Post by Bornthrilla on Oct 13, 2006 11:18:26 GMT -5
Bluedeathvalley.com: First of all, thanks for taking the time to talk to us today. We know how busy you are and we really appreciate you freeing up your schedule to do this interview. Now that you’ve had a chance to get settled into the position, how would you characterize your first couple of years here as athletic director?
Dee Todd: “I love A&T, I love the students, I love the opportunity to be here. I have a vision for A&T and I really feel that the alumni has been great and, for the most part, very supportive. I think that the thing that I have been challenged with is to really tell the truth and inform people about what’s going on with Aggie athletics. Obviously, I have a great background, and being able to spend 17 years in all the major meetings involving the expansion and everything within the ACC, it teaches you a lot. Not only do you see how one athletic department is run, but you see eight different departments ... which expanded to nine and then to 11 and I left before they picked up the 12th school . But you see what works, what doesn’t work and you’re involved in all the conversations. So there’s nothing here that’s come up that I haven’t had at least some idea of how to operate it. Maybe not to the extent of how it is here ... but I think for the most part its been a challenging experience because I feel my vision for A&T may be shared by those of us in this department, but the university might not share the same vision. And that’s to be successful on the athletic field.”
Well then, how do you go about infusing your vision to other people within this university?
Dee Todd: “I think you have to really stand your ground. You have to be sure of yourself and you have to educate and constantly talk and not change who you are and what you’re about. That’s the only way I know how to operate. I think if you start becoming what people want you to become, then you lose sight of your vision. I’ve seen it before because I’ve been places that are much, much larger than A&T. However, I started off at a school not as big as A&T, and so I didn’t forget my roots. And personally, I never wanted to be an athletic director. I’m prepared to be an athletic director, but I think it’s the hardest job in college athletics because there are so many people who can affect your success or failure whom you have no control over. So this was never a goal of mind. It just kind of came to me when (former Chancellor James) Renick (approached) me and said I think you’re the person and, you know, I gave him a pretty hard time. I didn’t just jump in it; we talked for at least two months.”
So Renick aggressively recruited you for the position. It wasn’t the other way around.
Dee Todd: “Oh no. From the time this job became available I received phone calls telling me that I should apply and I told every single person that called that I wasn’t interested. And one morning he called me at my home. He told me who he was and said that he was a little disappointed that my application wasn’t in for the job. And I told him I wasn’t interested. So he said ‘well, can we talk’ and I said sure. And then he asked could I come over and visit with him and I said I would. During that whole time I talked to him as if I was an advisor or a consultant to what he needed, and because I wasn’t looking for the job I basically laid out what I thought this university needed. I thought it needed to have someone who had total control of the program and that they needed to leave folks alone and let them do what they’re capable of doing. I thought all of those things would be a turnoff and he kept coming back and saying ‘I think you’re the one.’ And I said ‘that’s nice, but I have a job’. So yes, he actively pursued me. I never made one call.”
It had to be quite a shock for you then when Renick announced last year that he would le leaving the school.
Dee Todd: “I know a lot of athletic directors - I’ve been in this business a long time- and the one thing people always fear is that when the person that hires you leaves. So when I heard he was leaving that was not a good day for me. And I got a lot of phone calls from people who had experienced that who said ‘hey, its going to be tough.’ Because you go in and the person that hires you is the person that you feel believes in you and knows what your goals are, and somebody else might not see that. And the next thing you know you’re in a position where you can’t move. So yeah, that was a concern.
Well, what do you feel is the most challenging issue currently facing this athletic department and what are your plans to resolve it?
