to do some damage in the FCS.

 

When NBCSN comes to town, they'll be giddy.

Edited October 11, 2012 by uofalbany

[Clickclack]

Can anyone get access to this story?

 

http://www.bizjournals.com/albany/print-edition/2012/10/05/ualbany-rushes-toward-new-stadium.html

[Dane96]

And this one....

 

http://www.bizjournals.com/albany/print-edition/2012/10/05/10-minutes-with-bob-ford.html

[sarge965]

Can anyone get access to this story?

 

http://www.bizjournals.com/albany/print-edition/2012/10/05/ualbany-rushes-toward-new-stadium.html

HERE IT IS:

 

The latest economics lesson at the University at Albany plays out on a football field, taught by the grandfatherly head coach in his down-home straw hat.

 

Bob Ford’s cumulative results over 43 seasons—a tenure spanning 13 UAlbany presidents—proved crucial for the Capital Region’s largest college campus to lobby for the $18 million football stadium now rising behind the team’s practice field.

 

That stadium sealed a promotion next fall into a new conference with stronger opponents. The move means UAlbany can award 19 more scholarships, a 50 percent increase­—and have the chance, in one game, to bring in revenue equal to 20 percent of the entire team’s budget, currently just shy of $2 million.

 

It all underscores how money courses through all levels of college football, even at UAlbany, where football wasn’t even an official school sport when Ford resurrected the program in 1970.

 

“It’s a new day for us. We are just putting together our new business model now,” said director of athletics Lee McElroy, who played linebacker at UCLA.

 

When UAlbany hired Ford, football had not existed at the school since before the Great Depression. Ford had to line-item every football he bought, on a budget fit for a start-up venture.

 

The team’s trajectory since then mirrors Ford’s own bootstrap biography.

 

He had moved almost 20 times by the time he set off for college, following a father who never found the perfect job. He spent middle school living in a fixed-up chicken coop after his family went bankrupt. At age 30, St. Lawrence University fired him from his first head-coaching job, which he discovered while reading a newspaper 130 miles away.

 

“He’s the biggest reason why UAlbany will have this stadium. Without him there, I’m not sure you’d have all the donor funds, in all honesty,” said Ty Curran, an active donor who played offensive tackle on Ford’s earliest teams, including 1974, Ford’s only undefeated season.

 

UAlbany is now pricing out corporate naming rights and six luxury suites—impossible to envision at its current field, where a track and access road separate the stands from the sideline. The players standing on that sideline block the view of any fan in the first six rows.

 

UAlbany players study game film in a dance studio, projected on the wall opposite one with floor-length mirrors and a ballet barre. Ford’s office overlooks an old gym, where he can hear the echoing shouts of a pick-up basketball game.

 

“There are some high schools that could compete with that facility,” said Curran, 57, who today is CEO of a Manhattan health-care advertising firm with 330 employees.

 

Yet Ford and his teams have won five conference titles in the past decade.

 

At the same time, UAlbany dramatically downsized, and then froze, plans for the stadium during the recession.

 

“I tell recruits it doesn’t matter where we play. Get the cars off the Thruway; we’ll play there,” Ford said. “If you have that attitude, you don’t have to sell a stadium.

 

“But we recruited with the stadium. We’d bring a picture of what it would look like,” Ford said. “Then the kids would graduate and say, ‘We never did get that stadium you talked about.’ I said, ‘I know, but we still won a helluva lot of games.’ ”

 

That includes three wins in the past four years against Maine, a member of the Colonial Athletic Association—which recruited UAlbany this year.

 

Maine is a nationally ranked school with 63 scholarship players. UAlbany has 25 fewer scholarships, a tally greater than the players on its starting offensive and defensive lineups combined.

 

“You have to say, ‘I’m reaching for my wallet and betting on the team with 63 scholarships, not the team with 38,’ ” Ford said. “But it’s a helluva difference between playing one of those teams a year, or playing eight of them as a member of the CAA, the best conference on this level in the country. Hoo boy! That’ll be a fun thing to go through.”

 

All nine opponents in the conference outspend UAlbany. Maine spends $3.5 million on football, 80 percent more than UAlbany’s $1.95 million budget.

 

UAlbany’s football budget will rise at least 9 percent next year just from the addition of those extra scholarships.

 

The conference is eager to have UAlbany, said commissioner Thomas Yeager.

 

“It was really the whole package, but the stadium pushed them over the top as a deciding factor. That really helped separate them from the others we were looking at,” Yeager said.

