Mike Nugent came into the Griz Fan Pod on Sunday night already hot. “The fans have done their part year after year after year. They come, they buy tickets. They show up. … The players are trying their hardest. The leadership has set up this program to fail for years.” Three days later Andrew Schmidt delivered an epic rant on Big Sky Breakdown about the same department and landed here: “You sat on it, and you said, the people will come no matter what. … We don’t need the athletic fees. We don’t need to charge the students. We could just rely on the golden goose of Griz football.”
We were off this week, which leaves everybody time to argue, and the argument has moved off the defense and onto the people who fund it. And that is mostly not the University. Last year AD Kent Haslam said that getting less support from its own university than any other department in the Big Sky is “a real pride point for us.”
Last in the Big Sky in school financial support
It’s asked often: how do we have the stadium, the fans, the donors, the history but only two football league titles to show for it in seventeen years (2011 happened folks). It’s pretty simple: the university and athletic department haven’t been doing their part for years, and it’s caught up with us. Wa-Griz turned 40, and it’s showing.
A rash of injuries out of a weight room where, until this summer, the money covered one paid football strength coach. A head coach whose base salary is less than the offensive coordinator’s in Bozeman. All told, we have spent $3.8 million less over the last nine years on the things that directly affect the quality of team on the field.
The University has stiffed the athletic department, the department has failed to increase contributions, and football has been the program that has paid the price. Every FCS school directs general funds to its athletic department, and all but a few send student athletic fees too. The University of Montana is dead last in our league on both.
Across the nation, we rank 61st out of 77 in university and student support among all public FCS schools. We are one of only a handful of flagship universities in the whole subdivision, and this is frankly embarrassing.
The median Big Sky athletic department gets $14.6 million a year in student fees and university funds. Ours gets $10.4 million. Football makes up the difference
Our department still spends $30.8 million a year, fourth in the Big Sky, because our fans put in $13.1 million, the most in the league. Give it the median school-provided check and we would spend $35 million, more than Bozeman. That additional $4.2 million the school should be spending would fund the other sports, and let football keep what it makes. Add up the money that comes off football Saturdays and the business of Montana football brings in $13 million to $15 million a year. Football is allowed to spend $9 million of it. That’s how the university gets away with putting $4.2 million a year less into athletics than the median Big Sky school, and it can’t be allowed to continue.
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