It's confusing to me that you can look at the scope of his tenure as an AD and say the main focus has been winning. I think he is trying to achieve those aforementioned goals and then ride out when/if the winning comes.
Like I said, you will see what you want to see. There has been a good deal of success with John here. We won big 12 conf titles in two sports that had never won them before. FB was in top 10 not even 15 months ago and has six straight bowls. Track has produced two of the greatest athletes ever to attend KState, and national champions. You can also say FB was down last year and MBB has been down even further the last two years. I think Frank leaving, oscar replacing him, and the last two seasons is a significant trend. I do not agree with you that it demonstrates a lack of focus on winning.
The puzzling choice of oscar Weber makes everything extremely gray. He wasn't hiring an ascending coach. He didn't pull a lateral hire. He took a guy off of the scrap heap, who was headed to the College of Charleston, and gave him Frank's contract. And now, when oscar's trajectory is starting to mirror what happened at Illinois before he got fired, the perception is that he wanted some intangible thing like compliance. Two seasons of missing the NIT erase the goodwill of that Big 12 title very quickly, especially when that's accompanied by a first round loss to a #13 seed in the same year.
The refusal to call a spade a spade, which is that Currie made a mistake in hiring oscar, if for nothing other than the fact that it was a divisive hire to begin with, is frustrating. You asked someone else what constitutes success. Well, what are peer institutions doing? What has Iowa State been able to do in the last five years? 5 NCAA tournament appearances, 2 Sweet 16's, 2 conference tournament championships, etc. Would I take that over our one shared Big 12 title? Yes. Is there something Iowa State inherently has that we don't that inspires basketball success? No. Why can't we have that? Why should we
expect anything less than that?
Do I think a path to showing we're serious about those expectations includes firing oscar Weber and hiring Brad Underwood? Yes. Do I believe that finances are playing a part in preventing that? Yes. Do I believe that hiring Brad Underwood and having a basketball program on par with Iowa State is higher on Currie's list than completing BSFS renovations and building a war chest for the next football coach? No.
And you know what? If that's what Currie wants, and it's what he's prioritized, I'm fine with that. I agree that it all begins and ends with football. But what I don't want is some ruse put forward by the athletic department that oscar Weber's program is the best option we have on the table, and we believe that this is our best shot at winning, because that's complete and utter bullshit. If our primary objective was winning, we would have fired oscar's ass, and John would be in Brooklyn right now laying roses at the door of Brad Underwood's hotel room door.