 

The CAA is among those one tier below brand-name conferences such as the SEC (Southeastern Conference). That tier also includes regional schools such as Boston College and Syracuse University.

 

The larger schools often play smaller programs early in the season, games UAlbany would be eligible for in its new conference. The matchups would give UAlbany exposure on large regional TV channels and even the ESPN family of cable channels.

 

Then there’s the real money.

 

Those bigger schools pay the smaller teams to come play—essentially, hiring an opponent. Yeager estimates the smaller school receives a payment averaging $300,000 to $400,000 for a single game.

 

UAlbany’s football budget is on par with compensation for the head coach alone at state schools from Utah to Kentucky. Ohio State’s head coach earns bonuses larger than Ford’s base salary of $130,000.

 

McElroy predicts all the changes will cast football in a new light.

 

“You haven’t seen this a lot around here, but every weekend now, it’ll be a more intense crowd and very talented teams coming in,” McElroy said. “It brings an attractiveness and alignment we haven’t had here.”

 

McElroy quickly adds: “We have to step up recruiting.”

 

And fundraising, too. UAlbany has launched a $6 million campaign to help fund the new sports complex.

 

The game could easily have zipped by Ford, and with it, perhaps UAlbany’s chance to capitalize on football.

 

After all, Ford turned 75 last month and had a hip replaced in February. He recalls how the average shoe size on his first team was 10.5, a full two sizes smaller than this year’s team—which has three players wearing size 17.

 

Yet Ford has also modernized.

 

In the early years, Ford made 2 a.m. trips to Black Studio, in Schenectady, to pick up reels of game film. This summer, Ford bought iPads for all 10 assistants, allowing for near-instant review of drills during practices (even if his is still in the box).

 

“The Capital District probably didn’t get excited when we played Niagara. But it’ll be interesting to see what they do when Villanova comes in, or Delaware,” Ford said.

 

The stadium is on track to open for the 2013 season. An anonymous donor has pledged up to $1 million to brand the playing surface with these words: “Bob Ford Field.”

[sarge965]

And this one....

 

http://www.bizjournals.com/albany/print-edition/2012/10/05/10-minutes-with-bob-ford.html

 

You asked for it, you got it:

 

Standing 5’7” and in a signature straw hat, Bob Ford doesn’t command your attention right away. Then you hear what he has to say. Ford is in the midst of his 43rd season as head coach of the University at Albany football team.

 

What hours do you work?

 

From Aug. 1 to Thanksgiving, we work seven days a week. Sleep comes easy in this business. If we’re playing an away game, our coaches work 84 hours a week. Home game, 72 hours.

 

How much longer can you go?

 

This is a sport you need to stay healthy in. You have to be pumped up and motivated.

 

Also, I never want to go 0-11. That’s never happened.

 

I thought I’d stay here three years, then move on professionally. I was offered opportunities to leave, but as the years went by, this became my baby. And we had success, which helps keep you employed in this business.

 

I walk into the office and pretty much giggle from the time I walk in until the time I go home at night.

 

The opposite of your itinerant father, right?

 

He was constantly in search of the job. And he never found it. And if you hate your job? Forty hours is a long time—think about how long 40 hours really is.

 

My dad moved virtually every spring. We lived in 14 towns in Massachusetts, plus Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.

 

He was a border patrolman in Fort Kent, Maine, during World War II. He worked on the Boston and Maine Railroad, sold pots and pans, sold Metropolitan Life Insurance, owned a gas station. And the other jobs, I was too young to remember.

 

We moved so much, I went to seven elementary schools. There’s an advantage growing up like that: You are adaptable. But you don’t put down very deep roots, because you know you’re going to move again sometime.

 

Your family went broke at one point.

 

We had friends who owned a farm. They had a chicken house attached to a barn. We cleaned the chicken house and put up Sheetrock and we all moved in.

 

So I know this: I don’t ever want to be poor again, because that wasn’t a great experience. But I have no desire whatsoever to be wealthy. None. Right now, I make more money than I can spend. [His base salary is $130,000]

 

Your first job didn’t go so well.

 

At 26, I was the youngest head college coach in America, hired at St. Lawrence University. Four years later, I was the youngest head college coach in America to be fired, for not winning enough.

 

I was in Syracuse on a recruiting trip. I decided to pick up the paper as I was eating breakfast. There was a story in the sports section that I had been fired. That’s how I found out.

 

That’s how you learn. Either that, or you’re destined to fail. A lot of very successful people have made very bad decisions. It’s about what you do next.

 

How is coaching like running a business?

