He actually was able to retire from the AD position at Iowa so he's obviously good enough at the job.
Had to go remind myself of the actual years that Barta was here. It was '03 to '06. McClain had already peaked and had a .363 winning percentage in conference during those years. He was getting the axe no matter who was replacing Barta. Football had it's (relative) high point in that era culminating in the '04 Vegas Bowl victory. I loved Joe Glenn at the time because of the depths the program had sunk to previous to him, but in retrospect, I don't view the football accomplishments during that time as any better than average.
Whatever planning was put into place that resulted in the upgrades is laudable and I have no trust that Burman could have pulled it off...but again...in retrospect, this investments were never going to be enough. The smartest thing he did was probably to take a job somewhere that had a better shot at collegiate athletic success.
All this to say...I still go back to the mid '90's through 2000 or so as the critical time period where the ball of terribleness began to roll. That era represents a fork in the road that, as time passed, became harder and harder to ignore the effects of. Effective and non-effective administrations have, since that time, used what tools they had at thier disposal to keep things moving forward while the conditions have steadily worsened. At a certain point, it feels like it passed a point of no return.....a point that, realistically speaking, it became unreasonable to expect to return to the historical high points of the UW athletic tradition. For me, at the latest, it was when BYU, Utah, and TCU left the conference....but you could convince me it came earlier than that.
