I was thinking more to the future with UW and Minnesota. Don't have high hopes here. I don't think UW and Minnesota are at all comparable in the recent past. There also isn't a good other program to compare UW to. Maybe Michigan but they aren't nearly at the historical level of that program and Michigan appears to care and have funding.
DeBoer didn't have to rebuild. He inherited a team that took an all-time bad coach who took a team that should have been 8-4 at worst and somehow went 4-8. His offense had two rookie starting NFL OTs, 5 NFL WRs, 2 NFL TEs and some decent talent on defense that were on their third years at least of college.
Rebuilding now simply seems like if you're willing to spend psychotic amounts of money. Which sucks and who cares.
For UW (or anybody in this era) to be good going forward you need the following:
1. You need upper campus to be invested in the marketing/branding that athletics can have for the University as a whole and have alignment on how upper campus can leverage athletics
2. You need an Athletic Director that is business centric that treats football as part of a Billion dollar business that is hyper competitive about locking in funding, on-field performance, and telling the story needed to link branding, awareness, etc. of the program as well as its role as part of the University ecosystem as a whole
3. You must have a head coach and football operations staff that not only can identify talent but also connect with the players to ensure strong recruitment of those players with their fit into the program (and individual futures) as well as ensuring proper retention of player talent on the roster (keep those that are part of the solution and cutting ties with those that aren't)
4. You need to secure the funding from large whale investor(s) that are aligned to the overall vision with all parties presenting a compelling business case for the investor to sign off on and view themselves not only as a business partner but key stakeholder in the program's overall success.
It's not hard to see why this is all a HUGE issue for the University of Washington:
1. UW isn't a University that is necessarily worried about athletic success impacting their overall branding and profile. It's a Top public university and that's going to remain true whether football shits on itself or is wildly successful. It's not a place that is trying to expand its overall student population so it doesn't necessarily need the lift in applications that often comes with athletic success ... at best the jump in applications during high water points of athletic success may nominally increase the underlying average applicant ... at worst it's just noise in applications that equates to additional time, energy, and likely cost to sift through those applications by undergraduate admissions. And lastly, because of the University's profile academically there's little to no worry about a decline in the quality of the accepted applicant pool due to athletics. So you're stuck in a really awkward spot where unless athletics is a focal point of a University President or whatnot, athletics is not going to be viewed as a priority for upper campus as long as its operating at an acceptable level ... notably as long as athletics isn't an embarrassing representation of the University.
2. Chun is here because he had to find a lifeboat to rescue him from Wazzu. You don't have to look hard to find instances where people have interacted with Chun and not walked away as impressed. In no way does he look like he's bought into the University of Washington nor does he come off as a hyper competitive person who has a desire to win in everything they do. Instead, he looks like the same type of bureaucratic administrator that has paraded around college athletics for too long and is frankly outdated. There's probably still a role for him in college athletic administration but it's not at a place like UW where the competition level with its peers is completely in a kill or be killed environment.
3. Fisch is a mixed bag here ... his talent evaluations and roster management have been bright spots to his tenure whereas his on-field coaching has some flags and the fact that he's struggled to satisfactory commit to the program has lasting impacts throughout his roster and with fans/donors. It's no secret that there isn't strong alignment between his boss (Chun) and that leads to some significant issues. The last 2 weeks has provided some insight into him perhaps not having the pulse on his team/players like maybe he thought he did.
4. This is really the most important aspect and the issues you have with Chun and Fisch making it next to impossible to go to well funded "investors" with a buttoned up business case for investment that a donor is going to sign off on ... never forget that donors aren't uber wealthy by accident. Then you add one of the biggest issues that people in this region have (compared to other areas of the country) in that in the older donor population you have a sensibility and modesty to them that doesn't just blindly throw around "fuck you money" around as a passion project ... instead they invest with purpose and need to feel good about the return on their investment. How you define that return can be different for each donor but it's becoming increasingly difficult to produce that in the current environment.
So it's overall messy and hard to see where this gets better before it probably gets a bit worse without some systemic change (which goes to why the UW President attached his name to what he did this week) ...
It's one of the big reasons why I've been so adamant about things being precarious for UW (notably if Jedd was to leave) because the infrastructure under the hood right now is so unaligned that whenever the band-aid gets ripped off it could get really ugly.
If we're prioritizing ... Chun needs to be ousted before Jedd leaves
