Meanwhile, the school has missed financial targets. A 2015 audit of athletic department finances reported that spending on equipment, uniforms and supplies came in 88 percent over budget in the 2014 fiscal year, while travel expenses were 57 percent over their mark. Meanwhile, revenue from ticket sales came in 21 percent under budget.
Overall, the school had planned to reduce its athletic subsidy by $3.5 million for the 2014 fiscal year, according to the audit. It ended up increasing it by $700,000.
La vie continue at wanna-be sports factory the University of Houston; this article about it even has the dude in charge of turning Houston into Clemson alerting us to the fact that sports are “truly the front porch of the institution.” So true, so true, which is why The Texas Tribune has done a long piece on how the school is spending itself into the gutter subsidizing games no one on campus wants to watch.
The quotation in my headline’s intriguing, isn’t it? Technically isn’t an athletic program. Yes, I see the point. It’s in the stadium and it’s used by the marching band, but it has nothing to do with athletics. It’s academic, see.
Along with all that money transferred from academics to athletics, UH has a new football coach who’s kind of the equivalent of this chick — he issues threatening language to students who might be considering not going to a football game (she issues threatening language to students who might be considering using terms like male and female). Poor students.
September 3rd, 2015 at 9:12AM
The UH with the football team is the flagship campus of a four university system and the only one of the four to offer student housing. About 15% of the UH-University Park students live on campus. Houston has an NFL team. How does any of that add up to filling a 40,000 seat stadium? They couldn’t fill the old stadium either.
September 3rd, 2015 at 9:19AM
This is the kind of explanation that our CFO, Mr. Malice, excels at and that President Peterprinciple will angrily defend. Well, when they can pry him out from under his desk and unroll him from the quivering ball state, anyway.
It’s kind of like hiring freezes, which these days are announced here every year. It’s just that some parts of the university are freezier than others. Our athletics empire is north of the academic slum areas, and it is positively melty up there, thawed to the point that several new, well-paid bureaucrats can be added. Not only, according to Mr. Malice, does one need to spend money in order to make money, one needs to spend more money in order to lose even more money, which will benefit the university in the long run, because the willingness to lose lots of money on athletics shows that we are winners, not losers. Or something like that. Down south where the academic enterprise does biz, meanwhile, it’s 20 below and falling fast.
September 3rd, 2015 at 9:30AM
tp: Yes – if there’s one thing I’ve learned following university athletics, it’s that you need to spend more money in order to lose more money.