I understand her leaving. As noted above, the timing means whoever comes in will be trying to recruit at a time when most players have already committed and next year is likely to be rough. The key question for me, seems to be was Amy as bad as her record would indicate, or was she simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was hired at the tail end of the amateur era, and Coached into the pro era. Did she have any $ to hire players? Did she even have full scholarships? Did she have less than the rest of the BW? If no to these questions, is it reasonable to be awful? I don't know the answers to the questions, but if we are going to have expectations for the Coaches, the University has to be competitive.

Like many of you, I don't like the pro era of LB sports. It goes against what the University and what education is all about (or used to be). I don't believe it is sustainable (economically, not ecologically).

I was at a conference last week and had some interesting and disturbing conversations about what the future looks like with artificial intelligence. One thing that is already happening is the decrease in demand for entry level positions in industry. While AI is not currently able to do jobs that require high levels of discernment, they are already making people who can do these job far more productive. And AI can do many of the tasks that have been done by entry level folks. This is likely, in many industries, to mean a decrease in those entry level jobs.

Why this is relevant to a sports board, is that if the current crop of graduates struggle to find jobs, it is likely to impact the willingness of the next cohort to spend 4 years and go into debt to get a degree. One smart guy with a strong tech and education background is predicting that the CSU system is likely to see as much as a 30-40% decrease in students overall. This kind of drop is likely to be devastating to the budgets of CSUs. Survival of institutions is at risk. And frankly we don't have a strategy to survive. Thinking this wont impact athletic budgets is fantasy. As an institution, LBSU already has signaled under the last President that we are unwilling to spend on athletics, what will we do if there is a budget crisis?

The business person in me says in this potential environment, survival may depend of differentiation. If there are less students, and the demand is skewed towards the best students, you had best be an institution that is training the best. LB was on a path to compete with SDSU as the best CSU 10 years ago, JCC aspired to compete with Dominguez Hills instead. My belief is that defunding athletics will make us less interesting to the smaller pool of students that we will have to compete for.