You’re not wrong at all, though the way I see it might not be how you mean. I went to VCU for a couple of years right before the Final Four run, and although I didn’t love it there, I liked that VCU knew and owned what it was. It leaned in to being artsy, urban, and kinda grimy, and it didn’t want to be like the other state schools. After 2011, it started trying to fit in, and that’s not VCU at all. I remember my best friend spotting a black and yellow striped bowtie at the bookstore around when he graduated in 2014 and being totally baffled by it. VCU is not a bowtie school, and you go there because you don’t want to go to a bowtie school. I also noticed that around the time of the branding change, they decided to acknowledge MCV’s founding date as when the school started versus the RPI-MCV merger, which I can only assume was to make it ✨historic✨ like the other state schools. When I started there in 2008, they were promoting the school’s 40th anniversary, and now all of a sudden it’s almost 200 years old. Obviously this is just a couple of anecdotal examples and doesn’t get into anything about what it’s done to the city itself, but I do think they fit into the bigger problem: the Final Four caused VCU to absolutely lose its mind and systematically kill off everything that made it unique. Mason didn’t do this after their Cinderella run. The only way it makes sense is equal parts delusion and greed.