Athletics Deficit

According to an article in the Daily Campus, over the last four year the SMU athletic department has lost $56.7 million. I think that is ridiculous. SMU lost $12 million in 2004, $13.72 million in 2005, $12.96 million in 2006, $17.95 million in 2007, and they expect to lose $16.8 million in 2008 and $16.3 million in 2009. Personally, I think that these numbers are outrageous.

Apparently, most Division I schools do lose money through their athletics departments, but their average losses are much lower than that of SMU. I think that SMU goes pretty all out for a lot of occasion, and usually that’s a nice thing because it means that SMU provides great experiences. But in situations like this, I don’t understand why they would waste so much money when they could use it for something much more beneficial to the campus.

Part of the reason the losses increased by about $5 million in 2007 is because there were a few large expenditures. There was the $400,000 a year deal for new basketball coach Matt Doherty, a $600,000 buyout for fired basketball coach Jimmy Tubbs, and a contract extension that raised Phil Bennettt’s salary to $500,000 a year. While these are all very expensive, it’s possible that they could help the deficit by increasing our schools reputation for sports so that more students want to come here. Either way, I doubt that SMU is going to change its policy toward athletics any time soon.

SMU Athletics Deficit