E-Wu Tang Clan
Active member
Portland State fires football coach Bruce Barnum after 1-11 season
In 11 seasons with the Vikings, Barnum led the Vikings to a winning record just once.
www.oregonlive.com
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Portland State fires Bruce Barnum
- Thread starter E-Wu Tang Clan
- Start date
www.oregonlive.com
E-Wu Tang Clan
Active member
It's crazy they kept him this long. I think in 2017 he had an affair with a female staffer and they greatly reduced his pay as punishment. Maybe that is why.
Atomic Eagle
Active member
Just saw this. It is curious as to why he was able to hang on so long there. Also, was he fired, or did they just not renew his contract?
E-Wu Tang Clan
Active member
Canzano: Bruce Barnum fired by Portland State
Firing took place on the airport tarmac.
www.johncanzano.com
This article kind of makes me feel bad for Barnum and makes Eastern look good in comparison.
Highlights:
The AD went to fire Barnum on the tarmac when they got back.
PSU scholarships are 50 percent funded. There’s no external fundraising, which means no revenue sharing or NIL collective. The team doesn’t even have a home football stadium.
Barnum and the PSU football team have been volunteering at Camp Exceptional, a summer camp for special-needs and typical kids run by Canzano and family for 10 years.
One season, the travel budget required PSU to bus to a September road game. There was no money for an airplane.
Matt Billings — the AD — is in over his head. He’s miscast as an AD and woefully inadequate as a fundraiser. The dirty little secret is that Billings is being asked by his president to trim nearly $3 million from the athletic department budget over the next two fiscal years. He needs to cut $1 million by next July, per a source in the president’s office.
Atomic Eagle
Active member
Just read that article and came on here to comment. Fired on the Tarmac. Not shocking, though. Portland State and Portland in general is a complete shit show. I don’t see how any up and coming coach would want to go there. Sure, we have some problems here (money being the biggest), but at least we have good leadership despite being on the wrong side of the wins and losses column the past few years. Portland State is beyong the pale. Sad, really.
Seattle Eagle
Active member
Portland State is a joke. Totally classless.
Portland State allowed both the Portland fanbase and local government to become apathetic to their cause. Remember, in the 80s, Portland State was a d2 powerhouse and routinely had 15k sellouts. When the local govnerment tossed them out of their downtown stadium, it crushed everything. The Hillsboro Stadium is 20 miles of the worst freeway driving you could imagine away from campus.
I go to every Eastern game in Portland and EWU fans are always equivalent or greater in number.
True on the 80s, but between then and getting the boot from PGE Park, they weren't drawing many fans either. I think in 2017 and 2018 they were averaging only 4-5k fans per game. Now, of course, it's worse and they're drawing like 1,500 people.
Obzerver
Active member
Reading that article it said that PSU was funding only 50% of the scholarships being funded and no external funding available. I remember years and years ago when I was on a committee that acted as a liaison between players and the program. Included team and the school. I was asking questions and sniffing around and I started asking questions about scholarships and some being partial scholarships. I indirectly was inquiring about if we were using the entire amount of scholarship monies available. I had asked directly to an admin person who wondered why I asked that question. Didn't answer and soon after that committee was dissolved. I had been looking at all the schools in the conference...the haves and the have nots. Was wondering if all the schools were using all their monies they could for scholarships.. I had noticed EWU players were required to eat a sack lunch snack at nite (to help with weight, ect.) and they all had to pay for that. I wondered if that was the case for all schools. That was a loong time ago and have since wondered if some of the schools with tight budgets get creative on ways to trim their budgets from number of coaches, equipment. travel and many other things here at EWU...including scholarships. To be clear I had never heard EWU doing that and not inferring that we do. Now with NIL monies that really widens the gap between the haves and have nots from the Power Five teams of the FBS to FCS programs.
There was a game at Providence Park after the good 2015 season where they hosted Northern Arizona. Announced attendance 4,000 or so. John Canzano puts up a column where the headline identifies a drop count of 800. It’s generally been downhill since… though if you remember when the stadium was renovated in 2010 with the new east side, PSU tried to charge $70 per club seat and that seriously backfired. There was never an attendance bump with the stadium improvements. One more thing… those D-2 days referenced here happened before a certain interception in Eugene that seriously changed the course of the athletic department at the state’s flagship institution. Really, it’s been downhill since not longer after PSU went D-1.
