I didn't read Burke's details on the master plan for football, but I seem to remember seeing something about the AD not getting any money from the university, or something to that effect?
How many other Big 10 schools AD's are self funded?
We have over a Billion $ endowment for the university, right.....?
I'm not even saying money is the entire problem, because I do think they stepped up with Hazell and Painter, but if we still spend in the lower quarter or third of other Big10 schools, then maybe that means something.
It's not a black and white issue like Burke makes it out to be.
For example, one Big Ten school that I know of has their university parking service handle parking on football game days. They take in the money, execute the operation and then transfer the revenue to the athletic department. This counts as a "school getting money from the university" in the accounting world. Purdue handles parking through the athletic department - they take in the money, execute the operation and keep the money in the athletic department. There's no "advantage" either way - but in this situation, Purdue says "we didn't get any support from the university" and the other school can't say that. But there's literally no advantage.
Another example - Iowa get $600,000 from the university. I have no idea what this is for. It could be a situation like parking revenue that I just mentioned. It could be the university renting out the athletic facilities for events like graduation and such. It's not necess
Also, Purdue has the fewest number of sports of Big Ten schools. If you had to be rough with numbers, you can probably say that a varsity sport costs about $1 million. If other schools are saying hey, we don't want you to cut programs. We'll give you $3 million to help sustain them. Well, if that school is offering 5 more sports than Purdue is, that's not really some big advantage cause their operating costs are higher.
Purdue certainly is not POOR. Purdue's budget is on par with other Big Ten schools and other schools with successful sports programs.
Purdue's budget is on par with: Virginia Tech, UCONN, West Virginia, Ole Miss, Clemson, Arizona State, Maryland, NC State, Georgia Tech, etc. These are not schools that are cheapo, po-dunk schools. And many are very good at football. And quite frankly, this is comparing budgets when our football revenue is PATHETIC. And our budget is on par with a school like Clemson - who has 80,000 people at football games. If we had just had pretty good football attendance, our revenues would be well above some of these schools.
