This past month UAB President Ray Watts announced that the school would eliminate its football program along with the bowling and rifle teams. Watts cited a study done by Bill Carr and his firm as proper justification to kill a program that bad shown signs of life for the first time years.
Despite attendance being up over 100% from last year and head coach Bill Clark getting the team bowl eligible for the first time since 2004 during his first year as the head coach, Watts continued forward with plans of eliminating the program. This was despite outrage from prominent alumni, boosters, former players, current students and faculty. Watts basically went rouge and shutout everyone else from the process when it came to making decisions for UAB and its athletic department. When making the announcement that the program would no longer exist, Watts said that athletic director Brian Mackin led the study that led to the termination of football, but Mackin hasn’t publicly spoken to the media in months and resigned from his position as AD.
As a UAB graduate, former UAB football player, and someone who has followed this situation very closely from the beginning, it is safe to say things don’t add up to why the program was eliminated on such short notice. It’s not surprising at all that discrepancies were found within the study done by Bill Carr and it has left Watts on the defensive and the city of Birmingham very angry.
UAB faculty members drafted a no-confidence resolution against university president Ray Watts for failing to share governance of the school with the faculty. Students at a UAB basketball game chanted for him to be fired. Some financial giving is drying up, including a $45,000 sponsorship for the Blazer IMG Sports Network that was canceled, AL.com reported earlier this month.
UAB projected a $287,000 loss of athletic department giving in 2015-16 before donations quickly start increasing again in 2016-17, according to a 58-page study of UAB’s future obtained by CBSSports.com through a Freedom of Information Act request. UAB initially released an abbreviated 16-page report by CarrSports Consulting that the university has used to justify dropping football.
The more detailed report includes assumptions consultant Bill Carr made in his work, an apparent discrepancy over how he calculated projected football contributions, no financial model for what happens if UAB must leave Conference USA as expected, and UAB’s hope to reduce the money it owes for canceled football games by finding new opponents for the impacted teams.
Carr’s figures related to donations raise their own questions, including the methodology for how he counts which sports get credit for contributions. For instance, Carr lists $351,126 in total football contributions for 2012-13. Yet UAB on its own NCAA financial report from 2012-13 listed $1,136,522 for football donations that year.
Carr’s report says it divides up how to count where UAB athletic donations come from this way: 70 percent from men’s basketball, 20 percent from football and 10 percent from other sources. That’s essentially completely opposite of how UAB has reported athletic contributions in its annual NCAA reports for many years.
In 2012-13, UAB reported to the NCAA that 46 percent of its donations came from football, 18 percent came from men’s basketball. A similar divide between football and men’s basketball got reported over multiple years.
Bolton said in an interview on Dec. 29 that Carr’s study and UAB’s NCAA reports are an “apples and oranges” comparison and count donation allocations differently. UAB’s NCAA reports allocate gift money based on the scholarship expenses for each sport, meaning more donations go toward football than basketball because of more football scholarships, Bolton said.
There was also a calculation error over how Carr counted UAB football contributions. On a document titled “Football Projections” on Exhibit 1, Page 18 that deals with estimates by keeping football at UAB, Carr arrives at contribution numbers for 2012-13 and 2013-14 by correctly adding up seven itemized lines under the category “Contributions/Gifts.”
However, calculating those same lines for 2014-15 through 2018-19 projections leaves a $129,000 shortfall each year. Carr appears to not count $129,000 in those years for an itemized line titled “EF for Nike, Car, Expense Allowance.” EF stands for Educational Foundation.
Because of this calculation, the total football revenues at the bottom of the page don’t add up and fall $129,000 short each year compared to the listed numbers. That’s a shortfall of $645,000 that isn’t counted over the five-year period of football projections even though the $129,000 was calculated in prior years with actual or budgeted numbers.
There is also an issue with the numbers on the football projections page that estimates finances without football (Exhibit 2, Page 19). The numbers add up for 2012-13 and 2013-14, but not for 2014-15 due to $129,000 not counted from “EF for Nike, Car, Expense Allowance.” That leaves football’s projected revenue $129,000 short than the numbers suggest for 2014-15. It’s not clear why the numbers are counted differently.
I’m not sure how Carr’s firm could have so many errors in their report or how Ray Watts could actually cut a check to a firm to do a study when the data they are producing is incorrect. Things just aren’t adding up and things just don’t smell right at all with this entire thing. I don’t know if they didn’t expect people to read through the report and fact check their findings, but under no circumstances should this be happening when you have so many people that will be affected by this decision.
So now in an attempt to restore whatever credibility he has left, Watts stated at a press conference today that he would have a financial firm reexamine the data that was used to kill the football program. So the school will spend more money on another study that you paid for because the alumni and the general public are not buying what you are selling.
Facing intense scrutiny from his faculty, University of Alabama at Birmingham president Ray Watts announced Friday an independent reexamination of financial figures from a study used to justify the elimination of the football, bowling and rifling programs.
CBSSports.com found several discrepancies in the full report produced by consultant Bill Carr. Watts, who would not discuss specifics about the report, said at a news conference he still believes the initial study’s data is as accurate as when he eliminated football last month. Watts faces a no-confidence vote from UAB’s faculty senate next week.
“I would be foolish if I weren’t concerned,” Watts said.
Watts announced the formation of a committee to select a firm to review the initial Carr report. UAB paid Carr’s company, CarrSports, $79,536 for its work over the course of a year.
Watts said UAB will not field a football team in 2015 and “any further comment is premature” beyond next season. Many UAB football players and coaches have left for other schools since the decision last month.
“I’m sure a question is: Will you reinstate football?” Watts said. “The answer is simply that we agree with our alumni leaders and others that an independent review of the numbers that led to the athletic department decisions is needed. Only then will we have the ability to have credible and constructive dialogue about moving forward.”
So now we play the waiting game to see what comes of this study even though it’s painfully clear that it shouldn’t be necessary in the first place. As I stated before, things just aren’t adding up and anyone with eyes and ears that work properly should be able to tell that there is more than what meets the eye on this entire situation.
Further proof of this came out this past week when recordings of UAB’s football search committee were leaked and they revealed that the University of Alabama Board of Trustees had a hand in influencing who UAB would hire as the next football coach.
The recordings showed then-UAB athletic director Brian Mackin felt it was necessary to run the committee’s choice for its next coach by University of Alabama System Chancellor Robert Witt and two key trustees, Paul Bryant Jr. and Finis St. John.
Bill Clark was selected as UAB’s coach and led the Blazers to bowl eligibility for the first time in 10 years. Mackin said on the recordings that he initially favored hiring South Alabama coach Joey Jones, a former Crimson Tide player, in part because of his relationship with Bryant.
“So Paul Jr. is probably a fan of his,” Mackin said on the recording. “But Paul Jr. does nothing for me. We’ve just got to tolerate him. No coach is going to make him change his position on UAB football.”
All of the recordings can be accessed at AL.com.
The longer this plays out, the more incompetent Ray Watts looks as a university president and the worse the UA Board of Trustees looks as it looks like they played a part or at least played a factor in the happenings with UAB’s athletic department. I have no idea what this new study will turn up, or if it will help bring back UAB’s football program, but the longer Watts is under the microscope the worse it looks for him.