Almost.
Western Kentucky University drew UD‘s attention years ago, when a brave faculty member, Robert Dietel, stood up at a regents’ meeting to try to stop the school from switching to Division I-A football. (The link takes you to an old post – 2006 – which doesn’t make clear that, except for the final paragraph, it’s taken from a local newspaper article.) He was shouted down by the idiots who run the school.
Now proudly I-A at enormous expense to the students, WKU is “the only winless team in the country in 2009.” As the local writer explained in 2006:
To stay in Division I-A, WKU will have to average 15,000 fans at its home games. But it hasn’t even been filling L. T. Smith Stadium, where attendance has been 10,279 so far this year and was 12,795 last year — despite all the interest built up as the school won the 2002 NCAA Division I-AA national championship and went on to complete 10 consecutive winning seasons.
Let’s see how ticket sales are going now.
[The team] sold about 7,300 season tickets this year. Last season they topped out at 7,506 — a significant drop from the 8,648 sold in 2008.
You shouldn’t let idiots run universities. An obvious truth, but it seems to need restating.
August 2nd, 2010 at 8:26AM
[…] pressing this story on University Diaries because, like the scandal at Western Kentucky, it’s shaping up to be the paradigmatic corrupt university sports story — it’s […]
September 1st, 2011 at 4:59AM
[…] Dietel can take no pleasure in what has ensued over the last few years, though I’m sure he’s not surprised. He told the idiots at WKU what would happen. They didn’t listen. The school is now a money-hemorrhaging laughingstock. […]
August 7th, 2013 at 6:42PM
[…] 2009, WKU was the only winless team in the country. Moving briskly to 2011, things look just as bleak. 2012 was all about hiring major […]