The House of Blue

Trust me that Mitch will do nothing for the football program right now because of the success of the other teams; he can hide the deplorable football program by telling everyone how great the other teams are doing. He will hide behind the recent NCAA Men's title for as long as possible and the football program will continue to suffer because of neglect from the athletic department. Strap on your boots because this year is going to be all up to Joker and the boys. I have faith they will turn some heads but I will not get my hopes too high.

The fact that there is success in other areas will DECREASE the chances that football gets taken seriously because it will reduce the pressure on the administration.

The only way uk football gets better is if we have a coach that can overcome the restrictions that we have. I hope Joker is that guy but I'm not sure. I don't know if that guy exists.

That's probably true, but his hands are tied. UKAA makes money, UKAA hands money over to the university general fund. I don't know of any other D1 programs with this arrangement. Most athletic departments keep most if not all of their revenue.

And if we don't "flat get our fanny pasted?" If we go back to a bowl game this year, will you be the first in to thank Mitch for that?

As an aside, I've sent numerous emails to the administration concerning support for our football program, and have received at least a few responses from them. Is your passion for change limited to talking about how poorly we will do this upcoming year, or have you also been proactive?

The above posters are exactly right, the administration went to the legislature with approximately $150MM in requests specifically for the football program. The fact that the request wasn't news, or didn't get reported by anyone at all, is another matter entirely. The facts are that the administration made the request, the House told them no. Some hope was held out that the Senate would restore some or all of the requests prior to passing the budget. I know the House and Senate have now agreed on the budget, but I cannot find any information concerning the status of the bonding requests from UK. Perhaps some journalist could make a call or do some digging to find out whether or not bonding capacity exists in the finalized budget being sent to Bashear?

In any event, Barnhart and the administration made the request for football, but the legislature is (to my knowledge) blocking any funds to be used for that purpose. Strangely, at one time, I was told the bonding capacity was to be first used for dorms on campus, which I'm sure need remodeling, instead of any athletics purpose. Now it's news that a private company will be constructing a UK dorm, without any capital expenditures on UK's part. Some intrepid journalist should find the budget numbers, as laid out in the approved budget, and report the legislature's denial of support for our football program.

Then you, and others, can direct your ire where it is warranted and will do the most good.

Approved by the Kentucky Legislature.

Edit: I just looked this up and it still requires approval from the KY Council on Postsecondary Education, so please disregard the "approved" thing.

Man, it sure is easy to sling your $hit all over the wall with no facts to back anything you say. Hop and others have already provided the info. necessary to render your post silly and irrelevant. I'm surprised that your "well connected sources" didn't tell you how dumb and flat out incorrect your claims are when you went at them with those same baseless idiotic comments?? Probably because you have none.

It's funny because you obviously realize UKs improvement in athletics across the board (as you acknowledged in your post), and yet refuse to give the AD any credit for it. Then you go as far as to incorrectly call him out for making no attempts at improving our football program? Atleast be a little more subtle with your agenda unless you have facts or information to bring to the table. We can all see that you don't know what your talking about now.

That's a good question.

Wow, thanks for the info. Wonder why this is not more heavily reported??

This is in the text of HB265 as passed by the House and Senate and delivered to Beshear. You can pull the entire document from the website.

I linked the conference committee report in the other thread, shown as presented to and adopted by both the House and Senate.

I'm not saying I can't be wrong, though, I'm just speaking from the document I found.

You can check the link and ctrl+f search "stadium" to see what I saw.

That no one seems able to answer??

Well, certainly stirred the pot a bit. We will see what happens with things. I have taken some hits here and maybe deservedly so. But, if we are going to improve on last year we better be DRAMATICALLY improved. That said, we need the university along with the state to put money into the pot to build the facilities needed to play at the big boy table. Go Cats.