Did Chancellor Mone ignore the complaints of the boosters, or did he ask Braun about the complaints and decide not to remove her based on her response?Originally Posted by Montana87
It wasn't long after Braun started on the job that postings on the eunuch board started, claiming that she was driving away boosters and sponsors. i didn't pay much attention to those postings at the time, because they came from someone who appeared to have joined the board for the expressed purpose of criticizing Braun, and because the postings were short on facts: no specifics about the numbers of boosters or donors driven away, not even a ballpark guess on how much money was involved. There wasn't a lot of comments about the postings, save for a few veteran members who appeared to have the same unwillingness as i did to take the poster's word without any corroboration.
Since she started as AD, Braun has made some decisions that call her ability to do her job effectively into question. People have been moved around in the department. Some people have left on their own initiative, and others have been let go or encouraged to leave and done so. There is also the debacle of the neutral site for the Horizon League basketball tournaments, and now the dumpster fire of the head coach situation for Men's basketball.
Had i known then what i know now, i would have been more willing to take those original claims seriously. Had Braun responded publicly to the claims then in the manner she has responded to this whole dumpster fire, i definitely would have been more suspicious about any claims she would have made about all being well with Panther Athletics. But especially i find the claims of her unfitness for the job to be much more believable because they are coming from long-time members of the discussion board, people whom i have observed for a number of years and concluded that they were straight shooters, with knowledge and contacts with the program that mean they know what they are talking about.
The whole point of having a Director running the Athletics Department is so the Chancellor doesn't have to make all the decisions about the department on top of all the other decisions involved with running a large university. Delegating authority in that manner requires that the authority be delegated to someone who is worthy of trust. By all recent accounts, Braun is not worthy of that level of authority, and quite possibly never was. How did she get hired? How did George Koonce get hired? How did Rick Costello get hired?
i would really like to see some hard data on the athletics department: (1) How many boosters have ceased donating to the department because of Amanda Braun, from the beginning of her tenure to now? How much money had they given? Where would the department's funding be if they were still donating? (2) How many corporate sponsors have stopped supporting Panther Athletics since Braun took over, and how much money has the department lost as a result? (3) How do the losses sustained compare with the claims of increases in the number of donors and amount of money donated which Braun has made? (3) How much money was lost from declining season ticket sales? (4) How much of the decline is the result of the lack of success Braun claims was the reason for firing Coach Jeter, and how much is the result of decisions made by Braun's predecessors as Director of Athletics? (There are believable claims that most of the decrease is the result of the decision to stop playing downtown.)
As interesting as this information would be to me, i think it would be much more useful in making the case to campus administration that they need to be as engaged with athletics as with any other aspect of university life. Engaged doesn't have to mean being completely hands-on, so long as someone trustworthy is running the department. But the kind of engagement that Nancy Zimpher had with athletics, to use Jimmy's example, clearly has benefits for the university.
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