I think everyone should wait on all out praise on Smith until he proves more. People want to get behind him and he still has a lot to prove. He may end up great but I'll wait and see first. Your two major athletic programs are very important and I haven't seen anything from him yet. If they bring Danny back after 2 -20 loss seasons out of three then they don't care about it. And then letting Danny laugh and giggle cracking jokes like he is the best coach in the country with his arrogance is sickening. Get him out of here and find someone that takes the job seriously!!!
I?m going to go ahead and call this the worst take in the history of Marshall message boards,?likely never to be defeated.
Here?s the thing - it?s Marshall University, a place focused on the higher education of students in the tri-state region and beyond. It has sports teams that are meant to enhance the college experience for the students and the school should strive to be successful in everything it does, however, the success of athletics should be about number 10 on any top 10 list of things Brad Smith should be worried about on any given day.
Number one is always the quality of education provided by the university followed in some order by fiscal soundness, attracting and hiring quality faculty and staff, growing enrollment, growing the endowment, raising the academic profile of the school, developing new programs to meet changing markets, etc.
Athletics indirectly, and directly, benefits long term from those endeavors, but the point of those endeavors is not to have a better football or basketball team. A new business school, the cyber security stuff, the top online computer science stuff, are things that benefit the school, the city and the state. Doubling the endowment, growing enrollment, cutting deficits (while wvu is going the opposite direction in those metrics) is what Brad Smith should be judged on and he is killing it.
Marshall had/has 100s of things that need fixed just to make sure it is even still open in 20 years. That is, and should be, the focus of the President of the university. If he doesn?t we won?t even have a home town to cheer for.