UAB President Ray Watts Cites Cost-of-Attendance As Reason For Program Cancellation

This whole "Ray Watts has opened his mouth and let words come out" thing is getting rather tiresome. There is a pretty fine line between "cleverly defending your position" and "looking like a jackass," and Watts has blazed right through it once again.

O.K. I'll start by simply sharing the quote itself from the article in question. Pardon the delay, I needed to make a trip to the E.R over the weekend first.

"We anticipated that," Watts said. "Our consultants, who are experts in NCAA Division-I athletics, had a strong feeling there were going to be additional changes and additional expenses. We took that into strong consideration in our planning, not to the full extent but partial. But, yes, I think that's part of the overall challenge we are all facing."

Well yes, Ray. Every single Division I school in the country anticipated these changes, and didn't seem to require the immediate and complete cancellation of their entire football program as a response. Namely, what the hell is this?

We took that into strong consideration in our planning, not to the full extent but partial.

Does that mean they kind of thought about taking it into consideration? All I can really imagine is that it involved the following, at a town hall meeting:

President Watts: We strongly considered giving a complete f@$k about our players, but we just didn't have enough f@$ks left to give

Chancellor Witt: You have to understand, funding for f@$ks is way down

Watts: I mean look... we just don't have 85 f@$ks to give for the football team, we had to turn it into partial f@$ks for some players. Really we just felt that in the long term, it seemed better for everyone if we just stopped giving a f@$k entirely rather than appear to play favorites

Witt: I wholeheartedly agree. If we are thinking in the spirit of fairness, if we can't give complete f@$ks, we should just give no f@$ks at all. But feel free to go f@$k yourselves.

I mean, at this point Watts really would do himself a favor by just not talking. Pretty much everyone who has at least an intermediate knowledge of collegiate athletics knows that the cost-of-attendance changes are an issue that need to be dealt with, but that they are more of a change to be rolled with than anything major.

Seriously, the Conference USA commissioner himself called the idea of this being part of UAB's reasoning absurd:

Conference USA commissioner Britton Banowsky believes the impact of recent measures like cost-of-attendance is overblown. While UAB has cited it as one of its reasons behind its decision to drop football, the commissioner calls UAB an "extraordinary situation."

"It's completely manageable. I can tell you that for sure," Banowsky said about the new costs. "Our folks are not overly concerned about that and have plans to implement over time. When you look at the universities closely, what you realize is some operate at a pretty efficient level and get great outcomes. They are able to manage very well and they are not overly concerned about the changes, at least in the short run."

When nobody seems to be having a problem but you, perhaps you are the problem.

Good day, sir.