The sounds like the way things are going those shoes will be left empty.
Perplexing why SJU does not have a talented full time AD in place already...some sort of inside conflict or incompetence perhaps???
Both!
We have the most f'd up athletic department in the Big East. We obviously have internal conflicts as has been documented recently with Slice, golf, etc. That we have the most incompetent organization in the Big East begins with not even having an experienced AD and it has zero to do with $$. For what fans are charged for season tickets, mediocre post season records, hitting rock bottom, etc., the past and current staff have been generously compensated. An associate head coach who barely broke a sweat received a guaranteed multi year contract in the half mill range yet we continue to use $$ as an excuse for delaying the hiring of an AD. One of the major responsibilitis of an AD is fund raising so if we are saving $ we are also losing future revenue and donors with the continued mom and pop approach while the serious contenders have become big box. It is time some leaders at St. John's start thinking outside the box.
I disagree. The incompetence has EVERYTHING to do with $$. There's a little history to it. When the school opened up their wallets to pay Lavin, it was a huge expenditure for them - in the $2 million range. Lavin for his part, supposedly said to the school that he would take a lower salary in exchange for hiring a top notch, well paid staff. This is how we got Keady (a high paid special advisor) and Dunlap, who didn't come cheap since he was head coaching caliber. In hiring Mullin, they essentially were paying him about what Lavin's exit salary was, plus there were budget line items for a higher paid staff than SJU was accustomed to. So we got a big contract for Slice, and presumably Richmond is well compensated also. However, Bobby G. inherited a school in financial duress from a sharp decline in his first freshman class ( which results in a smaller soph, junior and senior class in successive years). So enter Mullin, out goes the AD, and the school saves maybe $400K per year while the Chief Counsel does double duty.
You can't hire a D2 or D3 AD IMO. D1 athletics in big time conferences are much more complex, with contracts for TV, radio, and arena deals (MSG), apparel, plus ad revenue, ticket sales, licensing etc. I'm going to take a wild guess that since all of those contracts involved Oliva anyway, the university figured that money was the most important role for the AD to play so let the lawyer run the AD.
When you are trying to save dollars in any organization and do it by staff reductions, any smart leader wants to keep energetic talent and get rid of dead wood. In Barry's case, they let the young talent walk in a department where many with ability have already departed and not been replaced - all to save money. In this regard, Bobby G is a disaster.
Beast, I appreciate your opinion and you are one of my favorite posters but over the past ten years the common denominator in our current position at the nadir of the Big East has not been $$ but incompetent leadership beginning with our last president and carrying over to our current president with less than stellar academic credentials. I was thrilled the search focused on a lay person and Bobby G seems to have good intentions but from his highest degree in Agricultural Economics to the schools he served, I think we could have done better considering we saved 145 years worth of salaries by having Vincention priests work at the bottom of the pay scale.
But Bobby G has not been the problem and neither has enrollment tanked to the degree you alluded to. In fact, if you just look at enrollment at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Undergrad Division on the Queens Campus,
from Fall 2005 to Fall 2015 total enrollment was : 2,999 3,024 3,004 3,186 3,395 3,436 3,340 3,197 3,126 2,973 3,173. During the years 2009 to 2011 we had one of the highest enrollment in our history with a peak of 3,436. Overall, however, enrollment has been flat as is the case at most private universities whose academic reputations are middle of the pack. At least president Bobby recognized that our tuition vis-a-vis reputation/quality was in dissonance and he froze tuition. A school that puts more focus and energy on tuition rather than endowments will always be operating on the financial fringe. Another issue which may affect future endowment is the fact that St. John's is now less than 50 per cent Catholic. In its rush to become more diverse they have failed to recruit Catholic high school students that are the heart and soul of competing schools like Villanova, Xavier, Creighton, Providence and former Big East members like Notre Dame and Boston College and even area schools like Marist, Fordham and Seton Hall.
Which leads me back to the AD search. As you correctly stated, Oliva has been involved in most of the situations that have had a negative impact from the Harrington/Chiang scandal to the Lavin and posse contracts six years ago to the current cluster fuck with Barry, Mullin, Mitch, ad infenitum. If anything, if I were a new president, he would have been or would be at the top of my list to be replaced, let alone hold two vital roles, neither of which he seems especially competent in if past performance can be used as a barometer.
All those things have to do with competence. That mediocrity also extends to a few of our academic departments that have lost students and replaced them with lower college ready students in General Studies. I will give you two examples. The School of Education many years ago was top notch. Now, not so much, having fallen behind local schools like Hofstra, Fordham, Hunter and Marist. That decline has been significant enrollment wise due to our reputation. The second example is the School of Business. We have fallen further behind Fordham, NYU, Baruch and we don't even rank nationally. Those two divisions provided a great base of future endowment contributors and supporters in general. The effort to improve those divisions has been pitiful. An exception is the School of Pharmacy which has always been well respected. Bottom line, in my view, is the continued mediocrity in many areas has led to the current cunnundrum. As a former poster was fond of saying "the fish stinks from the head". In the athletic department we seemingly don't have a head and the interim one stinks in my opinion. In the schools of education and business the heads have stunk for years now. Will president Bobby, with a degree in Agricultural Economics, be the saviour? I am not sold yet.
St. John's has many issues, some of which I mentioned on another Forum thread here. Not having an AD might be a symptom, but there are much bigger issues and the fall of the Tobin Business School and the School of Education are two of the biggest.