Baseball is Back

And that's a wow.  

I'm happy for the alumni and the players and their families who made this happen and I'm happy for the university to have a baseball team again.

There's one thing you can't avoid:  this makes the athletic department look ridiculous.  Not since Chris Kingston gloated about hiring Mike Jinks has it looked this dumb, and that took years to be exposed.

When I posted on this originally, I thought there had to be something more than $500,000 at stake.  Something having to do with support staff or maybe a desire to have the program fully endowed before bringing it back.  Or the need to show some pain in athletics, because it just didn't seem to make sense that the whole thing came down to $500,000.

Turned out it did.

So the cut is announced, everyone's crying, there's so much sadness and then...

...a bunch of non-professional fundraisers raised the money in 18 days.

If that is the case, and it is, it seems like the athletic department (and its fundraising AD) might have undertaken that first and saved us all the drama and the embarrassment. Instead of a super-secret operation, maybe some phone calls are made and we don't look dopes.  In fact, why wasn't that going on before the need for cuts?   Isn't there a staff of people whose job it is to raise money for athletics?

In fact, to be fair they should make all the other non-revenue sports do the same thing.  Sink or swim.  (no offense to the swimming team).

And how hard did we try to raise money for the other people in the department who lost their jobs?

I just can't see how you announce that and have to take it back in 18 days because someone did your job for you.