Everyone keeps pointing to spending and giving really general justifications (i.e. bloated bureaucracy). What exactly are you accusing the guy of? For instance, do you think that his coaching staffs were too big? Do you think that we fielded too many sports? Do you think that we had too many secretaries? Where specifically was he spending too much money?
I know I probably sound argumentative, but I really don't mean to be. As I see it, the guy spent money. He built new facilities (which we needed), he changed conferences (which was CLEARLY the right move), he advertised in the city (which apparently worked - see UConn, SJU, Rutgers, and B1G copycat advertisements), and he hired top notch coaches (which apparently worked - see our athletic success - especially this year). Yes, he dipped into the rainy day fund, but that's why it exists - we don't have big local companies that we can lean on. At the end of the day, he brought us way into the black, and that's incredibly rare. Most athletic departments run in the red. I don't think that that stuff could seriously be called reckless spending. The actions that I see seem a lot like prudent investing.
More specifically (because I'm happy with our success in other sports, have no trouble of the number of teams we field, and generally think that the size of coaching staffs isn't inappropriate):
We probably had too many secretaries, because Gross hired too many associate ADs and middle-management types. I can think of about half a dozen people who ran the department under Jake, and Gross went about replacing a number of those individuals with two or three people apiece. A lot of these were superfluous positions for friends, some of whom were flat-out embarrassments to the department and university (here I'm thinking of Joe G-what's-his-face, the guy who was brought in as associate AD for communications, despite the fact that there already existed a whole Athletic Communications Department, and -ed up everything he touched; people finally took note after the Roosevelt Bowie debacle). Hiring his evidently inexperienced second wife was also inappropriate (and no one I've spoken to says anything positive about her job performance).
Gross also allowed development to wither, pursuing a characteristically big-splash/low-sustainability strategy of wining and dining big spenders without cultivating grassroots donors. He did this, again, with an expanded group of personnel. Not a ton of bang for that buck.
He wasn't detail-oriented (not a huge deal on its face - that's why a departmental director gets to hire and delegate to a ton of people) and this attitude seemed to trickle down to a lot of people in the department. This, and Chancy Nancy's similar approach, resulted in the accounting fiasco
His department screwed up the IPF. I don't have the full inside scoop on who made what promises to whom, but the end result is that SU pissed away about $3,000,000 to demolish the interior of a fairly new track-and-field facility and build a half-assed football/lacrosse/softball field that was obsolete the day it opened and ended up being supplemented by the Ensley building about three years after opening. I won't pretend that Gross wasn't caught in a bad position, with too few donations and an unmet facilities promise to Marrone, but that's why he's the director of the department: to solve those problems in a sustainable way.
He paid too much money to Gary Gait and the tennis coach. It's a drop in the bucket compared to the rest, but when a school the size of Syracuse (or its marketing contractor) is paying ~$700,000 to the head coach of a team that -- no offense -- really doesn't matter (outside of what participation in the sport means to a small group of participants, parents, and alumni), that's necessarily about half a million dollars that could have been used elsewhere to enhance the institution.
For the record, I like Gross. Nice guy, great vision (if a bit self-serving) for our full department, some pretty nice (and unprecedented, really) results. Unfortunately, also a bit scatterbrained and too content to delegate to incompetent people. He was better than Jake in most ways. But now we need to find someone better than he was.
