No he is right - most basketball fans support football (some maybe while holding their nose) but there were many that advocated dropping football.
It has actually been worse than that for years. There has long been a group within the AD that wasn’t on board with football. Not at the senior level, of course, but next level down. The guys who do the day to day work. I thought it would fade away as we had success and those guys retired, but it kept regenerating and then we hired Pasqualoni, Batsht Bob and RE2 which didn’t help the case. The argument has always been you can’t do both, though Michigan, UCLA, Baylor, Auburn, UNC, Florida and many others would beg to differ. After all, Villanova is the only school to win the NCAA Tournament without major football since we did it in 1999 though we in the process of upgrading starting in the fall of that year.