Dee Todd: “The most challenging issue is money. If we put our budget on a doggy bone and threw it our there, he probably would walk away (laughs). At best, we are probably operating on a Division II budget. Our budget hasn’t changed in about six years. However, what has changed is the things that have to come out of our budget. Like for instance, the state mandated that all of our coaches have to come off of state salaries, but we still have a position and a half that is still on the state. Anytime there’s a mandated raise from the state in coach’s salaries that has to come out of our budget. Also, you always have to provide equitable opportunities for the under-represented population, as in gender equity. We want to be competitive and we’re working very hard and we have very good coaches, but we have schools that are outspending us right now. And outspending beats outworking. Years ago A&T was considered the big bad A&T, and consequently the term “Aggie Pride Worldwide” was established because we were the biggest and the baddest. But we never moved and people looked at our model and said ‘hey, what do we need to do to be like them and better?’ And they started putting the resources in place to improve their programs. People started stepping it up and we stayed the same. Now we’re pretty low comparatively across the board for MEAC schools ... and kids talk. If you’re going out recruiting the same kid and they found that with school “A” you travel this way and school “B” you travel that way, well then, the kids are going to look at this. You know, we’re talking about 17 and 18 year olds having to make a decision. And they see. They’re visual people; they see. We can bring them here- we have the finest facilities, no question about it- but it costs money to maintain those facilities, it cost money to paint the fields, it cost money to paint the tailgating (areas). Everything you do to put on a program costs money. So, my biggest challenge is to educate this population that we needs dollars, and that we can’t cut anything else. We can not cut anything else. How do I plan to change it? Tell the story. Do what I can to go out and if I need to help close the deal, tell me. I’m willing to do whatever I need to do. I can come up with the biggest plan but if you don’t have the funds.... I mean, we are bare bones. We really are.”
How do you view the fan and alumni support that A&T is currently receiving for it athletic programs?
Dee Todd: I think the fan support that you mainly see is with the Aggie Club. The Aggie Club made a pledge a few years ago to give over a million dollars and that’s wonderful, but you know what? We need that every year. So I challenge the Aggie Club for each one to reach one. If each member brings in one new member who matches what they’re giving, then we’ve already doubled what we’re going to get. The Victory Club was designed during the Capital Campaign but some things have changed with that. They’re supposed to go out and get the big corporate sponsors and fill up the scoreboard, but as you can see we still have three panels that are vacant. Those panels start off at a minimum of $40,000 a year, so if we fill up all those panels we should be getting about $300,000 a year. But again, that doesn’t even scratch the surface of what we’re trying to do. The rotating panels (on the bottom of the scoreboard) are less than that, but I think that we have to look at (attracting) every possible in-kind (donation) that we can. Let’s have specials all up and down the street. I think when you come up Market Street or any of these surrounding streets near A&T, you should know that you’re on A&T’s campus. There should be something on the marquee board that says ‘welcome to Aggieland’ or ‘good luck Aggies’ or whatever- we should have this whole community, particularly around campus, on board with us. Somebody needs to be out there making that happen. We need to teach people that we’re in this together and, like the saying that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’, we need not just one component but a lot of components to all jump in and say we’re willing to help the Aggies.
Do you currently have the infrastructure in place to aggressively pursue those corporate dollars?
Dee Todd: “We have someone who’s in development- Phillip McAlpin (Associate Athletic Director for Development/Marketing). That’s one person and Keith McCluney (Assistant Athletic Director for Marketing), he gets a lot of the things going. But other than them that’s all we have out there.”
Do you plan on adding any more people to your staff who can focus on corporate development?
Dee Todd: “Well, of course, that would require dollars. You’d have to pay them and right now people are doing multiple jobs. You know, I probably do more than the average athletic director. (Normally) you have a staff that can do those things while the athletic director needs to be going out there, meeting and greeting and making contacts. But I can’t do that because I have to physically work (laughs). I have to do a lot of other stuff.”
With the 15 NCAA sports that A&T currently fund, ideally what should our overall athletic budget be in order for us to be seriously competitive?
Dee Todd: “I would say at least about $7.1 million.”
And, in a nutshell, what is our total athletic budget now?
Dee Todd: “Under six”
And where does that rank us among other MEAC schools?
Dee Todd: “With football playing schools, we’re near the bottom. With schools that do not play football, we’re still near the bottom.”
How much does the future success of A&T athletics depend on the mindset of the next chancellor who comes in here? How much of a role will he or she play in the ultimate success of your vision?
Dee Todd: “I think probably a vital role. Hopefully they will understand that we (the athletic department) are a important part of this university. We’re one component of this university, but we’re also the most visible component. What happens within athletics exposes the whole university and I think someone has to understand that. What we do here is like us walking outside in our underwear; we’re exposed. No matter what you do. The same kind of issues may be going on in the biology department but nobody’s watching. We need someone to understand that athletics are your attraction to bring people to the school. You know, people want to come to school to be out there on Saturdays and support a winning program; that’s part of college life. We’re a very important component of this university, we just need people to understand that.”
Lee Fobbs was your first major coaching hire. Why do you feel he was the right man for the job?
