The Chronicle's story this morning says that UH spent about $300M to upgrade its facilities and staff in pursuit of the XII offer. It's not clear how long they looked back, but I think it's roughly in the past decade. In a little longer time span, we spent $31.5M on the Patterson Field House, $9M on the G.R. Brown Tennis Center, $3M for the Waltrip Indoor Training Center (bubble), $30M on Tudor, and some amount on other facilities far less than the $200+ M difference. The same Chron story says that UH athletics's annual operations expenses grew from $39M in 2014,
barely more than we spent in 2015, to over $73M in 2019. To make the comparison worse, our expenditures include far more expensive student scholarships; $X spent by Rice Athletics has less value to athletics operations than the same amount spent by UH Athletics.
The time to start was 10/20/30/40/50/60 years ago. With the lack of either a prominent administrative vision as Pimpa described or regular success in football or basketball to force our program into prominence, our best bet right now is simply that some combination of private schools and service academies in or going to the AAC want to be good friends with us. I'd say we have very long odds of escaping C-USA this year, and that any efforts we might start now would be better oriented for 2035 realignment than any immediate improvement in affiliation. I can be optimistic in the long term, but not today.
I gave to the Owl Club this week and every year since graduating. I'm going to be at the game tomorrow, and I hope nothing more than to be wrong in this cynical outlook. I just don't see how a panicked last second letter writing campaign is going to not only generate needed institutional support but also adequate proof of it that the AAC, MWC, or any other conference would trust it enough right now to make a decision in our favor. If JK's got some new capital improvement plans or fundraising campaigns to announce, last month would have been a great time to do it.
(09-10-2021 01:45 PM)Ranger Wrote: I would think JK is going after this 2000% since our upgrading conferences would improve his employment prospects. While he is not driving the train, I would hope he has the ear of those that are.
I'm confident that he is. He was documented trying to get us into the MWC in 2014 and the XII in 2016. I suspect Karlgaard was one of the surprising calls in mind
when PAC commissioner George Kliavkoff said, "I wouldn’t be doing my job if I wasn’t listening to schools that wanted to go in the Pac-12, and we’ve had a lot of them reach out. Probably all of the ones you would expect and several you’d be surprised by." That said, for all my confidence that he's trying, this task looks to me approximately like tilting at windmills. Noble but unlikely to achieve a lot of progress.