The college football world was rocked on Tuesday afternoon when, after a period of intense speculation and mobilization by supporters of the program, the University of Alabama-Birmingham (UAB) announced that they were shutting down their football program. The writing became clearer on the wall once official word came out less than 48 hours earlier about the termination of UAB Athletic Director Brian Mackin:
BREAKING: UAB is firing athletic director Brian Mackin & will announce later this week it will be shutting down football program per source.
— Thayer Evans (@ThayerEvansTLA) November 30, 2014
As it turns out, Mackin was not dismissed, but school President Ray Watts confirmed that he had chosen to vacate his position and would remain with the UAB Athletics Department as a special assistant. Citing “fiscal realities” on Tuesday, Watts went on to say that the school needed to take “decisive action for the greater good of the athletic department and UAB” after looking at the results of a year-long review by a consulting firm.
“[F]ootball is simply not sustainable.”
And with those words, the hammer was dropped on the football program, making UAB the first school to drop their football program since Pacific in 1995. Reaction was swift as students and supporters, who had already been gathering and demonstrating around campus, became exponentially more vocal and angry. As Watts was ushered to a meeting with coaches and playersto break the news, hundreds of fans had already assembled by the field house entrance, and a police escort was needed to keep the masses a safe distance away from Watts.
In contrast, the mood was somber among the players and coaches as they departed the meeting. Regardless of team affiliation, the images shown to the world were heartbreaking for all fans to see.
UAB football players leave in tears after meeting with president. pic.twitter.com/FSQXI99db5
— Jon Solomon (@JonSolomonAspen) December 2, 2014
Sad day. Players showing lots of emotion. #FreeUAB pic.twitter.com/HbfWx6yhOa
— Kyle Burger (@kyle_burger) December 2, 2014
#UAB players leaving meeting #FreeUAB pic.twitter.com/8OLzfT9YmM
— Kyle Burger (@kyle_burger) December 2, 2014
This photo of the UAB logo being removed for the last time is heartbreaking http://t.co/2CQvaAKlXr pic.twitter.com/qYtj8Ymki1
— Bill Hanstock (@sundownmotel) December 2, 2014
A Brief History of UAB Football
The history cannot really be anything but brief, since the UAB football program was just 24 years old. Making its debut as a Division III team in 1991 under Jim Hilyer, the Blazers were actually able to record a respectable finish as a first-year program when they ended the season 4-3-2. A fast riser, UAB made the move to I-AA (now FCS) football in 1993 and then finally to I-A (now FBS) in 1996.
Watson Brown was the longest-tenured coach, spending 12 years at the helm, including the first season in transition from I-AA to I-A football. In 1999, a major step was completed for the program when they were admitted to Conference USA, and the very next season, the team recorded perhaps its most famous victory when they defeated LSU in front of a hostile Death Valley crowd.
Despite a 7-4 finish that season and the signature victory, UAB was not invited to a bowl game. In 2004, UAB reached that milestone when they were invited to the Hawaii Bowl, where QB Darrell Hackney throws for 417 yards and 2 touchdowns in a losing effort.
Following the departure of Brown in 2006, former Georgia coordinator Neil Callaway was hired. Under Callaway, the program toils through 5 straight losing seasons, but two significant victories were also recorded during his tenure, both coming over Southern Mississippi: a 50-49 double-overtime win in 2010, and an upset win in 2011 when Southern Miss was ranked #20.
Garrick McGee was hired in 2012 following Callaway’s dismissal, but he was only able to amass a 5-19 record over two seasons.
In January of 2014, Bill Clark was hired following his a short but successful tenure at the FCS level, and in his first season, UAB becomes bowl-eligible for the first time in a decade.
4 days after the win to ensure bowl eligibility, it was announced that the UAB football program will be shut down following this season.
How Did Things Get to This Point?
The point, you see, is not about a storied program with decades of rich footballing history getting terminated suddenly. Just under 25 years old, the UAB program is rightly considered one of the newer programs in the NCAA footballing landscape, and it has been a program plagued by inconsistent results on the field. There have been no major upsets beyond the aforementioned victories, no bowl wins, and few players who have gone on to be successes at the next level, with Atlanta WR Roddy White clearly the most-successful Blazer in the NFL.