Dee Todd: “Well, I didn’t know Coach Fobbs, despite what some people might think (laughs). I never knew him. First of all, I was always taught that every good athletic director always has a short list of candidates. So whenever there’s a position that opens, you should always have a list of people that you can go to right away so you don’t lose a whole lot of time looking for a coach. When I first decided that I might have to make a change in football - (Wheeler) Brown and I were probably the only two who really knew that- we went to various sources. We went to the black coaches association and got a list from them. We had people call and recommend. Hornsby Howell, who used to be a coach here, had sent us three names, back about this time last year. We went and pulled their bios and Coach Fobbs happened to have been one of those names. I had pretty much established in my mind the type of person that I would be looking for, and that was the type who had kind of the same experiences I had as an administrator, but they had as a coach. Not necessarily a person who had run a program before but a person who had been in high-profile programs where they were an assistant. Because you can’t help but be around these programs and learn a lot. I wanted someone who had experience on both sides of the football. I wanted someone who had some HBCU background - either they played there or they worked there before. I really wasn’t looking for any recycles from HBCUs, regardless of their experience. I was looking for someone who could come in and knew - by being at a higher level- how to get back there. Because its hard to go somewhere you’ve never been or take somebody somewhere you’ve never been. That’s like me as an athletic director- I’ve been to the highest level as an administrator so I know what’s going on out there but I also see how we’ve got to get there. It’s a little bit challenging, but I was looking for those same ingredients in a football coach. We were trying to narrow down our list and we were talking to Doug Williams and he said to me ‘if I could hire a coach I would hire a guy named Lee Fobbs.’ Well, I was calling him Forbes at that time so I said ‘wait a minute, how do spell that?’ and he spelled it and said ‘yeah, from Texas A&M’, and I said ‘wait, I think I have his stuff’! And that’s kind of how we started. Doug said ‘I want to help you find the right person’ and I said well look, I have a list of names here - tell me what you think about these people. We talked for about an hour and a half and came up with five names, and I said ‘Ok, let’s rank these names and you tell me in order of priority who you think would work best in our program.’ And each time Coach Fobbs kept coming to the top. Then I started making phone calls just to see if people would be interested if the position became available, and that’s how I found Coach Fobbs.”
Speaking of Coach Fobbs, I know when he arrived here one of the first things he stated was that he felt the recruiting budget needed to be higher. In lieu of all the financial obstacles this athletic department is facing, will you be able to increase the recruiting budget for him this off-season?
Dee Todd: “Well, he’s absolutely right. The problem we have is that the budget is what it is and its got to support 15 programs. Within the budget you can move some things around, but quite frankly we’re doing everything we can to try to get some more money in there. Whether we get donations and put we it directly there (towards recruiting)- I mean, I know that’s where we need help right away and his budget is not sufficient.
What about the total number of scholarships for the football program? Will Fobbs be able to have the maximum amount for the 1-AA level next year.
*Note: Todd defers this question to her assistant Wheeler Brown, who is the Associate Athletic Director for Internal Operations
Wheeler Brown: “He probably will have access to the NCAA maximum, but I think what will determine that will be actual amount of dollars spent and the in-state, out-of-state ratio; that sort of thing. But to answer your question he’ll probably get to as close to 63 as you can get when its all said and done.”
Is there any specific rule we have in regards to the ratio of in-state and out-of-state scholarships?
Wheeler Brown: “There used to be a formula that the university went by but I guess we kind of tossed that out the window a little bit right now in order for him to be able to get what he needs to get. We’re pretty much asking him to go out and find what he needs to find and when he identifies it we’re going to need to somehow make it happen.
Finally Ms. Todd, you touched on it earlier, but what is your overall vision for this athletic department in the upcoming years?
