[BostonCard]

The size of the endowment is irrelevant, since much of it is already spoken for and even if you opened it up, athletics would have to compete with a whole host of other “priorities” for the University.  Yeah, if you look at my wealth, I could buy a Lamborghini. A lot of stakeholders (well, one in specific) would be rather upset if I liquidated my retirement savings to do so.

As for revenues, remember that as part of our move to the ACC, we agreed to receive a 30% share of ACC revenues for the next 7 years so the university is going to be on the hook for more than the $20 or so million that it had been subsidizing the AD for the last couple of years.  Plus, an interesting list; even when you take out Stanford, it is notable that lowest revenue SMU won the ACC regular season, and middle-of-the road Clemson won the ACC championship, while FSU, third on the list, had a year almost as crappy as Stanford.  It’s almost like money can’t buy you a championship, and long-term, there is probably a fair bit of reverse causation (being good brings revenue) or confounding.

It’s fair to lament that we shouldn’t be the worst team in the ACC.  But a long-term .570 winning team is not a top-20 football program; it is a top-50 program which will periodically be good to very good and sometimes suck.  Just as you remember being as good as Notre Dame (in football) and almost as good as Duke (in basketball), I’m sure you can also remember being as bad as Davis in football and having a basketball coach leave Stanford for Iowa claiming that it was impossible to win here (and kind of demonstrate it by taking BC to two NCAA tournament bids in three years, including an Elite Eight, before Stanford, and Iowa to the tournament 9 times in 13 years after Stanford, and yet never finishing with a winning conference record at Stanford).

BC

[BostonCard]

The size of the endowment is irrelevant, since much of it is already spoken for and even if you opened it up, athletics would have to compete with a whole host of other “priorities” for the University.  Yeah, if you look at my wealth, I could buy a Lamborghini. A lot of stakeholders (well, one in specific) would be rather upset if I liquidated my retirement savings to do so.

As for revenues, remember that as part of our move to the ACC, we agreed to receive a 30% share of ACC revenues for the next 7 years so the university is going to be on the hook for more than the $20 or so million that it had been subsidizing the AD for the last couple of years.  Plus, an interesting list; even when you take out Stanford, it is notable that lowest revenue SMU won the ACC regular season, and middle-of-the road Clemson won the ACC championship, while FSU, third on the list, had a year almost as crappy as Stanford.  It’s almost like money can’t buy you a championship, and long-term, there is probably a fair bit of reverse causation (being good brings revenue) or confounding.

It’s fair to lament that we shouldn’t be the worst team in the ACC.  But a long-term .570 winning team is not a top-20 football program; it is a top-50 program which will periodically be good to very good and sometimes suck.  Just as you remember being as good as Notre Dame (in football) and almost as good as Duke (in basketball), I’m sure you can also remember being as bad as Davis in football and having a basketball coach leave Stanford for Iowa claiming that it was impossible to win here (and kind of demonstrate it by taking BC to two NCAA tournament bids in three years, including an Elite Eight, before Stanford, and Iowa to the tournament 9 times in 13 years after Stanford, and yet never finishing with a winning conference record at Stanford).

BC