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Message: [QUOTE="AlaskaSU, post: 2176066, member: 230"] Joe Biden is unemployed. Perfect job for him to lead the funding effort as one of the Nation's most experienced fund raisers. If the U provided a 50% match, raising 7.5 million would do the trick. By comparison, The Melo Center was nearly 20 million. Nationwide alumni rally's, donations from Cuse professional basketball players, lots of possibilities. We seem to have lost our competitive edge. Even with available playing time we are coming up empty on our main targets. Maybe it is just bad luck, but over the last three years we have been a middle of the road ACC team. There are reasons why basketball recruits are influenced by housing perks: 1) they are more likely to come from public housing than from Scarsdale, 2) many of them have not spent much time living away from home, and 3) the four and five stars aspire to the good life, including fancy digs, that an NBA salary can provide. Having over-the-top digs would give us a leg up on recruiting. At one time both the Dome and the Big East gave us a leg up. Those days are gone; we are not a flag carrier for the ACC like we were in the Big East, and the Dome no longer gives our players an exposure advantage. Our circumstances have changed and our past is no guarantee of future success. I realize that catering to athletes is incompatible with the academic spirit and we are primarily an academic institution. Most of us are alumni and many are like me with many alumni in the family. Ultimately, academic reputation is more important than athletics. Therefore, we can decide to forego the facilities arms race. It would be OK with me. If we decide to compete, as long as athletes cannot be paid, we cannot be successful at the highest level without providing competitive residential facilities complete with tricked out lounges, patios with bar-b-cues, kitchen facilities and a dorm chef and barber, etc. In the era of one and dones, the best teams reload every year. We cannot afford too many misses. We need to be at least as attractive, and maybe more so, than the schools that we compete against. [/QUOTE]

Verification: What is a Syracuse fan's favorite color?