Dee Todd: “I would like to say in 10 years we’re winning everything, but that’s not realistic. “You have to, what I call, ‘tier’ your sports, and when I say ‘tier’ I mean you have to put them in a level according to expectations and the more money you put into those programs, the greater the expectations. Obviously, football and mens basketball are high expectations. We want to get them to where they are competitive in the MEAC ... and of course you have to have women’s basketball and treat it the same as men’s basketball. But then we go down the line to sports that we may sponsor but are not be sponsored be the MEAC. Well, we may not have to same expectations of that program; we just want to sustain it and you go out and do the best you can but we’re not expecting championships. Ideally, we would like to be in the top three in at least football, men and women’s basketball, volleyball and I think we should be able to do it in track. I think even in women’s tennis in the next three or four years we should be there. But again, those are programs that, in my mind, I know I can’t give them everything they need to be successful. I know that. So therefore I can’t expect more from them than what they’re getting. Of course, being competitive you want to win regardless, but we’ve got to put in to our football program. We’ve got to get that back right. Because when that’s right all the other programs seem to take care of themselves. But with football we just didn’t get down; we’ve been down. Coach Fobbs inherited two 3-8 season; you don’t just turn that around. When you look at the big schools ... you look at Mack Brown, when he was Carolina he went two years at 1-10. And we’re talking about schools who had everything they need to work with. Football is tough. When you get a new coach who’s trying to build his program and do it the right way, that’s tough. Losing is painful. We don’t like it, but we also know that we have to see the big picture and the big picture is that we’re going to be OK. The best thing I can ask people to do is be there, supports us, don’t be locker room coaches and second guess the man. Everybody has an opinion but unless you’ve been out there and you know what your dealing with on a day-in and day-out basis, its kind of unfair. But that’s fans. Fans are going to do that. I’m not here to coach football so I would never second guess him. I’m here to administer this program and if I see him taking a wrong turn I’m going to of course tug him and say we might want to take this direction. But I hope the fans would just be there because it means a lot to these young guys to look in the stands and see people still there hanging on for them. That means a lot. I think what we saw last Saturday (A&T’s 32-0 loss to Morgan State) was frustration. You know, the weather’s bad, you’re losing and you tend to retaliate and do things after the whistle ... which doesn’t make sense. We’ve got to take that aggression and we’ve got to put it in front of the whistles. We’ve got young kids but they’re not going to be young next year. We’ve just have to stick with them and we’ve got to take every opportunity to walk by them and say, ‘Son, keep your head up. Keep working hard because its going to be alright.’ I hate to see them leave with their heads down. But its hard; I’ve been through this before. I was coaching at Northwestern when Dennis Green was there and Northwestern had the record for the longest losing streak in 1-A football at 33 games. It was painful and I was just the track coach (laughs). So I’ve been through it before but I don’t think we’re going to be there. I think we just have do the right thing and put 60 minutes of hard-playing football together. And I think people should take all their hits on us now because its not going to be that way forever.”
Dee Todd: “I love A&T, I love the students, I love the opportunity to be here. I have a vision for A&T and I really feel that the alumni has been great and, for the most part, very supportive. I think that the thing that I have been challenged with is to really tell the truth and inform people about what’s going on with Aggie athletics. Obviously, I have a great background, and being able to spend 17 years in all the major meetings involving the expansion and everything within the ACC, it teaches you a lot. Not only do you see how one athletic department is run, but you see eight different departments ... which expanded to nine and then to 11 and I left before they picked up the 12th school . But you see what works, what doesn’t work and you’re involved in all the conversations. So there’s nothing here that’s come up that I haven’t had at least some idea of how to operate it. Maybe not to the extent of how it is here ... but I think for the most part its been a challenging experience because I feel my vision for A&T may be shared by those of us in this department, but the university might not share the same vision. And that’s to be successful on the athletic field.”
Well then, how do you go about infusing your vision to other people within this university?
Dee Todd: “I think you have to really stand your ground. You have to be sure of yourself and you have to educate and constantly talk and not change who you are and what you’re about. That’s the only way I know how to operate. I think if you start becoming what people want you to become, then you lose sight of your vision. I’ve seen it before because I’ve been places that are much, much larger than A&T. However, I started off at a school not as big as A&T, and so I didn’t forget my roots. And personally, I never wanted to be an athletic director. I’m prepared to be an athletic director, but I think it’s the hardest job in college athletics because there are so many people who can affect your success or failure whom you have no control over. So this was never a goal of mind. It just kind of came to me when (former Chancellor James) Renick (approached) me and said I think you’re the person and, you know, I gave him a pretty hard time. I didn’t just jump in it; we talked for at least two months.”
So Renick aggressively recruited you for the position. It wasn’t the other way around.
