UConn’s athletic budget is an abject disaster. Like, nearly $40 million in the hole for 2018 kind of disaster. Widespread fan disengagement was certainly part of the problem, along a difficult financial situation for the school (and the state) generally. Running that big of a hole, even with dubious athletic department accounting practices, means you can’t invest in your programs, which can further put your teams in a death spiral. If your fans hate your schedule, and you don’t have the money (or geography, history, etc) to improve, your prospects for financial improvement look slim.
UConn needs to fix this narrative and now is the perfect time to do it:
1. Stop counting scholarships as if they were paying full out state tuition. No one actually pays that. Instead, calculation the incremental cost to educate our athletes.
2. Stop leasing the Rent and the XL. These are BS items with the State paying the State, the net effect of this is to mask the losses the institutions generate at the expense of the UConn athletic department. Instead, make games at the Rent and the XL profit sharing ventures with net profits split between CRDA. It is more transparent way to account for the profitability.
3. Travel expenses are about to drop precipitously.
These three things ought to cut our paper deficit in half, minimally. UConn then has a narrative of how it restructured it's AD.
