Trev Alberts named new Husker AD - 11 a.m. press conference

[JJ Husker]

1 hour ago, BigRedN said:

When did you become a fan JJ and how old were you?  I was 5-6 years of age in 69-70.

It's great you've got two more years.  50 years is a lot of fun and investment.  Good for you. 

Would’ve been about 70 age 6 or 7.  A bunch of players and coaches came to Columbus (I assume on a state tour like they do now). I got a bunch of autographs- Johnny Rodgers, Jerry Tagge, Bill Olds, Maury Damkroger, Frosty Anderson etc. Of course it helped that they were B-B champions 70-71 but been following them ever since. And I got a booster dose being a student at UNL 81-84 when TO should’ve won his first title or two. Those were very good years to have student tickets.

 

As much as we don’t like our irrelevance of the last 20 years, I know deep down the only thing that can stop this ride is me dying. The Callahan and Riley years have already proven that to me. Anybody that made it through that isn’t going anywhere.

[NoLongerN]

@JJ Husker, that's awesome sir.  Thanks for the share.

[runningblind]

8 minutes ago, JJ Husker said:

As much as we don’t like our irrelevance of the last 20 years, I know deep down the only thing that can stop this ride is me dying. The Callahan and Riley years have already proven that to me. Anybody that made it through that isn’t going anywhere.

No, not going anywhere, but I will fully exercise my right to complain in exchange for the team getting my support and merchandise money! I'm going to 2 road games this year alone despite my complaining, which I only do here or with my buddies. The team gets my full optimism and loud noises in person.

[GSG]

9 hours ago, BigRedN said:

Thanks for expressing your opinion.  

I think this is what you are saying ...
 

For me ... literally ... and with no threats ... as a fan from a little boy who is now 56 [50 years of rooting] ... there really isn't a whole lot left to love in the Big Red  !  I've come to the point where I am not enjoying what is pontificated ... and I'm done.  Not just Scott, but the University ... gets two more years to bloviate and tell me "progress" is here.

 

[JJ Husker]

2 hours ago, runningblind said:

No, not going anywhere, but I will fully exercise my right to complain in exchange for the team getting my support and merchandise money! I'm going to 2 road games this year alone despite my complaining, which I only do here or with my buddies. The team gets my full optimism and loud noises in person.

We all have the right to complain. If it wasn’t for complainers this site would’ve folded up long ago.

 

However it would be nice if some hereabouts would take about 10 to 20% off.

[desertshox]

15 hours ago, Nebraska55fan said:

 

Most conferences have requirements that must be met to maintain membership. Most include a minimum number of sports- some being mandatory. 

 

 

that's neither here nor there. i was answering the question why men's golf and tennis were added if wrestling was dropped due to scholarship numbers. the summit league would only allow UNO to join if they had all the sports the rest of the conference had. they don't add them, they stay D2.

[Mavric]

6 hours ago, desertshox said:

that's neither here nor there. i was answering the question why men's golf and tennis were added if wrestling was dropped due to scholarship numbers. the summit league would only allow UNO to join if they had all the sports the rest of the conference had. they don't add them, they stay D2.

 

This also seems like it probably is most of the story, from articles posted earlier:

 

Quote

TWO-TIME ALL-AMERICAN GEORGE IVANOV: I think there were too many alpha males on campus for both of them to be there. Coach Denney was a big name at that time on campus. A lot of people respected him, and here comes Trev Alberts and he starts ordering coach Denney around. Between them two, that didn’t go very well. Immediately, they had a bad connection. I don’t know if that was the reason or not, but it didn’t help. 

 

DENNEY: I tried to, but I could never connect with him. One time I told him that I’m not going to worship you. He would say things like we were intramurals. He actually made us take wrestling pictures down off the walls. They were in the hallways. You almost have to hand it to him that he could pull all this off. He had some charisma. He’s elegant. This guy is sharp. 

 

IVANOV: I don’t think it was his decision to drop wrestling. I think he was just the face, the bad guy. I don't think he could possibly have the power to make that decision. I think he was just the face and someone higher than him made him make that announcement. 

 

In his 41 years at the school, former Chancellor John Christensen said he had never encountered a financial crisis like the one UNO faced a little more than a decade ago. The school was in such a bind that the entire athletic department was in jeopardy, Christensen said in a 2019 interview with the Omaha World-Herald prior to his retirement. In the same story, Christensen said cutting wrestling and football “was the toughest decision I’ve ever had to make in my life. Two of my kids were college wrestlers and one of them is the head coach at North High. They were incredible fans. My wife is a tremendous fan. When I told them, they were devastated.” 

 

CHRISTENSEN: It hurt. And it hurt Trev, as well. It hurt both of us. We had talked with several potential people about a way we could solve the financial thing for the entire campus. It all came down to the fact that the answer wasn’t other things that we were going to throw out in order to reduce the devastation that was occurring. With those things, we didn’t have options. 

 

I hated seeing that happen, but the reality is UNO’s a totally different place now. Simply said, we were in a financial situation where critical decisions had to be made. And if you look at where it’s at now compared to then, even the people who were really upset about it understand now that, yes, I cared about wrestling and football, but now if you look at where the University of Nebraska-Omaha is at educationally, community-engagement wise and the entire campus being advanced, along with student housing along Pacific Street and the building of Baxter Arena and the property purchases there, all of that educationally and athletically and student support-wise advanced the entire campus. And it happened to be there were tremendous financial concerns, but look at where it came now. 

 

There also may have been some Title IX ramifications in play. 

 

According to the Omaha World-Herald, UNO was missing the Title IX mark in 2011 with females representing 52 percent of the student population but just 36 percent of its student-athletes. Dropping football and wrestling immediately made the Mavericks Title IX compliant. 

