Hate to see this reality hit our athletic department. But hopefully it means we will come out the other side without having huge loans that take years to pay back. Department-wide furloughs and layoffs
Most of these furloughs are short-term. Very few from what I understand are being asked to take much of a leave. Many just need to take a mandatory two weeks without pay before the end of the year. Still sucks to have to miss a paycheck, and some assistant coaches and staff will be hit harder than others, but it’s not nearly as bad as the headline makes it seem.
I mean I guess everyone’s expenses rise to meet their level of income, but if these folks have planned for this for the past six months like they should have been, (I know I have) they should be able to do fine. I think the whole freakin shutdown is ridiculous. We should have been able to weather this with targeted precautions, and been close to a both herd immunity, and the virus burnout by now if the politicians hadn’t freaked the f**k out from the beginning.
Financing capital expenditures that allow our program to grow is where debt is expected and a good thing. And everything we’ve done has been very well planned to meet our objectives without going way overboard like so many other programs across the country. We’ve grown our AD from the MT West days of $20M to $100M annually. And in order to be competitive we had to raise the bar in facilities but there’s a return on our investment there where we are able to continue to grow revenues. However, if we were to take out a $90M loan to pay coaching salaries, administrative, staff on a year without revenues and then have to take years to pay that back…there’s no ROI there. It’s close to flushing money down the toilet.
Basically just means they’re taking Fridays off (ie. forced unpaid vacation days) for a couple months, no affect on recruiting, the coaches will still be doing what needs to be done.
However it is unfortunate for all of the non-football members of the athletic department, their furloughs are longer and their situations are much more affected.