Ha, I love when people proclaim that their idea of progress is the only acceptable idea for Progress! - and if you disagree, you're against any kind of advancement or embetterment. In the same way that many conservatives think that if you don't buy into their idea of America you're anti-American, or how many liberals think that if you disagreed with Obamacare you were against poor people and sick people. I want a better University at Buffalo school and athletic program like anyone else, I just vehemently disagreed with Danny White's ideas for doing so. What he wanted to do didn't represent the only way to go forward, and opposing those ideas never meant I (or his other critics) am against progress.
We are the only PUBLIC STATE school in the entire country that has local fans that insist the school doesn't need to represent anyone from outside of its city's boundaries. That is offensive to people like me who grew up in areas like Albany and are told that we didn't attend a New York school, we attended a Buffalo school. I'm all for local pride but at this point it's doing more harm than good. You want to speak about "brands"? This is like owning the rights to the name Coca Cola, but refusing it out of pride in your current name, "Steve's Brown Drink". If you want to claim you're progressive then stop being so afraid of change. The current branding isn't working and the worst part is that it will never grow outside of WNY. As long as we're called "Buffalo" people in the rest of New York state will continue to ignore us, and people in the rest of the country will continue saying things like, "Khalil Mack and Bobby Hurley came from a small school". It doesn't matter how much we win, that is the perception of Buffalo. If we have larger aspirations as a program then we need to expand our presence and improve our image outside of WNY - especially since we are competing with the NFL and NHL there. If you have a better way to do that outside of simply calling ourselves what we are - "New York", then I'm all ears.