 

[Toe]

Couldn't they have found another conference for wrestling to compete in? It's not that uncommon for smaller sports, like Notre Dame is a Big Ten member for hockey, and Johns Hopkins competes in Big Ten lacrosse - and they're a freaking D-III school!

[Mavric]

Also, this article from the OWH gives a little more insight. Also at least somewhat explains the crappy timing of the announcement about the wrestling program and why two programs were cut and then two others added.

 

Quote

Alberts also early on talked openly of building an on-campus hockey arena, a years-old idea that had gotten little traction. But before that could happen, there were bigger financial challenges to be tackled.

 

The UNO athletic department in recent years had been in constant budget-cutting mode because of revenue shortfalls. Earned revenues from ticket sales and sponsorships had been flat for a decade, forcing campus administrators to inject ever-increasing amounts of student tuition and fee dollars to prop up the budget. A financial scandal related to athletics funding in 2006 had even cost a UNO chancellor her job.

 

Christensen told Alberts he needed to come up with a long-term plan that would solve the “financial nightmare” in athletics.

UNO at the time competed in Division II in all sports but hockey, and Alberts said he soon learned that was not working.

 

Beyond hockey, UNO athletics had little profile in the community. Few attended football or basketball games, seemingly uninterested in watching the Mavericks play the likes of Washburn, Missouri Western and the other small Missouri and Kansas schools in their conference.

 

Alberts began working quietly with a group of prominent Omaha business leaders on exploring a new future for athletics. 

 

“He’s competitive, strategic and focused,” said Josh White, at the time a young administrator working under Alberts. “He likes to be around a team he can trust and go to work on problems.”

 

Alberts said he and the group let the data drive their decisions, and ultimately came to some surprising realizations.

 

 

UNO was one of the nation’s largest Division II schools. Urban metropolitan-class universities like UNO tended to compete in Division I and play mid-major college basketball, gunning for a bid in the NCAA's March Madness basketball tournament.

 

Another trait of such schools: They typically don’t have football teams.

 

Alberts and the group additionally soon realized UNO did not have the budget to play football at even the lowest level of Division I.

 

UNO’s $1.4 million budget for football would need to double just to reach the average for the schools competing in the Football Championship Subdivision. And that didn’t include the cost of new facilities, or new spending on women’s sports to preserve gender balance.

The school couldn’t realistically expect to make up that kind of money selling football tickets. In the 2010 season, UNO had recorded just over $100,000 in football ticket revenue.

 

As much as he loved football, Alberts said he concluded UNO simply couldn’t afford to take the sport to Division I.

 

Alberts subsequently found a conference potentially interested in sponsoring UNO’s D-I membership: the Summit League. It was a basketball-centric conference made up largely of Dakota schools that had at one time been league rivals of UNO in D-II, as well as fellow metropolitan schools in cities like Kansas City, Tulsa and Denver.

But the Summit League didn’t offer wrestling. In fact, UNO had only three of the eight men’s sports the Summit League sponsored. No other school in the league had fewer than six.

In what was perhaps the most controversial move, Alberts decided that if the Summit League offer came through, UNO would drop wrestling and reallocate its nearly $500,000 budget to fund new men’s soccer and golf teams. Chancellor Christensen also signed off on the decision, even though he was a huge wrestling fan and close friend of Coach Denney.

 

“John and I both knew emotionally this would be extraordinarily difficult for us,” Alberts said last week, “and neither of us liked it at all.”

 

UNO’s admission to the Summit was quietly approved by league schools in March 2011. The timing could hardly have been worse. The vote came just as UNO’s wrestling team was opening competition in the D-II national championships in Kearney.

 

[HANC]

I thought all along that I remembered that wrestling had something to do with Title IX more than anything else.  That was necessary with the move to DI. I feel better after reading that post that I am not completely losing my mind. 

[ColoradoHusk]

4 hours ago, Toe said:

Couldn't they have found another conference for wrestling to compete in? It's not that uncommon for smaller sports, like Notre Dame is a Big Ten member for hockey, and Johns Hopkins competes in Big Ten lacrosse - and they're a freaking D-III school!

I don’t know all the facts, but it sounds lol in order to join their D-1 conference, UNO had to add men’s golf and men’s soccer to compete in the conference, but if they kept men’s wrestling, UNO would have been out of compliance with Title IX.  So that’s what led to the shutting down the football and wrestling programs, and adding golf and soccer. Yes, it sucks that it happened to the wrestling program, but Alberts had to make the best decision for the future of the Athletic Department and the University. 

[Lorewarn]

I think there was a UNO quarterback that set an NCAA record for passing attempts in a game at like 79 or something crazy like that back in the early 2000s. Was dating a girl I had a crush on in high school.

[internetman]

11 hours ago, ColoradoHusk said:

I don’t know all the facts, but it sounds lol in order to join their D-1 conference, UNO had to add men’s golf and men’s soccer to compete in the conference, but if they kept men’s wrestling, UNO would have been out of compliance with Title IX.  So that’s what led to the shutting down the football and wrestling programs, and adding golf and soccer. Yes, it sucks that it happened to the wrestling program, but Alberts had to make the best decision for the future of the Athletic Department and the University. 

you dont think there was anything with UNO being somewhat successful in football and UNL fans/admins/coaches starting to think they will lose recruits? is this a lala-land idea?

[Mavric]

7 minutes ago, internetman said:

you dont think there was anything with UNO being somewhat successful in football and UNL fans/admins/coaches starting to think they will lose recruits?

 

No.

 

Quote

is this a lala-land idea?

 

Yes

[BigRedBuster]

I will never understand why Husker fans are so upset about a sport being canceled at a different school.