Well thanks Big Wood. I appreciate the love and the feeling is mutual. But allow me to retort.
First, having a soccer team and a football program at a school are not mutually exclusive, you can do both. Marshall does it and they have a national champion soccer team and a great football program. Their athletic budget is less than UTEPs.
Secondly, there is a major market for soccer in El Paso, you know this is true. Certainly more than golf, cross-country or T&F. The locos are drawing more fans as of right now than the UTEP Miner football program this year (84,000 vs 48,000). Utep program has 2 games left, locos at least 3 They're selling more beer, more hotdogs, more on merch (est.) and probably bringing in more in TV revenue.
Thirdly, you gotta hand it to him, Dimel has done a great job of recruiting locally and developing local talent, but that has been an anomaly at UTEP and El Paso is a soccer hotbed as mentioned previously. We have a local kid who is a phenom with the national team and another kid who is playing for Newcastle United. We're not making the most out of our local talent.
Lastly, this attitude that we have to continue doing the same thing over and over with little or no strategic planning is part of the reason we're in a shit conference and being left out of expansion year after year.