I’m optimistic about the hire. For those who wanted a “P4” AD, I disagree. P4 guys are generally used to very strong fan/donor support etc. We needed someone who knows what it’s like to try to do more with less, and by all accounts this guy fits the bill.
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Seems like an underwhelming hire but let’s see what happens. Glad they finally made a decision. I also find it a little ironic that former UH AD Rudy Davalos left UH for UNM way back when.
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Most of that was Rhodes work…the point is WE made the jump.
Pez was a disaster ‘Yes Man’
We had a plan in place to become a top G5 program worthy of a P invite.
In the recent PAC expansion news, we kept hearing that SDSU and SMU were possible PAC expansion candidates…but i never heard New Mexico mentioned.
Seriously, someone educate me on if New Mexico is a top G5 school? I don’t know their achievements.
On the fundraising while at LSU…do i really need to comment how hard it is to fundraise at a top P5 program where most Louisiana residents will donate before the put a penny into their own retired funds?
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Hope Fertita wants to build more facilities. Hope Sampson never quits. Cause Pez was not the driving force on these. He lost an argument and millions of dollars to a college student playing politician.
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No good! Should have hired Bill Belichick.
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Football
2017 3-9
2018 3-9
2019 2-10 fired coach
2020 2-5
2021 3-9
2022 2-10
2023 4-8 fired coach
Basketball
2017 19-15
2018 14-18
2019 19-14
2020 6-16 fired coach
2021 13-19
2022 22-12
2023 26-10 lost first round ncaa
The Pit was renovated last in 2011. Their practice facility, Rudy Davalo’s Basketball center was built in 2006.
University stadium is 63 years old. They got a new video board in 2013 and while he ran it he got the artificial turf replaced in 2021.
I get that when he got the job he was an ‘up and comer’ out of LSU with 400 million raised there, all by himself, I am sure. But for 7 years he hired 2 football coaches and 1 basketball coach and got 1 first round ncaa tournament and no bowls. I guess that womens cross country championship really shined. This kind of ‘out of the box’ thinking is awesome.
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Renu, needs to respectfully, recuse herself from Athletic hires…especially ones that take 2 months to find "an outside of the box most important hire in UH history "
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The before and after for baseball is even uglier.
He’s hired and fired a football and basketball coach. His baseball coach hasn’t had a good start either.
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Well good thing we can never fire our coach because he has pictures of important people with goats or something.
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Have you been to albuquerque? For starters basketball is competitive every year, two, every wrinkle of football sucess results in the head coach and staff leaving for a bigger program. New Mexico is a landing spot for coaches and sadly players, because they transfer out asap.
As far as Alquequerque, they are lucky to put 15,000 in the seats. It is not the program that is the problem, the city is full of mediocre “who gives a corn” attitude towards sports. You’d probably find a UT longhorn fan in Albuquerque before a Lobo fan.
In saying that, the lobos had a ton of people travel for the Mountain West Tourney to Las Vegas
So if he had done anything it would be an amazing hire. We could say, have you been to Albuquerque? He was able to find success in Albuquerque!!! Instead he has 1 ncaa tournament from his competitive teams.
I went to Jr High in Albuquerque, yes…
We would be able to say ‘have you been to Albuquerque? He had success in Albuquerque!!!’
But we can’t say that. Instead we can say ‘he was a shining star 7 years ago that helped raise 400 million at LSU, which is a hard place to raise money for athletics, and then he went to Albuquerque and got new field turf and one ncaa tournament loss in the first round in 7 years, so we thought he would do really good in Houston because he was a shining star before he went to Albuquerque.’
Yeah, no doubt. I agree with you there. We shall see, Rick Pitino Jr was a good hire
UNM’s basketball program has averaged 10-15k/game for a long time.
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Good solid hire! The AD position is not an easy job these days. He covers all the bases.
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Two thoughts here: maybe there were a lot of interesting candidates that we were interested in and they weren’t interested in us; the other thought is we brought in the five best candidates we had from Indeed and Sampson only liked one of them. If there’s one person in our university system a billionaire doesn’t want to anger it’s Sampson.
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@UH1927 He hired Richard Pitino for Hoops. Good hire
And just hired Bronco Mendahall, former BYU head coach, for Football, could be a good hire.
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When this all first started I heard they were leaning heavily on Sampson. I was thinking, “damn, that’s like giving up control because he is probably the only employee on campus with any serious leverage.”
The article says Sampson liked him. Just putting 2 and 2.
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Damn, at least give the man a chance
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