Jeralta wrote:

Those picking on GA don't know business.

1) GA isn't rogue.  His actions align with the Board-approved strategic plan and President's expectations.
2) If the Board or Prez didn't want him he wouldn't be here.

As I've often said, I don't have a real problem with RE being let go, but the way it was apparently done is appalling. There was no need to do it that way. They should have let him go as soon as TJ decided to leave, if that was the decision.

I will admit to not liking your post about the upcoming t shirt promotion.  That isn't on Amodio, that is on his marketing director who I know for a fact is working very hard.  She has a difficult job of trying to get students who are apathetic interested in college hoops.  Trust me, I know how hard that job is because I used to have to beg students to attend games with me.  I would sit in the lobbies and drag people down to the games.  The Crew is doing a promotion and a tailgate which I think is pretty good.  The marketing director cares and is trying, it's just damn near impossible to get students are Duquesne interested.  It sucks.

Simms wrote:

I will admit to not liking your post about the upcoming t shirt promotion.  That isn't on Amodio, that is on his marketing director who I know for a fact is working very hard.  She has a difficult job of trying to get students who are apathetic interested in college hoops.  Trust me, I know how hard that job is because I used to have to beg students to attend games with me.  I would sit in the lobbies and drag people down to the games.  The Crew is doing a promotion and a tailgate which I think is pretty good.  The marketing director cares and is trying, it's just damn near impossible to get students are Duquesne interested.  It sucks.

This is Amodio, he hired her, she reports to him, he approves the spending on promotional ideas, its all him. He is the boss all report to him, so if a lousy T-shirt give away is all she came up with, and he OK"D the money to spend on the lousy T-shirts its all him. Iron duke has said before, its a job for life at Duquesne, no matter how much you fail nobody gets fired, except the hardest working most productive employee that they have had in the last 30 years.

It is the responsibility of the AD to support and promote the product, not undermine the most productive employee and fire him because his buddy did not get a job for life.

Jeralta, so Amodio followed the boards advice to fire RE and not leak but directly send the email to CBS sports.com web site 23 minutes after he left CD's office? We all know the first place the e-mail landed was Cincinnati, hmmm, wonder who worked there for years and has friends, then it went to CBS sports.com website, and who is a BB analyst for them, ohhhhhhh, Dino Gaudio, how convenient.  Thanks for your input, but I think you may have had to much eggnog during the holiday season.

I'm not sure about everything in the above post but Dino Gaudio did studio commentating (half time, etc) for the CBS College Sports channel prior to ESPN.

Bill Rafferty and Jay Bilas work for both CBS and ESPN.

Last edited by duqkurt (1/08/2013 11:45 pm)

You're right, Kurt, some of these guys do indeed have non-exclusive contracts. Bilas and Len Elmore do NCAA tourney games on CBS while working for ESPN the rest of the year. Dick Vitale's contract on the other hand does not allow that. Raftery is a CBS Sports employee who does mainly Big East games on ESPN. Perhaps he was grandfathered in from the old syndicated Big East Network, as I remember him well from that. So I stand corrected on that point.  I still can't find any evidence that Gaudio has ever worked for CBS. Even if he did indeed do a guest spot or two as a studio analyst during the 2010 NCAA tourney, as you seem to recall, that's a pretty tenuous link to be pointing fingers at him in this case. Parrish wrote about the aftermath of the shootings at Duquesne, the 2009 A-10 championship game against Temple, he was one of the first, if not the first, to break the news that Ron had removed himself from consideration for the Penn State job. He would have had plenty of contacts at Duquesne and clearly had a direct link to Ron the day of the firing. I kind of doubt he needed Dino to get him that memo.

Dennis, the Cincinnati connection is a sports writer for CBS sports, Greg Doyle, he has bounced around from North Carolina and Cincinnati. He did a radio show in Cincinnati and knows GA. He could not break the story that would have been to obvious, so Parrish broke the story.

I don't understand the part of your post that reads  "Parrish had broken the news of the firing, confirmed by RE himself, at 11:46 a.m., and he cited the Dougherty memo in that brief. Whether he had it at that point and was waiting for legal clearance to post it, or added the reference later, I can't tell."

Are you saying RE confirmed the firing to Parrish at 11:46?

RE left the University immediately and went to get his kids out of school so they would not be blindsided by a teacher, student or staff member when the story was going to break at 12:00. RE never talked to Parrish. When RE and his wife got home around 12:30 with the kids the story was all over the news.

Dennis, what were Ron's contributions?

The attrition rate? I agree that the stream of kids leaving was a bit much, and that it included kids that I wish would have stayed, but in some cases there were reasons behind kids leaving that are better left off message boards, and in other cases talented kids were wooed away from our program by coaches who - yes I will use the word - cheat. The result of that attrition never showed up on the team's record. Players came and went, and the Dukes were competitive every year under Ron.

The late season breakdown his last year? Fair enough, but share some of that with coaches and players stabbing him in the back.

I'm sorry he's gone, I know some aren't, and we'll never all agree on that.

For what it's worth, Ron took the high road on the way out. Never said a thing against Duquesne or Greg Amodio. I have a lot of respect for that.

For starters, ED, the team wasn't all that successful the last three years. If they had been, Ron would still be here regardless of all this palace intrigue BS.  Two mediocre .500 seasons sandwiched around the Saunders-and-Clark senior season that showed so much promise--8 straight wins to start the conference season, part of an 11-game winning streak overall--that ended in yet another late-season collapse, seven losses in their last nine, including that embarrassing loss to a 20-loss St. Joe's team, made up almost entirely of freshmen and sophomores, in the conference tourney. And for the record, there were late-season collapses in all three seasons and five of Ron's six years overall, not just last year. It was all Greg's fault because Ron was too busy fighting political battles with Greg to coach the team effectively? Sorry, that explanation only goes so far with me.

My point is that I expected more after that March 2009 run. I think we all did. That should have been the beginning of a long, sustained run of success for this program, not the beginning of yet another end. I think they all blew it and I include Ron in that "they". Shame on Greg if he didn't fully support his coach during such a crucial time for the program. I would hope any evaluation of his performance takes a long, hard look at that.
But yes, I think there were some coaching, recruiting and player development and retention failures that Ron can be held accountable for. Let's take recruiting, which to me was the biggest failure. What did the '09, '10 and '11 recruiting classes yield for Duquesne? Sean Johnson, two years of TJ McConnell and what else exactly? Role players and deep subs are all I see. Compare that to what other teams in our conference got out of those recruiting classes. We're paying the price for that this year and I imagine we'll be paying the price for that next year as well.

Beyond that, the sort of conflict that apparently existed between Ron and Greg is rarely the fault of only one person in my experience and I have  a hard time believing that the souring relationship between the two over the last few years was all Greg's fault. I only know what I read here, which seems to come from people close to Ron, like Scotchngars for example, who's mentioned in posts before that he talks to Ron. Ron may have taken the high road personally, but he's not above using surrogates to get his side of the story out. Who could forget Alan Robinson's media blitz last spring?

Dennis, I'm not arguing with you, but Ron never talked to Parrish or CBS sports, he told me this Weds. morning. They may have reported that, but he did not talk to them that morning. He was all about getting his family together and trying to figure out why they would not have given him 1 week. He could have had the head coach position at Miami of Ohio, but when the letter was leaked they told him they could not sell it to their board.

Ron also took the high road here,because that letter definately defamed him from that Head coaching job and another at a smaller school in the south. So, he does not file a suit against Duquesne for defamation, and was forced to take a lesser buyout than what the contract stated or go to court and draw all this out. He is a better man than those who destroyed his reputation.