SoCal_Pony wrote:LA, I feel your pain.
The problem is we don’t have P5 money to correct our mistakes, we have a FB program that hemorrhages cash, and we are reliant on key alumni to fund us. That is a bad recipe for sustainability. Given how brief our BB success was, Hart made a tactical mistake in trying to milk it. That made matters worse.
I know I am in a minority here, but we are losing millions on FB for the amusement of ‘maybe’ 5,000 alumni, half of whom will die in the next 20 years. And what’s the payoff? Zero championships in over 30 years. If we miraculously did win one, we earn a ticket to Birmingham to play a 6-6 P5 team. Big Whoop. 50/50 chance we also lose our HC.
BB on the other hand gives us more exposure against elite schools such as USC and Michigan.
But FB will remain, our athletic budget will always lose money and our only valuable asset, our BB program, will suffer because of it.
Enjoy your Mavs, good news is they are now trending up.
- When we went to the first bowl game, the number of applicants to SMU skyrocketed.
- Several alumni who donate significantly to football also donate to SMU in other significant ways... take away football, and those other donations dry up.
- There might only be 10K in the stadium, but there are well over double that on the boulevard every week. How much additional exposure and revenue does that bring to the school?
Athletics are a marketing expense for any university, and you have to evaluate the overall impact of that marketing expense when you evaluate the ROI. Not investing properly in the athletic program for a 25 year period has cost the university millions in terms of alumni engagement from the folks who were students from 1989 - 2005.