 

You’re a CEO, to a degree. I have 95 kids, 10 full-time coaches, a football operations guy, a cadre of trainers, three strength training guys, academic support, equipment people.

 

I have three goals that never change.

 

I want to turn out great young men, who have an impact upon society, an impact upon their community, who are able to stand on their feet and talk, look you in the eye and shake your hand.

 

We want to turn out great students. Third thing is, turn out good football players. Otherwise, I’ll pick up the paper and find out I’m fired.

 

You always wear these hats...

 

My dad developed skin cancer as he got older, and we are out in the sun a lot at practice.

 

Probably 10 years ago, I found a straw hat I liked in Saratoga, at a store on Broadway, on the left-hand side as you’re going up.

 

It gets to late October, and if you’re in a straw hat, you look like a doofus. So I went back and found a similar style in felt. They last about two years. I stock up.

 

Strangers stop me in the airport: ‘I know you! The hat!’

 

Are you calm and cerebral, or prone to yelling?

 

Sometimes I have to get right up close and test a kid’s manhood. If the kid knows you really love him, he’ll accept it.

 

Will more parents keep their children from football, with this new focus on concussions?

 

When I played, if you were conscious, you went back into the game. And you could not have water on the field. It was a toughness thing—amazing there weren’t more deaths.

 

Here’s the thing: The size of our field has not changed, yet the player has.

 

When I started, the average shoe size was 10.5. Now it’s 12.5, and we have three 17s on the squad. We have a left tackle who is 6’7” and about 340 pounds.

 

Bigger bodies at a faster speed—boom, collisions. The head snaps back.

 

There is always risk involved. Studies have shown the head injuries in soccer are greater. But I think it all has to discourage some mothers from allowing their children to play the sport.

 

How do you still relate to 18-year-olds?

 

This job keeps you thinking young. I don’t ever complain very much about my health to our kids. Suck it up and get after it and put in a day’s work.

 

Obviously an age gap has opened up. It’s mostly rap music in the locker room. Golly, some of it is brutal—like I’m going to hum that all the way home, right?

 

Quick info

 

Robert “Bob” Ford

 

Title: Head coach, University at Albany football

 

Tenure: 43 seasons

 

Age: 75

 

UAlbany career: 259 wins, 179 losses, one tie

 

Conference titles: Five during the past decade

 

Resides: Clifton Park

 

Family: wife, Donna; daughter and four grandchildren

[Clickclack]

Thank you sarge...much obliged! What a great read...exciting times.

Edited October 11, 2012 by Clickclack

[Dane96]

OH my lord...I...no WE as the Albany Community, have been lucky to have this man pass through our lives.

 

What a truly GREAT MAN!

[madDOG]

Thank you sarge...much obliged! What a great read...exciting times.

 

Exciting times INDEED! Thanks Sarge! Great articles.

[danefan]

Great articles.

 

Too bad the TU doesn't have journalists like that.

 

I'm sure there will be a copycat story at some point in the near future.

[Clickclack]

Great articles.

 

Too bad the TU doesn't have journalists like that.

 

I'm sure there will be a copycat story at some point in the near future.

 

The TU is to busy kissing Siena's a$$...unfortunately they oblivious to the monster that is growing a few miles down the road that will swallow up anything Siena basketball could ever do...

[sarge965]

Adam Sichko is the reporter from the Albany Business Review

I thought these were really well done

here is his email if anyone wants to send him a comment

asichko@bizjournals.com

[danefan]

Adam Sichko is the reporter from the Albany Business Review

I thought these were really well done

here is his email if anyone wants to send him a comment

asichko@bizjournals.com

 

Done. Thanks for posting that link.

 

I've found complimenting a job well done goes infinitely further than complaining about the jobs that aren't well done.

[Clickclack]

Adam Sichko is the reporter from the Albany Business Review

I thought these were really well done

here is his email if anyone wants to send him a comment

asichko@bizjournals.com

 

Done. Thanks for posting that link.

 

I've found complimenting a job well done goes infinitely further than complaining about the jobs that aren't well done.

 

Truth...+1

[UAalum72]

And to be fair to the T-U (whether you think they deserve it or not) today's Campus Notebook notes that the London Times ranks all four SUNY center among the top 400 universities in the world (Albany in the 300-350 range). This follows a story on the guy who chained himself to protest cancelling Fountain Day.

 

Also in the local section, UAlbany's literay coup a long, winding road tells of Fallbany weekend kicking off with a seminar by Nobel-winning author JM Coetzee and novelist Paul Auster. Besides here, the two appear together only at Penn State and Stanford.