I had an interesting conversation, with a guy who is a legal consultant to an SEC group that advises schools on legal issues for athletics, focusing on fundraising, NIL landscape and compensation for athletes. He complimented NC State for gaining national relevance in sports. I mentioned that lots of supporters felt that not enough of the budget was being spent on football. He asked about our budget, which he assumed was much larger. He asked about donations and that really took him be surprise. He said, I know your team is having a down year but they’ve been pretty solid the last few years and that NC State made lots of people tune into last year’s Final 4. He went on to say that he couldn’t believe that we did this with the donation level. He knew of Boo and said, “Boo is a magician; we should have elected him president”. He went on to say that, if you want competitive sports programs, the AD needs, at bare minimum, 20% of the income stream coming from contributions. He said, the higher you get above 20%, the better chance you have of consistently fielding good teams. . Interestingly, he also said, getting good at football, invariably improves the basketball team, over time. He said, most sports benefit from good football teams. He said being good in basketball can help football but not like football can help basketball. I went back to, then shouldn’t we spend more of our budget on football? He replied that, “That would be step 2. Step 1 is that you really need to get a lot more supporter engagement. You need to get the overall budget up and that comes from donations. Then, you can adjust the budget to put more towards football and still cover the other expenses.”. He mentioned that rights/ tickets/ donations are the main income streams. The only one of those that can have significant adjustments is donations.
I took a look at some donations/ income numbers. Here is what I got:
UVA-38.9% of athletic income is donations
CU- 38.5%
FSU- 26.3%
Ga Tech- 25.8% (donations + draw from athletic endowment which came from donations)
VPI- 23.0%
UNC- 17.0%
NC State- 14.4%
Cal- 13.6%
Here are some of the Big Boy programs
UGA-36.7%
UTx- 32.3%
OrU- 26.8%
OSU- 25.3%
Bama- 25.2%
UTn- 23.4%
I looked at smaller programs in P4
IU- 37.2% (that will probably go up, with Cignetti’s success)
KsSU- 28.1% (only P4 public school with a smaller ath budget than NC State)
SC- 23.8%
MsSU- 20.5%
UK- 18.7%
I looked at G5 in NC
ECU- 21.5%. Their athletic donations are much closer to our total, than I realized
ASU- 16.4%
The next time we want to critique Boo, DD, et al, remember that WP Nation has not exactly performed at a high level. We haven’t even performed at a mediocre level. The “glass house” metaphor comes to mind. We need to do better, if we want to get better.
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