When Football Gets the Ax

The New York Times reports:

The most unpopular man in Birmingham, Ala., these days is Dr. Ray Watts, the president of the University of Alabama-Birmingham. Earlier this month, Watts announced that the school was going to eliminate its football team. You can just imagine what happened next.

When Watts told the team that this would be their last season, one player, Tristan Henderson, angrily challenged him in a video that quickly went viral. Later, several hundred supporters chanted and cheered for the coach, and heckled and chased Watts and his police escort, according to Jon Solomon of CBSSports.com.


Mark Emmert, the president of the N.C.A.A., described Watts’s decision as “unfortunate.” A group of important donors wrote a letter to the chancellor of the Alabama university system, calling for an investigation into Watts’s decision. Another big supporter, a Birmingham restaurateur, canceled his $45,000 sponsorship of a television network that aired U.A.B. games and ended the use of his restaurant as the locale for the basketball coach’s weekly radio show. “This is so tragic,” he told a reporter. “It’s like a death.”

You'll be seeing more of this , in the coming years.