Nebraska - -probably not suited for our guy though. Got fired, wasn’t winning enough football games. Fancy that!
Also, ADs at Virginia and Yale (I think) retired.
Just like an Arkansas fan to hope and pray for Long to leave, he is only considered to be one of the best but yeah let’s run him off.
Everyone is entitled to an opinion and to express it as you have.
Yes sir…you are correct.
Well at least he hired Mike Anderson ! Glad he got that done. Hiring Coach B was a miracle at the time. I wonder why some folks like to complain and can’t coach themselves. Apply for the job when it becomes open. Until then try to support the coach and team.
I noticed your link here has Tom Jurich of Louisville at the top of the list. If all you care about is winning games Jurich is great. But to do it he’s hired and kept around two sleazeballs. He knew what he was getting with Petrino and hired him anyway and I guess Pitino must have him over a barrel to get away with hookers in the dorm and paying for an abortion.
I know, that was a head scratcher for me.
The Jurich ranking has an asterisk next to it. Right under the paragraph it says college football can’t go without a scandal. Two days after this story was released an assistant was accused of paying escorts. So, this list was from a few years ago. Before the escorts, he has a legitimate argument, after changes opinions.
True, however I always wondered about him after he hired Petrino back.
Jeff Long is the 8th highest paid athletic director in college sports yet we are not in the top 20 athletic departments. If he has any sense to him, he has to see the Nebraska situation as a cautionary tale. Winning matters too. It’s good that we graduate kids and they (for the most part) stay out of jail. It’s good the NCAA is not on campus investigating us. It’s good that the cumulative GPA for athletes is as high as it has ever been. I applaud him for that. But it’s not an either/or dichotomy. The product on the field/court/diamond has to improve; and I know it can be done without cheating or selling out one’s convictions. We have done it before. Winning is the best treatment for ending the echo chamber of negativity and that starts with the AD. We don’t need anymore facilities, strange coaching hires, new logos, hash tags or uniforms. We need wins and we need to be relevant or what’s the point. I just hope Jeff Long realizes that too. Shawn Eichorst at Nebraska simply waited too long to figure that out and today he is unemployed because of it.
Not a Long fan, but the track teams have won NC since 07, the baseball team is perineal Top 25, Hockey (ummmmm) have won multiple conference titles, soccer has had Top 25 teams and Sweet 16 performances, basketball is trending up, swimming and diving even has had decent seasons. Honestly, when Petrino was here the team was trending up. I think that’s where the issue lies, Bret is doing all the off field stuff we want, unfortunately it’s the on field stuff that’s the issue. When JLS was interim coach and we knew he wasn’t gonna be the HC, I made a statement on the old Lounge that I expected our next coach to be a stop gap. So far, CBB looks like exactly that. For his sake, I hope he turns it around. Firing Petrino (right or wrong) and hiring CBB may be what ultimately costs Long his job, but in all honesty, if Long gets offered a P5 commissioner position, I think he’s gone anyway.
I completly understand your “stop gap” thought process and believe that was the reason for the contract and huge buyout Bielema was given. I think Bielema walked into this program much like Dana Altman did the basketball program so many years ago however Altman ran back to Nebraska when he saw the state of the basketball program while Bielema said ok…fine but you gotta gurantee me 7yrs.
I can see that.
Our hockey program is pretty good but Jeff Long gets no credit for it. Hockey is not a varsity sport at Arkansas. It is varsity at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, but not at Arkansas, where it is a club sport. The trend of the overall athletic department is up. As you noted earlier in the thread we’re doing well in many sports, both men and women. Yes, even basketball, where, as you will recall, we had the eventual national champion on the ropes.
Jeff has created a situation where we are able to compete on the SEC and national level in many more sports then we did before, and the fundraising and facilities are two big reasons why. The main exception unfortunately is the most visible one – football. And that’s the only sport many people care about at UA.
I agree with you on that.
According to the Learfield Director’s Cup rankings for the 2016-17 sports year, Arkansas ranked No. 20 in sports, which is ahead of South Carolina, Alabama, Auburn, Missouri, Ole Miss, Tennessee, Mississippi State and Vanderbilt in the SEC. Remember, there’s more to being an athletic director than overseeing the football program.
Arkansas has 7 men’s sports and 10 women’s sports. Scoring for the Learfield Director’s Cup counts 10 sports for men and 10 for women. For Arkansas to finish in the top 20 with only 17 sports is truly an accomplishment.
We have 8 men’s sports and 11 for women as far as the Director’s Cup is concerned. T&F is counted twice, indoor and outdoor. IIRC 16 of our 19 sports scored Directors Cup points last year, which means either participating in NCAA postseason tournament or a bowl game. The ones that didn’t score are women’s swimming, hoops and volleyball. All eight men’s teams scored.
Stanford, which almost always wins the directors’ cup and did again this time, scored in so many sports that several sports which were in postseason play were left off the scoring list. Stanford has varsity teams in 17 men’s sports and 21 for women, double our team count. And they’re pretty darn good in most of them, including many without a lot of national competition (fencing, rowing, water polo, stuff like that).
Wall Street Journal just put out their annual valuations of college football programs. Arkansas was ranked 17th in the country, which is fairly incredible considering that we’ve long been a smaller school in comparison to many other Power 5s in terms of attendance (and therefore alumni).
Regardless of what many in Arkansas think of Jeff Long and the current state of the program, most outsiders view the job being done as above-average. Hence the reason most think Arkansas fans are nuts for suggesting he be fired.
The fans who want Long fired have tunnel vision and only see one thing: the football team hasn’t won the division in 11 years and hasn’t won the conference in almost 30. They don’t care about any of the other stuff. I suppose some of them also blame him because we haven’t made a Sweet 16 in 21 years as well.