This decision and the fallout from it go well beyond football. Several aspects need to be looked at here. For starters, it becomes increasingly clear with some research that a palpable tension exists between the University of Alabama Board of Trustees (BOT), which governs the flagship campus in Tuscaloosa and two other campuses in Birmingham and Huntsville, and UAB backers. The roots for this may go back further than 2006, but one of the first clear signs of this happened that year, when now-Florida State head coach Jimbo Fisher was being courted by UAB to become their new football coach after Watson Brown left. Verbal agreements had been reached, including a commitment from boosters to pick up half of Fisher’s salary, which would have left UAB on the hook for less salary than they had been paying Brown.
The BOT vetoed the agreement, possibly behind the urging of the son of Alabama coaching great Paul “Bear” Bryant, Paul Jr. At the same time, Alabama was also in the middle of a coaching search. Their target was Nick Saban, and the expectation was that if Saban were to be hired, he would have wanted his former offensive coordinator from LSU by his side. That offensive coordinator? One Jimbo Fisher.
Coincidence? There is of course always that probability, but given the word on Tuesday that fiscal reasoning was behind the decision to terminate the football program, it seems odd to consider that the BOT – which, in the interest of fairness, had ostensibly no part to play in this decision, according to Watts – would have decided to intervene back in 2006 when UAB was making a very fiscally-responsible decision.
Here’s another coincidence: Paul Bryant Jr. is the founder of Bryant Bank. No less than 5 members of the BOT are high-level employees or have spouses who are high-level employees at Bryant Bank.
The bottom line is that the conflict of interest for the BOT in administering two schools competing in the same division is clear for all to see.
UAB has demonstrated this season that it is a football program on the rise, and while it may be a stretch to think that their development under Clark somehow threatened Alabama’s and Auburn’s footballing and sporting hegemony in the state of Alabama, it is not an entirely-ridiculous conclusion. It becomes even more of a logical conclusion to be reached when considering the following from CBSSports.com’s Jon Solomon in an article from mid-November about the future of the UAB football program:
Simmering under the surface of this debate is the role of powerful trustees with Crimson Tide ties, including Paul Bryant Jr., the son of the legendary Alabama football coach. To UAB supporters, there is no doubt Bryant Jr. plans to finally kill UAB football before he leaves the board this year after a decades-old feud tied to Gene Bartow, the late founder of UAB athletics.
Bartow accused Bear Bryant of cheating in a letter to the NCAA in 1991.
“Gene Bartow, out of his mouth, told me on many, many occasions that the aim of the board of trustees was to kill UAB football in the last 8-10 years,” said Jimmy Filler, UAB’s biggest booster and the creator of the UAB Football Foundation. “They’re going to get the recommendation from [UAB President Ray Watts], and they’ll accept what he brings to them.”
Alabama state Rep. Jack Williams, a longtime supporter of UAB, said the board has always been opposed to UAB football.
“It’s been a thorn in their flesh since day one,” Williams said. “I think they’ve done everything to kill it. I’ll be honest: I think the program’s success this year may be what leads to its demise if the board goes through with this because people are excited.”
Consider this as well: In 2011, with complaints and concerns about Legion Field reaching a crescendo, UAB made a motion to the BOT for the construction of a new 30,000-seat stadium in Birmingham. Carol Garrison, the President of the school at the time, gave her full support for a new stadium as it was pitched to city and school system leaders, but it all fell on deaf ears as the BOT denied the motion. The BOT’s concerns were that the program lacked the support to make such an investment viable. Meanwhile, Garrison, whose support for a new stadium was precisely because she had envisioned drumming up a more passionate fanbase for UAB and promoting student life, resigned in 2012.
Ostensibly and officially, the University of Alabama Board of Trustees played no part in the decision at Birmingham this week, and because of the paper trail that has been established with binding agreements, we will likely never know just how involved the BOT was in this process. Evidence is at best circumstantial, but it has long been no secret that ever since UAB coach Gene Bartow accused Alabama legend Bryant of cheating back in the 1990s, Alabama backers have been bearing a grudge. The BOT, for their part, has never done much to fully invest in UAB academically and athletically, providing just enough funding to the latter to stay afloat but without providing the necessary resources to flourish.
Football is big money in Alabama, and the battle for bragging rights brings out the worst in otherwise rational adults across the state. Could the Board of Trustees and/or Alabama backers have gone to so much lengths and harbored such a vindictive grudge against what is supposed to be a sister school that UAB arrived at the point it reached yesterday? Again, we will never know. What we do know is Bryant Jr.’s position by virtue of both his father’s and his own name ensures that of all the members of the BOT, he has the most influence at his disposal.
