What can't be underestimated is the impact of the decline in state dollars coming to CU over the last decade. Once over 10% of the budget (>$2B) came from the state legislature, now it's under 3% and falling. Not many other state schools have had to grapple with this challenge. CU has navigated these waters relatively well, even having a surplus a few years ago. Right or wrong, this is the state of ongoing emergency where CU's head has been in for a long time, and right or wrong, I think that Dr. Phil gets alot of credit for the Boulder campus remaining in an overall state of growth and prosperity (mostly thanks to a higher % of out-of-state and international students).
Now overlap this situation with the co$tly failures within the AD, and you know why we are broke and unable to write big checks to get out fast. We need big time private money, period.
As to the topic, my pain threshold is tested weekly, but I'm still here and going to games and never missing a minute of my Buffs, so it will never be too painful to withstand the beatings while I wait for our eventual success.
I credit Bruce Benson for navigating the issue of declining state funding. His strategy involved focusing on federal money in the form of research grants. The fed dollars have gone a long way towards building the medical campus, JILA, and other bioscience, physics and engineering structures on all campus locations. And everybody knows that government grant writing does not have a premium on athletic performance. The government grant terms are not going to allow for dollars earmarked to send a probe to Mars be used for athletic facilities investments.
The issue is Federal money is not necessarily any more reliable in the long run as state money. The recent sequestration and government shutdown around the debt ceiling is a pretty good signal that those universities who are reliant upon government dollars ought to think about diversifying their revenue sources into the private sector.. Going after research grants by the likes of ConocoPhillips and BP become more important to CU to sustain the research that is critical to CU's academic reputation. CU also has to exploit more funding opportunities from small business and alumni to diversify and hedge risks around tightening government revenue streams.
My opinion, for what it's worth, is that CU's leadership has known for years that the government and tuition are the two most important things to make payroll. For as long as that was the case, the leadership of CU had business reasons to de-emphasize football. During the first six years 2005-2011 of the Benson administration, there was not the same short-term economic incentive to go all in on the football arms race.
But, like Rip Van Winkle, Bruce Benson finally woke up to the reality that the athletic department really is the front porch of the university when it comes to individual and small business fundraising. I assert that it is out of economic necessity that Benson and his lapdog DiStefano finally came around to the importance of CU athletics to the overall health of CU. The admin are not all of a sudden interested in the success of CU football because they are fans of football. No, they came around to this recent change of heart because there is an increasing need to capture donations tied to the purse strings of fans who are athletically oriented. I suspect that if government funding was looking like a reliable long term gravy train, then BB and PS would have been content to let the CUAD drift longer than they already did.
This is a long winded way of saying that the new-found desire to pay market rate salaries for MacIntyre and George is a simple business decision, and not some longstanding heartfelt love of building a football team that really must compete for a conference championship in the Rose Bowl. I don't believe that either BB or PS really love football anymore now than they did in 2009, when Dan Hawkins was extended for year 5.
I also fear that if DiStefano were left to his own judgement, he would be prone to use the current AD debt, the escalating costs associated with salary, the declining revenue tied to falling attendance, and the lack of DirecTV revenue flowing through the P12 Network as a business decision. Heaven forbid, if George can't dig the AD out of debt and MacIntyre fails to dig CU out of the P12 cellar, then would he consider going the University of Chicago route and move to close things down? Since his state of the campus speeches emphasize fiscal discipline above athletic success, I suspect he might be the kind of leader who actually might take rock bottom and turn it into a dinosaur like 420 and Mall Crawl.
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