Link: For a laugh..."How AU Can Help Save UAB Football"

Snuffy Smith said:

This is a very unnatural obsession they have with that program. I really don't understand it.

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It's very easy to understand. They believe a strong UAB would eventually be a recruiting threat to the Alabama program and/or divide loyalties of the affluent Birmingham booster base and thus lessen Alabama's influence statewide. It would be a 50-year wait or so, but that's what they wanted to see.

What's funny about this is that the UA BOT probably recognized the same thing and that's why UAB was given no special consideration in regards to its programs losing money, and they shut the program down. What I don't understand from UAB fans is many of them seem to believe that if they can prove the UA BOT shut down the program because it threatened UA, that it would be evidence of something nefarious. Heck, I'll readily yield that point to them. But the role of the UA BOT is NOT to do what's in UAB's best interest -- it's to do what's in the best interest of the UA *system* as a whole, and what's best for the UA *system* is not siphoning resources from its flagship campus to float programs at a satellite program, nor is it in the best interest of the system to have intrasystem competition for interest. The only solution the UAB fans have at the moment is to get UAB its own BOT -- the "#FREEUAB" thing -- but that doesn't work because there's just not enough widespread support for UAB to justify its own, stand-alone network ... thus potentially proving the point that the fan support for the football program wasn't there to begin with.

Literally, the UAB argument turns on itself not once, but twice. Either way you argue it, the UA BOT (via Watts) made the right call. The only people trying to argue against both streams of logic right now are 1. UAB students, which you'd expect; 2. Birmingham-based media, which is also to be expected to some degree due to homerism; and 3. AU fans who realized what UAB's actual position in the equation was.

P.S.: UAB brought a ton of this on itself by taking an adversarial stance with the UA campus. Blame Bartow for that, the overseers of the UA School of Medicine, whoever. But the reason why AUM thrives in Montgomery is that they go out of their way never to threaten the AU main campus.