A Winning Season Puts UAB Football on Strong Footing
Members of the UAB Football team leave the football operations center Monday as they head to the Bahamas Bowl.
The UAB Football team plays in its second bowl game ever Friday when they take on Ohio University in the Bahamas Bowl. The game caps the Blazers’ first season back on the field after being shut down over financial concerns in 2014.
The team is eight and four this season, a dramatic turnaround given the Blazers hadn’t played a single game for two years.
Coach Bill Clark says this bowl game means one thing: validity.
“I think everything we talked about wanting to be competitive, maybe we were a little past that,” says Clark. “To get in a bowl game and get in a great bowl game against a really good opponent, I think it says everything about where this program is headed.”
UAB Athletic Director Mark Ingram wasn’t surprised the team was successful. “But I don’t want to act like I predicted they would win this many games,” Ingram says.
Ingram says this season has been better for the bottom line too. Merchandising and licensing revenue is up, as are donations. An average of 26,000 fans attended each home game this season; that’s about 4,500 more than the last season the Blazers played.
That makes sense to Darin White who leads Samford University’s Center for Sports Analytics.
“It all boils down to eyeballs,” White says.
In other words, the more people watching your team, the more money you can generate. Winning helps grab eyeballs.
Andy Schwarz, a California-based economist, has been following the Blazers. He says UAB was already riding a wave of support as they returned to play. But their performance on the field keeps people excited, putting the team on better footing longer term.
“In this case, it probably will go a long way to make sure that first year is not sort of a honeymoon effect that fades very quickly,” says Schwartz.
UAB opened new football practice facilities and offices this fall. Ingram says he’s already added academic support staff and trainers for student athletes. He says those sorts of things are essential to stay competitive in college athletics.
But college athletics is dominated by the largest conferences such as the SEC and the Big 10. Ingram believes that hurts schools like UAB, which compete in smaller conferences.
“It creates this misperception, this misconception that we’re not as important, we’re not as good, we’re not as valuable,” says Ingram.
He argues every college athletic program is trying to do the same thing. They’re trying to win, to graduate students and be a positive force in their communities.
He hopes this season is a springboard for UAB so that in the future the Blazers’ success won’t be particularly surprising.
“It’s no longer a shock that somehow we became bowl eligible and went to a bowl,” says Ingram. “Nope, this is what UAB does.”
A win in the Bahamas would be the latest step toward that.
The Dodgers want to win another World Series. The Toronto Blue Jays are in their way
The Los Angeles Dodgers have put all the chips in on their pursuit of being baseball's first back-to-back champions since 2000. The Blue Jays and their red-hot lineup won't go down easy.
The White House starts demolishing part of the East Wing to build Trump’s ballroom
Dramatic photos show construction equipment tearing into the East Wing façade and windows, though the federal agency that oversees such projects has not approved President Trump's 90,000-square-foot, $250 million ballroom.
Outage at Amazon Web Services disrupts websites across the internet
Amazon's cloud computing service provides back-end support to many companies that operate online. When it has problems, so do they.
Hollywood pushes OpenAI for consent
The latest version of OpenAI's Sora can quickly turn text prompts and simple images into studio quality videos, which left the entertainment industry deeply uneasy.
9th Circuit rules that National Guard can deploy to Portland
The appeals court overturned the ruling of a lower court judge in Oregon, and clears the way for President Trump to deploy the National Guard to Portland.
This isn’t the Louvre’s first high-profile heist. Here’s a history of earlier thefts
Masked thieves stole priceless jewels from the Louvre on Sunday morning. The Paris museum has suffered a string of successful art heists, dating back to the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911.
