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Instead of complaining all the time, maybe these kids can spend some of this energy and actually get their butts in the seats. The higher attendance leads to more publicity, which leads to more advertising revenue, tv revenue, etc.

When I was a column writer for the Daily Campus many moons ago, I wrote a column that in essence countered the earlier hit piece on the athletic department. I was right, most of my optimistic prose came true because well our boosters paid the players, but that was a later story for the Daily Campus to deal with. The fact is that you can have positive pieces if some of our pro-athlete students would volunteer to write for the Campus. I got dared to do so and did it. In the end my typing skills improved and I had a press credentials for other sporting events in Dallas.

I guess the question is whether our shortfall each year is covered by the general operating fund and wiped clean or whether as a bookkeeping entry the shortfall is carried over year after year as an ongoing deficit.

DC is a joke too. WIthout a Sudoku, no one would pick it up.

It's a real issue, with a deficit of $3K per undergrad per year. One positive is that the median loss for all FBS schools has increased over 50% from 2007 to 2010. At SMU, the deficit was flat, although at a high level.

One thing to consider is the real cost of the tuition grants. The average athlete at SMU probably comes from a lower than average income and therefore would have had a larger than average grant anyway, although not all would be admittable. Let's just say half the tuition grants would have been given to the student-athletes. That might put the deficit on par with the FBS average and actually show a declining loss since 2007 due to the rising cost of college costs.

The number of olympic sports is at the lowest level possible. No opportunity to cut here.

Donors give nice support to the football and hoops head coaching salaries, but other salaries and infrastructure are expensive relative to not enough revenue. Big insight!

Of course, you can't force students to attend games anymore than you can force them to go to plays, Tate Lecture Series events or office hours. Things are improving, slowly but surely, just like the overall university's stature.

Name me one year that SMU was rolling in the dough and was not running a athletic deficit.

Granted, I think the political doublespeak is silly, but I cannot visualize a year, especially when we were in a big time conference playing brutal schedules and having all sorts of "expenses" where we wren't running one, and a large one at that. It just comes with the territory with being a recognized name in college sports.

I'm not sure why this is even a story since our funding isn't directly tied to the state anyway. Do the editors at the DC foresee our billion dollar endowment vanishing because of the athletic budget?