Dee Todd: “Oh no. From the time this job became available I received phone calls telling me that I should apply and I told every single person that called that I wasn’t interested. And one morning he called me at my home. He told me who he was and said that he was a little disappointed that my application wasn’t in for the job. And I told him I wasn’t interested. So he said ‘well, can we talk’ and I said sure. And then he asked could I come over and visit with him and I said I would. During that whole time I talked to him as if I was an advisor or a consultant to what he needed, and because I wasn’t looking for the job I basically laid out what I thought this university needed. I thought it needed to have someone who had total control of the program and that they needed to leave folks alone and let them do what they’re capable of doing. I thought all of those things would be a turnoff and he kept coming back and saying ‘I think you’re the one.’ And I said ‘that’s nice, but I have a job’. So yes, he actively pursued me. I never made one call.”
It had to be quite a shock for you then when Renick announced last year that he would le leaving the school.
Dee Todd: “I know a lot of athletic directors - I’ve been in this business a long time- and the one thing people always fear is that when the person that hires you leaves. So when I heard he was leaving that was not a good day for me. And I got a lot of phone calls from people who had experienced that who said ‘hey, its going to be tough.’ Because you go in and the person that hires you is the person that you feel believes in you and knows what your goals are, and somebody else might not see that. And the next thing you know you’re in a position where you can’t move. So yeah, that was a concern.
Well, what do you feel is the most challenging issue currently facing this athletic department and what are your plans to resolve it?
Dee Todd: “The most challenging issue is money. If we put our budget on a doggy bone and threw it our there, he probably would walk away (laughs). At best, we are probably operating on a Division II budget. Our budget hasn’t changed in about six years. However, what has changed is the things that have to come out of our budget. Like for instance, the state mandated that all of our coaches have to come off of state salaries, but we still have a position and a half that is still on the state. Anytime there’s a mandated raise from the state in coach’s salaries that has to come out of our budget. Also, you always have to provide equitable opportunities for the under-represented population, as in gender equity. We want to be competitive and we’re working very hard and we have very good coaches, but we have schools that are outspending us right now. And outspending beats outworking. Years ago A&T was considered the big bad A&T, and consequently the term “Aggie Pride Worldwide” was established because we were the biggest and the baddest. But we never moved and people looked at our model and said ‘hey, what do we need to do to be like them and better?’ And they started putting the resources in place to improve their programs. People started stepping it up and we stayed the same. Now we’re pretty low comparatively across the board for MEAC schools ... and kids talk. If you’re going out recruiting the same kid and they found that with school “A” you travel this way and school “B” you travel that way, well then, the kids are going to look at this. You know, we’re talking about 17 and 18 year olds having to make a decision. And they see. They’re visual people; they see. We can bring them here- we have the finest facilities, no question about it- but it costs money to maintain those facilities, it cost money to paint the fields, it cost money to paint the tailgating (areas). Everything you do to put on a program costs money. So, my biggest challenge is to educate this population that we needs dollars, and that we can’t cut anything else. We can not cut anything else. How do I plan to change it? Tell the story. Do what I can to go out and if I need to help close the deal, tell me. I’m willing to do whatever I need to do. I can come up with the biggest plan but if you don’t have the funds.... I mean, we are bare bones. We really are.”
How do you view the fan and alumni support that A&T is currently receiving for it athletic programs?
Dee Todd: I think the fan support that you mainly see is with the Aggie Club. The Aggie Club made a pledge a few years ago to give over a million dollars and that’s wonderful, but you know what? We need that every year. So I challenge the Aggie Club for each one to reach one. If each member brings in one new member who matches what they’re giving, then we’ve already doubled what we’re going to get. The Victory Club was designed during the Capital Campaign but some things have changed with that. They’re supposed to go out and get the big corporate sponsors and fill up the scoreboard, but as you can see we still have three panels that are vacant. Those panels start off at a minimum of $40,000 a year, so if we fill up all those panels we should be getting about $300,000 a year. But again, that doesn’t even scratch the surface of what we’re trying to do. The rotating panels (on the bottom of the scoreboard) are less than that, but I think that we have to look at (attracting) every possible in-kind (donation) that we can. Let’s have specials all up and down the street. I think when you come up Market Street or any of these surrounding streets near A&T, you should know that you’re on A&T’s campus. There should be something on the marquee board that says ‘welcome to Aggieland’ or ‘good luck Aggies’ or whatever- we should have this whole community, particularly around campus, on board with us. Somebody needs to be out there making that happen. We need to teach people that we’re in this together and, like the saying that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’, we need not just one component but a lot of components to all jump in and say we’re willing to help the Aggies.
