Reply to thread

Message: [QUOTE="upstater, post: 3818609, member: 153"] Like I said earlier though, the game is never to hide the $$ from the athletes but from the parents. So this plays out in so many different ways. For example, branding. Colleges pile all the money from branding/royalties into athletics revenue. In many places, it is probably deserved. But, if you've been on Yale's campus or let's say NYU or Boston U. (non-athletic type schools) you will see kids wearing branded sweatshirts etc. For state schools where you have non-students wearing sweatshirts, hats, etc., it makes more sense to count that as athletic revenue. But is it 100% due to athletics? Or 95%? 75%? Then there's donations. Without a breakdown it's hard to know what's being counted in this UConn number. Is this the donation for a hockey rink? Baseball field? Soccer field? A lot of schools will use the donations as athletics department revenue. That's well and good since it was donated for athletics purposes. BUT then the school builds the facility with its own money (or bonds it out and ends up servicing the loan from the academic side). Which means: the donations to the facility were counted as athletic revenue. But the cost of building the facility was borne by the academic side. U. Michigan did this a decade ago when it expanded the big house and remade basketball/hockey arenas, built new training facilities etc. The donations counted as AD revenue. The academic side bonded out the facilities, and now maintains the loans at a cost of over $20m a year ($450m in loans). Until 2 years ago, the AD did not reimburse the academic side for the cost, but now it does. Infamously, there's the Oklahoma St. case from 2008. T. Boone Pickens gave the school $175m to build on their football stadium. The school counted that money as pending revenue. But the costs to build were provided by the academic side. So they bonded it out and started building. Then the 2008-2009 meltdown happened, Pickens lost a ton of money, temporarily reneged on his commitment to the school. The upshot was horrible for Oklahoma State, as faculty there had won some big gov't research contracts that required the school to build out new facilities for the research. But because of the stadium and the disaster on their finance sheet, they couldn't secure the bonds to build. They were way over their skis. They not only ended up not building the research facilities, but they also lost over $100m in grants, when the time expired for the research to start. Several years later, Pickens made god on his promise and gave the school $175m for athletic facilities. It was all counted as revenue by the ADs office. [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach