They will make more money in the ACC on the contract than they will in the Big East. By several million. If that's accurate, then how are they struggling?
The university in the past decade has had to divert everything they've got into helping the local community survive. As upstater correctly notes, the AAU has modified it's membership criteria significantly, and put all members under review, to reflect what's happening in the federal governemnt regarding academic research funding.
From what I"ve learned recently though, even if the AAU hadn't modified it's criteria, SU would still have fallen significantly below AAU standards in research programs that are federally funded. They've essentially given up going after federal dollars to any signfiicant degree, and instead of pursuing large private industries nationally, and globally, are mostly are going after state dollars, adn local dollars. THe diversion of money out of New York City to upstate new york does not make people happy down in our neck of the woods. I wasn't aware of any of this until just about aweek ago, as I haven't really paid much attention to Cuse other than the b-ball program since the 90s.
They done a great job up there in going after alumni donations, and the most definitely have an endowment that is in the billion dollar figure range, but for an institution that size, with that history, to be focusing on the funding and research projects that they are concentrated on now, after a half century of being an AAU institution, well I don't know how else to put it, but to me, that means clearly that Syracuse University leadership in the past decade has made a conscious decision that the local community up there is failing, and they are in survival mode, to keep it going.
They are actually doing a good job of it, and after learning all this recently, it makes perfect sense that they'd be running for the guaranteed paycheck from ESPN that the ACC provides, rather than what the Big East was doing, taking the risk of going on the open market.
Whether or not you agree that the community up there in upstate is in bad shape, I don't care.
But I don't understand why people that have anythign to do with syracuse can be excited about a yearly $15million paycheck, for a university with a billion dollar endowment, in a small market community (struggling or not).....and understand what comes along with it.
What comes along with that 14 team scheduling in the ACC, is that the only annual home and home partner for all sports (football and basketball most important) is Boston College. That's fact, it came out a week ago. THat means that Duke, UNC, etc.... all those programs that you think you are going to get, are only coming Syracuse every other year. You're also playing post season b-ball in Greensboro instead of MSG. Syracuse, through the ACC, has now given up All Tiers of broadcasting to the ACC for all sports. THat means Syracuse doesn't get any say in when they will be playing football games. Thursday night football, get used to it. Wait never mind that, Wednesday night football get used to it, because the NFL just announced a full slate of thursday night games coming, and espn isgoing to be stupid enough to go head ot head with the NFL, with ACC football. And all of that, for the next quarter century. for accepting approx $8mill a more a year in a guaranteed paycheck, instead of going on the open market with the Big East.
You may not believe me, but I don't care about that either. THere are people that have supported Syracuse for a very long time, that are not happy at all with this move, especially after the scheduling partnership with BC came out.
THey already had an agreement in place to start scheduling BC again as a non-conf opponent..