Do you currently have the infrastructure in place to aggressively pursue those corporate dollars?
Dee Todd: “We have someone who’s in development- Phillip McAlpin (Associate Athletic Director for Development/Marketing). That’s one person and Keith McCluney (Assistant Athletic Director for Marketing), he gets a lot of the things going. But other than them that’s all we have out there.”
Do you plan on adding any more people to your staff who can focus on corporate development?
Dee Todd: “Well, of course, that would require dollars. You’d have to pay them and right now people are doing multiple jobs. You know, I probably do more than the average athletic director. (Normally) you have a staff that can do those things while the athletic director needs to be going out there, meeting and greeting and making contacts. But I can’t do that because I have to physically work (laughs). I have to do a lot of other stuff.”
With the 15 NCAA sports that A&T currently fund, ideally what should our overall athletic budget be in order for us to be seriously competitive?
Dee Todd: “I would say at least about $7.1 million.”
And, in a nutshell, what is our total athletic budget now?
Dee Todd: “Under six”
And where does that rank us among other MEAC schools?
Dee Todd: “With football playing schools, we’re near the bottom. With schools that do not play football, we’re still near the bottom.”
How much does the future success of A&T athletics depend on the mindset of the next chancellor who comes in here? How much of a role will he or she play in the ultimate success of your vision?
Dee Todd: “I think probably a vital role. Hopefully they will understand that we (the athletic department) are a important part of this university. We’re one component of this university, but we’re also the most visible component. What happens within athletics exposes the whole university and I think someone has to understand that. What we do here is like us walking outside in our underwear; we’re exposed. No matter what you do. The same kind of issues may be going on in the biology department but nobody’s watching. We need someone to understand that athletics are your attraction to bring people to the school. You know, people want to come to school to be out there on Saturdays and support a winning program; that’s part of college life. We’re a very important component of this university, we just need people to understand that.”
Lee Fobbs was your first major coaching hire. Why do you feel he was the right man for the job?
Dee Todd: “Well, I didn’t know Coach Fobbs, despite what some people might think (laughs). I never knew him. First of all, I was always taught that every good athletic director always has a short list of candidates. So whenever there’s a position that opens, you should always have a list of people that you can go to right away so you don’t lose a whole lot of time looking for a coach. When I first decided that I might have to make a change in football - (Wheeler) Brown and I were probably the only two who really knew that- we went to various sources. We went to the black coaches association and got a list from them. We had people call and recommend. Hornsby Howell, who used to be a coach here, had sent us three names, back about this time last year. We went and pulled their bios and Coach Fobbs happened to have been one of those names. I had pretty much established in my mind the type of person that I would be looking for, and that was the type who had kind of the same experiences I had as an administrator, but they had as a coach. Not necessarily a person who had run a program before but a person who had been in high-profile programs where they were an assistant. Because you can’t help but be around these programs and learn a lot. I wanted someone who had experience on both sides of the football. I wanted someone who had some HBCU background - either they played there or they worked there before. I really wasn’t looking for any recycles from HBCUs, regardless of their experience. I was looking for someone who could come in and knew - by being at a higher level- how to get back there. Because its hard to go somewhere you’ve never been or take somebody somewhere you’ve never been. That’s like me as an athletic director- I’ve been to the highest level as an administrator so I know what’s going on out there but I also see how we’ve got to get there. It’s a little bit challenging, but I was looking for those same ingredients in a football coach. We were trying to narrow down our list and we were talking to Doug Williams and he said to me ‘if I could hire a coach I would hire a guy named Lee Fobbs.’ Well, I was calling him Forbes at that time so I said ‘wait a minute, how do spell that?’ and he spelled it and said ‘yeah, from Texas A&M’, and I said ‘wait, I think I have his stuff’! And that’s kind of how we started. Doug said ‘I want to help you find the right person’ and I said well look, I have a list of names here - tell me what you think about these people. We talked for about an hour and a half and came up with five names, and I said ‘Ok, let’s rank these names and you tell me in order of priority who you think would work best in our program.’ And each time Coach Fobbs kept coming to the top. Then I started making phone calls just to see if people would be interested if the position became available, and that’s how I found Coach Fobbs.”
