Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/368554
pushed for the report to make sure that Berkeley would move forward. And quite frankly, we've been holding her back." Things like that give you a lot of con7dence. So you read about the football APR, and the other thing that was interesting about that, and I think it's one of the things you see, is that if you don't have strong teams, you're more willing to try to put muscle on the 7eld and maybe not pay as close attention to the academics. One famous football coach said to me, "If I get to be really good, I won't have to have the knuckleheads out there." In other words, he can be more selective. He's not going to push the administra- tion to accept somebody who has a little bit lower academic credential. So the Cal football program was starting to struggle, and I think that was part of this debate and part of this argument. But he was very blunt about it. OK, now let's take the stadium. I sort of marvel at it in a lot of ways, and I'm not sure the scheme that was proposed was the best one, but here you've got a football program at Cal that's thinking it's in the big time. You've got a board of regents that de- manded the stadium be completely re- done, because it was sitting on an active fault zone, and you go, OK, they went all out for their facilities for football. They were going for the big time. Well, I've never in my life seen a case where the athletic director controlled that, as op- posed to the president or the chancellor or the 7nance people. Universities don't walk into $100 million operations and say, oh, they're doing that. Nobody here does that. They come through a particu- lar process. Well, they went through a particular process, including support from the chancellor and including ap- proval by the regents. The other thing is, when did they do this? It was 2007-2008. So they think they've got 80 percent of the luxury part of it sold, and they start this just at the beginning of the recession. So they went from 84 percent commitment to 60- some percent commitment. And all of a sudden they've got a big hole. Whose FIELD OF DREAMS Barron and Penn State football coach James Franklin escort Sandy Barbour into Beaver Stadium on the day she was an- nounced as the uni- versity's new athlet- ics director. Photo by Annemarie Mountz