The locker room video is hard to watch. As I said the other night, it must be really rough to have an Iraq War veteran call you a liar to your face - and have him be right.
UAB Blazer senior tight end Tristan Henderson went on ESPN's Outside the Lines to talk about his outburst and everything surrounding it. Some thoughts:
It's an absolute joke that President Watts told them that "it was a numbers thing" and "the numbers didn't add up" but never actually shared with them what all those numbers were. You can't just urinate into the wind and then tell me it's raining and expect me to just nod my head because you're the boss.
Furthermore, I know we've heard it before, but what the hell does "we don't know what we don't know" mean? I understand its usage in the general sense. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is infamous for his circuitous line about "the things that we don't know that we don't know" - aka those things that we can't realize that we didn't know about a situation until after we've gone through said situation.
I'm not sure that really applies here. All of the numbers are full and present, from what the CarrSports report found, to the money that has been raised, to... or maybe Watts is referring to the data they didn't gather about what the cost would have been of converting to a Division I FCS program rather than dropping the sport altogether.
Speaking of numbers, let's talk about 6-6. As Henderson said in the video, the city of Birmingham is supportive of the program, and "they were (just) waiting for us to become who we became." I can empathize as a decade-long fan of a bad baseball franchise - after a certain point, people are going to be reticent to be fully supportive until they see something worth supporting. Now that they finally have that, it has been taken away because of numbers that still don't fully make sense and an administration that very likely was not focused on those numbers to begin with.
Lastly, I'm glad to hear Henderson's immediate assertion that UAB Blazer football will absolutely and without hesitation be participating in any bowl game that will have them. Though I can't decide if it's awesome or cruel that ESPN is currently projecting them to be chosen for the Bahamas Bowl.