To tee this up, I want to be sure to frame expectations. I'm not comparing CU to private institutions with the resources available to them (Stanford, USC, etc.) or to schools that either have a "Sugar Daddy" (Oregon, Oklahoma State) or a list of "Billionaire Boosters" (Texas, Texas A&M). I'm not wondering why we're not elite on funding, I'm wondering why we're the poorest kid on the block among P5 peers.
Beyond all the money spent to pay and fire coaches that competitors seem to throw around much more readily, there are a number of things that have drawn my attention and been frustrating to witness:
1. CU being the only member of the Pac-12 that doesn't have a baseball or softball team. It's the national pastime sport & CU is a state flagship. Not a Title IX issue - baseball offers 11.7 scholarships while softball offers 12, so having these sports would actually bring the CU ADep closer to the desired 50/50 scholarship balance. This is purely a financial issue.
2. Back in 2006, CU announced it was cutting Men's Tennis and also downsized the ADep over financial difficulties. All that because about $7M in budget shortfalls accumulated over the previous 5 years. https://cubuffs.com/news/2006/3/23/250429
3. The decisions on coaches where CU has held onto people it knew it was time to part from. Ricardo Patton's lame duck year. The final year of Dan Hawkins. Certain assistants who were on multi-year contracts and forced onto a head coach. All of this is financially motivated (dictated, really).
4. Football facilities. I don't remember the exact dates, but I moved to Boulder in 1998 so all of this would have been since then. Major projects before the IPF/Champions Center which had been a "need project" on the board since Tharp was AD: permanent lights finally added, modern scoreboard finally added. We still have an antiquated sound system, antiquated bathrooms, lack of amenities, a lack of chair back seating options, horrible "premium" seating on the west side, and a whole lot of neglect and dilapidation from Balch to rusty signage around the stadium.
5. Court sport facilities. It was shocking when I first learned that CU, as a major university, did not have practice courts. So MBB, WBB and VB all had to coordinate their practice schedules on the game court around the games of the other teams and also exam & event schedules at the Keg. When the groundbreaking ceremony was announced in 2010 on the Basketball/Volleyball Practice Facility, it was done by Bohn to force the project which had been written into Coach Bzdelik's contract. CU ADep did not have the $10.8M it needed raised yet when they started it. https://pac-12.com/article/2010/03/24/groundbreaking-set-coors-events-center-practice-facility
6. This year, the Pac-12 put together a massive loan program to help its members meet budget shortfalls due to Covid. There was only 1 school that took the loan. CU now owes the Pac-12 $18M. https://www.yahoo.com/now/pac-12-1-billion-loan-201117564.html
I could go on, but I trust the above is enough to drive home the point.
What I'm hoping to accomplish with this thread is to ask some questions and hopefully get some answers. It's embarrassing and shameful that CU is apparently way behind conference members like WSU and OSU, among others, on financial resources and management.
Why is CU so poor?
What types of things can be done to fix this?
Beyond all the money spent to pay and fire coaches that competitors seem to throw around much more readily, there are a number of things that have drawn my attention and been frustrating to witness:
1. CU being the only member of the Pac-12 that doesn't have a baseball or softball team. It's the national pastime sport & CU is a state flagship. Not a Title IX issue - baseball offers 11.7 scholarships while softball offers 12, so having these sports would actually bring the CU ADep closer to the desired 50/50 scholarship balance. This is purely a financial issue.
2. Back in 2006, CU announced it was cutting Men's Tennis and also downsized the ADep over financial difficulties. All that because about $7M in budget shortfalls accumulated over the previous 5 years. https://cubuffs.com/news/2006/3/23/250429
3. The decisions on coaches where CU has held onto people it knew it was time to part from. Ricardo Patton's lame duck year. The final year of Dan Hawkins. Certain assistants who were on multi-year contracts and forced onto a head coach. All of this is financially motivated (dictated, really).
4. Football facilities. I don't remember the exact dates, but I moved to Boulder in 1998 so all of this would have been since then. Major projects before the IPF/Champions Center which had been a "need project" on the board since Tharp was AD: permanent lights finally added, modern scoreboard finally added. We still have an antiquated sound system, antiquated bathrooms, lack of amenities, a lack of chair back seating options, horrible "premium" seating on the west side, and a whole lot of neglect and dilapidation from Balch to rusty signage around the stadium.
5. Court sport facilities. It was shocking when I first learned that CU, as a major university, did not have practice courts. So MBB, WBB and VB all had to coordinate their practice schedules on the game court around the games of the other teams and also exam & event schedules at the Keg. When the groundbreaking ceremony was announced in 2010 on the Basketball/Volleyball Practice Facility, it was done by Bohn to force the project which had been written into Coach Bzdelik's contract. CU ADep did not have the $10.8M it needed raised yet when they started it. https://pac-12.com/article/2010/03/24/groundbreaking-set-coors-events-center-practice-facility
6. This year, the Pac-12 put together a massive loan program to help its members meet budget shortfalls due to Covid. There was only 1 school that took the loan. CU now owes the Pac-12 $18M. https://www.yahoo.com/now/pac-12-1-billion-loan-201117564.html
I could go on, but I trust the above is enough to drive home the point.
What I'm hoping to accomplish with this thread is to ask some questions and hopefully get some answers. It's embarrassing and shameful that CU is apparently way behind conference members like WSU and OSU, among others, on financial resources and management.
Why is CU so poor?
What types of things can be done to fix this?