(05-25-2020 12:00 PM)cr11owl Wrote: It’s telling Leebron sees it as a positive that “we don’t have as much athletic revenue to lose as our peers”.
Well, I guess that statement could be taken two different ways, depending on who he thinks are our peers.
If peers is meant strictly in an athletic sense, i.e. CUSA and the other G5 schools, then this could present an opportunity for us to catch back up to the P5 train while it's currently derailed. Nobody in G5 has much ticket or TV revenue in the first place, so most "revenue" comes from donations, student fees, and subsidies from general operating funds, which ultimately traces back to tuition and endowment income. The vast majority of G5 are non-flagship/commuter state schools who have no real donor base or endowment, and who were already charging as much in student fees as they could get away with. So as enrollment drops and state funding tightens, this could basically be an extinction event for athletics at schools without either good donor bases (BYU, Navy, Army, maybe Boise) and/or not willing or able to increase subsidies -- only possible for rich privates like BYU, Rice, SMU, Tulane. Essentially, the barrier to (re)entry to the P5 is lowering, either temporarily or permanently, and while only a few programs will even survive to attempt that leap, we might be one of those few in a position to do so.
OTOH, if peers is meant in a more overall sense, like schools in both the FBS & AAU like UT, A&M, Duke, Northwestern, Stanford, Vandy, then those schools do have ticket & TV revenue that will be drastically drying up and they're going to have to do a lot of retooling, whereas here at Rice, fear not, we should be able to keep things looking pretty much the same as they have been. Which, of course, will still be several levels below these "peers."
(05-25-2020 12:00 PM)cr11owl Wrote: I don’t see us making any big moves in athletics while he is President. The vision just isn’t there.
Agreed. Whatever marginally better supporter of athletics he may have been than his predecessors, at the end of the day he's still been a caretaker president, not a visionary. If history is any guide, whatever opportunity there may be here, I have every confidence he'll successfully steer us away from it.
