Can Brian Noland End ETSU’s Inferiority Complex?

If you talk to East Tennessee State fans, they couldn’t care less that the baseball team seems to be dropping like a brick after a fast start, or that the basketball roster is depleted, or that no Bucs were selected in the NFL Draft or even signed as a free agent.

Never mind the softball team has a losing record or the women’s basketball team struggled mightily last season.

No, they’re ecstatic because Brian Noland is staying as ETSU President after a flirtation with the University of Tennessee.

It’s true that college presidents are highly influential in the path the teams take.

I once interviewed former ETSU athletic director Todd Stansbury when he was at Oregon State. The Beavers were longtime losers for years, but their baseball program is perhaps the nation’s premier powerhouse (witness last year’s national championship) and this was the era when Dennis Erickson’s football team was routing Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl.

When I asked him why the Beavers had been able to turn their athletic programs around, he pointed to Paul Risser, who had come to OSU after previously a stint as a botany professor at Oklahoma.

Yes, even a botany professor understood the importance winning athletic programs can have at a university.

But few fans point to the success of their sports programs to their president the way ETSU fans do. Usually fans mope about athletic directors or coaches. The…