Bubba didn't want the job. No biggie. It's not a great job.
Agreed.
However, I think there's an element of truth that she's pretty out of touch with athletics. During realignment, while the worst thing that Schulz did was head to the Olive Garden and watch a horrible move with this wife, BGL went and had dinner with the CU Chancellor right before they bailed to the Pac-10, and the subject never even came up. Never. Came. Up.
As news hit that Colorado had left the Big 12 for the Pac-10, one day after Nebraska moved to the Big Ten, it didn’t take long for word to spread that Gray-Little dined Wednesday night with Colorado Chancellor Philip DiStefano, in town to evaluate university administration. They spent part of Thursday together as well. Yet, DiStefano didn’t share his school’s move with Gray-Little. Even if DiStefano was sworn to secrecy and didn’t want to jeopardize Colorado’s standing with the Pac-10, it paints KU’s chancellor as out of touch with her Big 12 peers.
When asked, Gray-Little said at her news conference Thursday that conference affiliations are decisions made by presidents and chancellors, who bank on the guidance of the experts, the athletic directors. Well, I find it difficult to believe that Perkins advised his boss to be schmoozing alumni in England when the Big 12 meetings were taking place in Kansas City. Perkins has been talking up the potential for conference realignment for months.
Whichever adviser told the chancellor it was fine to blow off the Big 12 meetings — after all, it’s just a sports deal and who really cares about sports, right? — needs to advise the chancellor to find a better adviser. Similar to her previous university, North Carolina, the basketball team plays a huge role in marketing the school. It’s not good when a chancellor or president places too much importance on athletics. It’s even worse when not enough importance is placed on it because in the long run that hurts the academic standing of the institution. Gray-Little should have maintained regular contact with her peers from the Big 12 and with peers from other possible future conferences for months.
http://www2.kusports.com/news/2010/jun/11/defining-faces-ku-perkins-gray-little-and-self-exp/If I were a KU fan, I'd be just petrified that this woman is leading my university from a sports perspective. From the academic side, she seems to have a pretty solid handle on things, so in that way, it would appear that they're taking the Colorado stance in the fact that the UP will spend all of their time building up the academic side at the expense of the athletics side. Just as long as the athletic department doesn't embarrass the university's image (which it's doing nearly every single day), she would probably prefer to have nothing to do with it.
If I'm an AD, and I see the mess that's there, and I see a Chancellor that couldn't give less of a crap about what's going on, I'm thinking, "I'd rather stay at my mid-major school too."
