re: Louisiana audits find three university athletics programs losing money

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I think schools in the AAC have athletic budgets $60 million and higher. Tech's $28 million is hard to overcome.

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Hard to tell with Tulane, SMU, Temple, Navy, etc not reporting, but I know ECU is around 43MM and Memphis 45-46MM. Add in conference distribution being 2.5-3x higher AAC vs CUSA and it's a ~10MM gap. The big difference here is both these schools also have student fees, ECU's is over 13MM annually, Memphis fluctuates between 7-8MM annually. This is where La schools miss out vs their peers. UT-Tyler charges $16 per credit hour. That fee alone to make them even with a D2 school gets LTU into the 36MM budget range (on par with ECU) and gets the Cajuns into the black with a slight budget bump.

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I think our recently inflated-beyond-means budget was our admin partly trying to keep momentum of Billy's success and inflate our budget for possible conference opportunities

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It looks like it started around 2016 or so, IIRC this would be around the time the "Master Plan" started falling behind with funding due to the Oil Market tanking. It will be interesting to see what 2023 looks like, because 2016 to 2022 it looks like it has only gone up with deficits and general fund transfers.