You are right that it doesn't take $60m to run an "Athletic Department". Tech however is still very much cash poor and unable to keep up with the Jones at well under $25m in operating cost. Cost of living is absurd here in North LA when you compare it to Boston or LA, but Coaching Salaries, and other things are the same everywhere. Also, it takes money to develop a product that draws in the casual fan, especially when there is so much free stuff on tv. Tech is the worlds worst about drawing casual fans, or maintaining even the lower level die-hards. We don't cater to the masses and it is killing us.
You are equating success on the field to success in the Athletic department. We have a .570 winning percentage lifetime and still have never ever sold out our current stadium. I never said we needed $60m budget to be successful, yet it keeps getting repeated like I did say that. My definition of success is the establishment of a higher value point of the brand that it Louisiana Tech.
We are no where near a ROI curve and you know it. We are far from it. Clemson University operates at around $112m in athletic expenditures. When comparing apples to apples you should be using Clemson, SC not Boston or Seattle.
We're actually pretty good considering the population from which we have to draw them.
Yes, those are cinnamons.You are equating success on the field to success in the Athletic department.
Agree. There's still a lot more we can do.We are no where near a ROI curve and you know it.
Disagree. Clemson might like to call themselves a small town, but they're smack in the middle of the Greenville-Spartanburg metro with around 1.5MM people. (Same goes for Auburn & TAMU)When comparing apples to apples you should be using Clemson, SC
Apple to apples, we need to be looking at Boone, NC and Pullman, WA.
North LA from Rapides up is 1.25 million people. Greenville Metro may be bigger than Shreveport Bossier but its not dissimilar. If all it took was winning we would have been a P5 school a long time ago. There are multiple p5 comparisons that we could utilize to see where we stack up. We are good enough to be a solid mid level G5 school, but we don't excel in many of the areas that would make us a "state" school like a Wazzou, Clemson, Kansas State, Iowa State or Oklahoma State. Our biggest problem has been and always will be that the State of LA is a economically dysfunctional as there can be and its investments will always be LSU, but we should still rank closer to the second tier P5 schools than we do. I have been to Clemson and it is about the size of WM. It was shocking how small.
Yeah, I think 14 schools is way too many for any conference, but that's kind of where we're at in most of FBS these days. Also, you're telling me that we had about 1,000 fewer fans at our cross-divisional game than our OOC and in-division games - I don't think that's a travesty. There aren't 14 schools you could put together where a random cross-divisional game wouldn't garner less interest.
On the whole, while I could see that we'd likely have a slightly higher average attendance if BB&B was allowed to cherry-pick our favorite 8 teams to make our own new Tech-centric conference, it's never going to work that way. Not even if you limited the choices to CUSA and the 'Belt. And so by the time you re-shuffled the deck, there is a really good chance we're right about where we are now (or worse off). I just don't think CUSA is all that bad (even if it isn't my dream conference). It's a fun game to play when you look at the geography and see the overlap, and even national writers that I like really enjoy trying to split us off "to make more sense." But I don't see the overlap as that big of a deal, and I'm not convinced that redrawing the conferences based solely on geography makes anyone all that much happier (well, I guess some would be happier, maybe even us, but on average I think it's a wash).