Leaderboard

I'm very late to the party on this, and it's almost a threadjack at this point, but I've got to comment. A month or so ago I spent most of one of my days off from work attending a Golden Eagle Club board meeting - a special "strategic planning" meeting intended to review the roles and responsibilities of board members, create a system of accountability (for the board), update a board handbook, increase "awareness of the ORU brand" in both the ORU family as well as the Tulsa community, and in general get a more committed fan base. The result of the meeting was the formation of more committees, that will take up more of my time off. But to me, for many of the staff members who are leading us, their allegiance and dedication is elsewhere, or at least it seems that way. McCutchen may be a good dude, and maybe he should be allowed the freedom to express his commitment to his alma mater on Twitter. But it goes back to the general atmosphere of the ORU athletic department, where nearly everyone, from coaches to secretaries, are OSU grads. There is no question that they're all FINE people, and I love them all, I truly do, but when it comes to their first love, they're "[employees] of ORU, but FANS of OSU Athletics." I have a major problem with that. The proud parents of one of our own who now works in the athletic department of Liberty University (wanna guess who it is?) told me some things that that person probably never would say in public, but are so relevant here. When you go to work in the Liberty athletic department, you're told you're expected, if wearing athletic gear, that it be Liberty gear while on campus. If you fail in this you're sent home to change, and are told if it happens again you will be fired. If a student is seen on the Liberty campus in the colors of another school (VERY common at ORU), every effort is made to find out who that student is, they receive a request to come to the athletic office, and they are offered a Liberty shirt to replace the one from the other school, and the importance of loyalty is reinforced. I am sure I was informed of some other such things, but I've forgotten them at this point. The upshot is to create loyalty to the university, at all levels. I love Mike Carter - as a person and as an athletic director - he's done SO MUCH for ORU in the time he's been here. I can't imagine where ORU athletics would be without him. He is an outstanding person at so many levels. That said, his choice to use a picture of himself in an ORANGE tie on his bio page on the ORU website, demonstrating to all that visit there his first love is OSU, shows disrespect to the university that he works for and the fan base he's working so hard to build. Not only that, it represents the mindset that allows for the frustrations I mentioned above, for Richard McCutchen to say he WORKS for ORU but he's a FAN of OSU Athletics. I guess the point of all this is that, in my opinion, it's going to be hard to build the kind of commitment in fans we need for the program to grow unless we have that same sort of enthusiasm and commitment shining down on us from the top. And right now, I don't feel like it is. PLEASE tell me where I'm wrong!