L4 is from Northeast Mississippi where Indoor Plumbing was a luxury when he was a child… **
(apologies to my NEM friends for painting with broad strokes but when presented the opportunity to tweak L4’s nose, one tweaks)
Brand new FB Practice Facility
- Thread starter retire the banner
- Start date
(apologies to my NEM friends for painting with broad strokes but when presented the opportunity to tweak L4’s nose, one tweaks)
Things have changed drastically since 2021 in college sports. Maybe you missed it.
I’m just not sure what your proposed solution is to this problem.
The actual luxury sport is football, as far as being good at it. It’s very, very expensive, and completely untenable for all but about 8-10 schools at most to be good enough to win it all. We’re not ever going to be in that club.
Baseball, by comparison, is not very expensive to be good at. That’s why the whole SEC is good….once they all started actually caring about it….because the southern / southeastern US is where most all of the college ready talent is in baseball. There and California.
Either way, there’s not a way to simply not care about baseball. MSU is already at the minimum number of sports required for Division 1 membership. Even if you cut it out entirely, you’d have to replace it with something even less relevant that also has no chance of being profitable just to keep football from becoming an FCS program, and our $55 million per year check from the SEC from disappearing.
Football isn't a luxury. It is what pays the bills for all the other sports except men's basketball. Without football the baseball program could not exist at its current level. Without football we would not be in the SEC. Saying football is a luxury is just plain out ignorant.
I grew up on MSU baseball and love it. Going to the game tonight. We put way too many resources in it at the expense of our football program though. We have finite resources and choose to allow the cash cow go to sh*t and complain when they spend a couple million dollars on something like lights when literally everyone else has those lights. God forbid we try and look like an actual SEC football stadium. Baseball raised a little over 30 million dollars for their stadium and the other 30 million dollars came from the budget (or financed), which means it came from football. If we would have built a 30 million dollar baseball stadium we could have built a 30 million dollar IPF 6 years ago and we would not be having this conversation but we had to put the nonrevenue sport on a pedestal at the expense of the cash cow and now an IPF costs twice as much. Same with the lights. If we do the LED lights years ago they don’t cost 3 million dollars.
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It damn sure has, our AD topline revenue increased by 13% year over year. We are on pace to double our record for alumni giving this year. We've collected more large donations than ever so far this year, and it's just May.
The above data seem to help prove my earlier point that the money is not finite and this is not a zero sum game, as you seem to think. I also pointed out earlier that some of our alumni give to baseball as their preferred sport, so killing off baseball won't magically make those people love football, and it may not add any significant helpful amount to football.
So tell us why we have to cut baseball altogether again?
We need a prize for the person that tells everyone that football pays the bills the most times.
We need another one for the person that acts like that doesn’t matter the most times.
This is all moot and it ain't happenin, but let me try to ask another way:
Best I can tell (forgive me if I have bad info here), baseball lost between $1M and $2M during our worst years here recently. Is killing the baseball program (our only national championship winning program and probably best brand ambassador for our university) and giving that $2M to football really going to solve all our football problems?
Defunding baseball to buy an extra second string guard or tackle will just guarantee we suck at everything.
mission accomplished *
Having a very good / elite NCAA football team absolutely is a luxury. It’s got a financial barrier of entry that only a single-digit handful of the thousands of colleges and universities in the country can ever achieve. That is an exclusive club that is the very definition of luxury. And its a luxury we will never have.
Also, having a football program that, by very good fortune 80-90 ago, got to be members of a league with some other teams who themselves became huge TV draws is also a luxury. It’s something you can’t even buy today if you wanted to, and had boatloads of money to do it. SMU or Stanford couldn’t just roll up to the door and say “how much to let us in?”
That was the case 25-30 years ago, before all the mega TV contract distributions. What is NOW paying the bills for all those things isn’t ticket sales, IPF’s, beer sales, parking fees, or even anything in Starkville or the entire state of MS at all. It’s the 100 million+ SEC Network subscribers in the entire SEC footprint….97% of whom do not even live in Mississippi. Over 50% of our entire AD revenue comes from that TV distribution, which will occur regardless of whether we go 12-0 in front of 60,000 fans every home game, or 0-12 in front of 25,000 every home game. So more or less, simply fielding a football team and playing 12 games on TV is what pays for all those things. That’s the only end of the bargain we have to hold up to “pay the bills”. Just like our state welfare gets paid by the taxpayers in more populated states, so does the athletic welfare for MSU and Ole Miss. Over 50% of our budget is legitimately funded by fans of riv
And without baseball, football couldn’t exist either, because we’d not even be allowed in FBS or the SEC without both. Again, the only solution there is to add lacrosse, bowling, or something else even less profitable, if you’re wanting to take baseball away.
Good grief, and why in the heck do you think the SEC has a huge TV deal? It ain’t baseball. we spend WAY too much on baseball.
No, but it would help. Baseball has never made money. It at best breaks even.