Grambling

[JesseMartin]

See, now it's hard to pick a side at this stage. The athletes have more support. But JSU and their community lost a lot of potential income, and they had nothing to do with what happened, so who is going to compensate them? On the other hand, the whole reason for this is because Grambling is slowly going broke! Maybe they could be JSU2?

There is something to be said for fundraising...but as much as we bitch about NOT getting INCREASES in funding, imagine getting your budget cut by over half and having to figure out where the hell that's going to come from. Fundraising isn't a miracle. Seems to me their Athletic Dept. was lucky in that they are probably like ours and only a fraction of their funds come from the school, while the rest is self-sustaining. The problem is when that money was cut they didn't allocate it properly. Now that that is happening, they will probably be facing a lawsuit in excess of the football program's entire budget, so there is that.

[greenminer]

Not the coaches:

I'm not gonna lie, I'm suspicious.

I'm happy to admit I read that wrong, but I could have sworn I read coaching staff...and the article says it was updated after I initially read it. Anyways...

If I were the President and AD I would have traveled with the team.

[SilverEagle]

You can't tell me (well, you could, but I wouldn't believe it) that most Grambling (and their opponents) fans are really there at those games for the football. They all come to watch the Grambling Band. They should drop Football and let the Grambling band do like UTA's marching band......http://www.uta.edu/music/ensembles/view.php?ensembles_listid=4&ensembles_catid=11

[Mean Green 93-98]

http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/9846943/grambling-state-tigers-players-send-letter-complaint-administration

Yeah, I'm going to have to side with the players for sure now.

Ever heard the saying, "Two wrongs don't make a right"? Regardless of how poor the conditions may have been, they (apparently) led people to believe that they were going to travel to and play in the game at Jackson State, and just didn't show up. That's lying, and that's letting a lot of folks down who in no way contributed to the problems at Grambling. If things are that bad, quit. Yes, some people will lose some respect for you. But after what these players pulled, I'm not sure they deserve any respect from anyone.

[JesseMartin]

It seems more to me like the coaches and admin had everybody convinced that the players would stop their boycott or strike or whatever by that time...note that after they walked out of the Tuesday meeting, they made no indication that they would cave on their (very reasonable) demands by Friday. You can't really blame them for the timing either...if they spent all summer and the first half of this season trying to get changes made to no avail, then at what point do you finally say enough is enough? Wait till the season is over and a few more guys have gotten staph infections, possibly bad enough to be hospitalized? Wait until your 3rd or 4th coach of the season is fired before maybe the 4th or 5th pays attention to the egregious problems? It seems that by spending the last few months pursuing change quietly before going to such extremes, the players have been the most reasonable people out of all involved parties on that campus.