Turning now to UAB itself. What about the school administration’s role in this?
Watts claimed that when Clark was hired in early 2014, Clark was not only made aware of the ongoing review of the athletics program at the school, but that he was “candid” with Clark about the possibility that the football program may be terminated. No, seriously: a school President did in fact go public yesterday with the statement that an up-and-coming coach who had turned his team into an FCS Championship contender was more than happy to come coach at a middling FBS school with the knowledge that the school might be considering termination of the program.
And yes, Watts did maintain a straight face to the media.
In total, 3 programs have been terminated at UAB – football, rifle, and bowling. As part of the initial process of the review, all coaches at UAB were asked to determine what the financial needs for their programs would be to remain competitive over the next half-decade. As part of the results of the review, it turns out that Watts and the consulting firm used the very same numbers he and they had asked the coaches for against them to determine the futures of their programs.
Clark was hired less than a year ago, and in that short time, he has taken players he had not even recruited and turned a struggling outfit into a bowl-bound team. Meanwhile, the report was commissioned by the school over a year ago. The turnaround Clark has inspired is evidenced by the results on the field, and fans have been responding to the rumors about the uncertain future of the football program that have gone back for some time now – as recently as last week, a prominent UAB booster announced the formation of a football foundation with the following goals:
- Extending coach Bill Clark’s contract. Clark, nearing the end of his first season at UAB, agreed to a three-year deal originally.
- Scheduling non-conference opponents beyond the 2016 season. At the moment, UAB has no non-conference games scheduled for 2017 and beyond.
- UAB’s administration committing to support the program “at levels that provide UAB football an opportunity to compete for C-USA championships.”
Would that type of support and financial pledging be the very thing that Watts bemoaned that UAB lacked which played into determining the football program’s fate?
Finally, Watts claimed that “killing football was not what we set out to do.” However, the opening page of the report seems to suggest otherwise:
“In accordance with the university’s new strategic plan, UAB Athletics’ Strategic Planning includes a rigorous evaluation of its appropriate NCAA Division I classification and sports sponsorship – including the possible elimination of football, UAB’s most resource intensive sport.”
The level of duplicity being displayed by UAB administration is staggering.
Now What?
Watts appears convinced that Conference USA (CUSA), whose bylaws require its member schools to field football teams, will be willing to create an exception for UAB and allow their other teams to continue to compete in CUSA seasons. Britton Banowsky, CUSA Commissioner, made the following statement after the UAB announcement:
‘We don’t fully understand the decision, nor agree with it, but do respect it and the authority of the UAB administration to make it. UAB has been a contributing member to the Conference since its inception and has expressed a strong interest in remaining a member, a topic that the Conference’s Board of Directors will take up in the months ahead.”
If UAB cites “business as usual” rationale in deciding to ax the football program, it seems hypocritical of the school’s President to express a public wish for CUSA to dismiss the same approach and create an unusual exception to allow UAB to remain a CUSA member.
Should the conference decide (as expected) to force UAB to leave the conference, the effect will spill over to the entire UAB athletics department, as scholarship athletes who were recruited on the premise of facing CUSA opposition and who ultimately elected to become Blazers will face uncertain futures. One other major effect for the athletics department will be the $2 million worth of penalties for canceling previously-scheduled nonconference football games that UAB is now on the hook for.
At a human level, what happens now to the student-athletes on UAB’s now-terminated athletics teams? The school has pledged to honor scholarship offers, and under NCAA rules, the students will be allowed to transfer without having to sit out a year. Perhaps the most jarring footage that emerged from Birmingham after the news was this video clip, posted by one of the football players (Warning: Video contains explicit language and profanity):
Military veteran Tristan Henderson’s impassioned plea to Watts, seen from 3:30 onwards in the video clip above, has since gone viral, making it to Sportscenter as well.
Part of President Watts’ closing statement to the media yesterday was to say that “[t]he best days for UAB Athletics are yet to come.”
Watts will have the unenviable task of convincing the UAB community that those words were not just another empty promise along the road of broken dreams that the UAB football program went down.
(H/T to James Copeland and AL.com, most particularly Kevin Scarbinsky and Kelsey Stein, for the bulk of the source material used for this editorial)
(Featured image: al.com/Joe Songer)
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