re: Eric Hyman's accomplishments as AD

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-He should have fired Kennedy after year 3.

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Yup.

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-His managing expectations line painted him as a loser.

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Yup.

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-He managed to refer to A&M as "they" in a recent interview.

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Not making as big a deal out of this as some (**cough**TA**cough**), but that is not a good look in a series of not-good looks. As AD, it is imperative that you're constantly cognizant of the image you project, and that incident along with his "managing expectations" thing have shown me that Hyman isn't quite up to snuff in the "perception is reality" department.

Eric has time to turn it around, but honestly at this point, I'm missing $Bill, for all his bluster.

TBird, I agree that his "they" faux pas wouldn't be that big a deal in a vacuum. Honestly, it's not that big a deal even when you consider his other mistakes. To me, it's just another small suggestion that he's parked here to make a few extra bucks before retirement, and that he's not genuinely invested in the job.

Byrne made some mistakes as AD, but he really wanted to win and he was gonna go down swinging if he didn't. Maybe that would have described Hyman awhile back, but I'm not sure that it does anymore. He commented that he's glad that this was his last year on the the baseball seeding committee. That just seems... tired. And we don't need a tired, checked-out athletic director.

The issue I have with most of the Hyman discussions is they tend to refuse to give him any credit for the positives during his tenure and yet he gets 100% of the blame for any negatives.

I don't know how you can simply act as though all of the positives from football he gets no credit for. The facilities and the concept that we are going to have the best, period. Keeping Sumlin and hiring Chavis. New Kyle set to be better than pro stadiums. Are those all on Hyman? Absolutely not, but at a bare minimum he could have screwed them up and we have had many an AD in the past that has. My guess is he deserves at least some credit as a supporter of those issues and he clearly makes football his #1 priority, something Byrne certainly could not say. He also is supportive of anything he can to not only expand the brand but improve the on field performance, it isn't strictly a revenue issue as others have done in the past.

He extended Blair and has kept Henry in spite of the sips coming after him and I am sure others.

He kept Childress after last season. If you don't consider that a positive at this point then you are blinded by hate for the man.

He supported hiring Stansbury.

The negatives are well trodden. Keeping Kennedy is certainly controversial but I think overblown when you consider Kennedy has improved steadily though slowly. His demeanor is horrible and he is the anti-Byrne when it comes to taking credit for accomplishments or communication. He also clearly treats this "like a job" and doesn't have a deep love for A&M, though I think this feature is less important than many. JDC, Groff, and Byrne all loved A&M through and through but all were deeply flawed AD's.

Oh, and if you really miss Byrne just remind yourself over and over that Byrne wanted to stay attached to Texas either in the Big 12 or Pac 12, hated the idea of the SEC, and wanted to reduce Kyle by 10k seats. He had no desire to spend any more than necessary on football and extended both Fran and Sherman. To me nothing that Hyman has done is half as bad as any of that.

I do think Hyman is flawed and isn't a long term answer, I just don't think he is nearly as bad as most think. Personally I think he is grooming Cook as his successor or at least that wouldn't surprise me. I also must admit that living in Austin and seeing the idiocy that is Steve Patterson makes it much harder for me to hate Hyman, we could do A LOT worse.

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Failures.
-He should have fired Kennedy after year 3.
-His managing expectations line painted him as a loser.
-I know he was only a fraction of the baseball selection committee, but until Hyman, no top 8 RPI team with an AD on the committee had ever failed to lock down a national seed (I think we were #6 in RPI so he even had some fudge factor to work with).
-He managed to refer to A&M as "they" in a recent interview.

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You forget he thought our stadium should have been sub-100k.

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Given the attendance trends in cfb, he was probably right.

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I would argue that we ARE really at 90k (or lower) compared to other top programs when you consider our massive student attendance numbers.

The fact that he couldn't "get" that we had one shot to pass everyone and we were going to take it logic be damned concerns me.

On the other hand Sharp stepped in and fixed it, and as long as Sharp is around I expect a lot of AD decisions to be out of the AD's pay grade.

I refuse to give him credit for doing what any athletic director would have done in his position, and I give him blame for doing nothing when any good athletic director would have made a change.