New athletic director

HOT SCOOP - NEW ATHLETIC DIRECTOR

Akron will name its new athletic director sometime next week. It will be Mack Rhoades from Texas-El Paso. He is in the below picture on the right. He served as senior associate AD for the Miners.

He is definitely a qualified candidate because two other schools also were pursuing him. He looks young, and he is. He's 38 years old.

At UTEP, he did everything we need to do at Akron. He increased community support and ticket sales for basketball and football. He got his Masters' degree at Indiana and has worked at Yale and Marquette's athletic departments.

I only hope they gave interim AD Mike Waddell a serious chance as an in-house candidate. He certainly deserved it.

This scoop was brought to you by a UTEP fan posting on Zipsnation.org - a nice message board for Zips fans. I'm more confident that this is true than I was about Ken "Judas" Lolla leaving. Take that for what it's worth.

I e-mailed Rhoades this morning. Hopefully I'll be able to get you an exclusive interview before the end of the day.

By the way, sorry the blog was down yesterday. My host site had maintenance done all day.

Football

While surfing on Zipsnation, I saw an interesting post. The poster said he/she heard Steve French say the Zips will bring an out-of-conference bowl team to the Rubber Bowl to start the 2006 season - and that the game could be on ESPN.

Boston College was mentioned, and the Eagles make sense. Their non-conference schedule is a joke most years. Last year, they traveled to Ball State to beat the Cardinals in the season opener.