Speaking of Coach Fobbs, I know when he arrived here one of the first things he stated was that he felt the recruiting budget needed to be higher. In lieu of all the financial obstacles this athletic department is facing, will you be able to increase the recruiting budget for him this off-season?
Dee Todd: “Well, he’s absolutely right. The problem we have is that the budget is what it is and its got to support 15 programs. Within the budget you can move some things around, but quite frankly we’re doing everything we can to try to get some more money in there. Whether we get donations and put we it directly there (towards recruiting)- I mean, I know that’s where we need help right away and his budget is not sufficient.
What about the total number of scholarships for the football program? Will Fobbs be able to have the maximum amount for the 1-AA level next year.
*Note: Todd defers this question to her assistant Wheeler Brown, who is the Associate Athletic Director for Internal Operations
Wheeler Brown: “He probably will have access to the NCAA maximum, but I think what will determine that will be actual amount of dollars spent and the in-state, out-of-state ratio; that sort of thing. But to answer your question he’ll probably get to as close to 63 as you can get when its all said and done.”
Is there any specific rule we have in regards to the ratio of in-state and out-of-state scholarships?
Wheeler Brown: “There used to be a formula that the university went by but I guess we kind of tossed that out the window a little bit right now in order for him to be able to get what he needs to get. We’re pretty much asking him to go out and find what he needs to find and when he identifies it we’re going to need to somehow make it happen.
Finally Ms. Todd, you touched on it earlier, but what is your overall vision for this athletic department in the upcoming years?
Dee Todd: “I would like to say in 10 years we’re winning everything, but that’s not realistic. “You have to, what I call, ‘tier’ your sports, and when I say ‘tier’ I mean you have to put them in a level according to expectations and the more money you put into those programs, the greater the expectations. Obviously, football and mens basketball are high expectations. We want to get them to where they are competitive in the MEAC ... and of course you have to have women’s basketball and treat it the same as men’s basketball. But then we go down the line to sports that we may sponsor but are not be sponsored be the MEAC. Well, we may not have to same expectations of that program; we just want to sustain it and you go out and do the best you can but we’re not expecting championships. Ideally, we would like to be in the top three in at least football, men and women’s basketball, volleyball and I think we should be able to do it in track. I think even in women’s tennis in the next three or four years we should be there. But again, those are programs that, in my mind, I know I can’t give them everything they need to be successful. I know that. So therefore I can’t expect more from them than what they’re getting. Of course, being competitive you want to win regardless, but we’ve got to put in to our football program. We’ve got to get that back right. Because when that’s right all the other programs seem to take care of themselves. But with football we just didn’t get down; we’ve been down. Coach Fobbs inherited two 3-8 season; you don’t just turn that around. When you look at the big schools ... you look at Mack Brown, when he was Carolina he went two years at 1-10. And we’re talking about schools who had everything they need to work with. Football is tough. When you get a new coach who’s trying to build his program and do it the right way, that’s tough. Losing is painful. We don’t like it, but we also know that we have to see the big picture and the big picture is that we’re going to be OK. The best thing I can ask people to do is be there, supports us, don’t be locker room coaches and second guess the man. Everybody has an opinion but unless you’ve been out there and you know what your dealing with on a day-in and day-out basis, its kind of unfair. But that’s fans. Fans are going to do that. I’m not here to coach football so I would never second guess him. I’m here to administer this program and if I see him taking a wrong turn I’m going to of course tug him and say we might want to take this direction. But I hope the fans would just be there because it means a lot to these young guys to look in the stands and see people still there hanging on for them. That means a lot. I think what we saw last Saturday (A&T’s 32-0 loss to Morgan State) was frustration. You know, the weather’s bad, you’re losing and you tend to retaliate and do things after the whistle ... which doesn’t make sense. We’ve got to take that aggression and we’ve got to put it in front of the whistles. We’ve got young kids but they’re not going to be young next year. We’ve just have to stick with them and we’ve got to take every opportunity to walk by them and say, ‘Son, keep your head up. Keep working hard because its going to be alright.’ I hate to see them leave with their heads down. But its hard; I’ve been through this before. I was coaching at Northwestern when Dennis Green was there and Northwestern had the record for the longest losing streak in 1-A football at 33 games. It was painful and I was just the track coach (laughs). So I’ve been through it before but I don’t think we’re going to be there. I think we just have do the right thing and put 60 minutes of hard-playing football together. And I think people should take all their hits on us now because its not going to be that way forever.”