gmartin wrote:Ok..... enough of Jans. He is gone!!!! Back to my original question. Do you think BG would be a better basketball program if it didn't have so many D1 sports. Paying nearly 4x as much in football salaries than if we were FCS, and paying for hockey cuts into the budget. Take the Frack money out of the equation. Look at Butler Gonzaga and Xavier. They are not D1 in football. Don't have hockey program and they are in Sweet 16.
As I tried to say in my original post, it depends.
If we dropped football, is the leadership more willing to move on from a poor coaching hire? Certainly it should, in theory, provide more funds to hire a better pedigree head coach, but with that comes higher buyouts if you need to fire them.
If the administration is going to sit on coaches until their contracts run out, when they're clearly not the right leader for the program, then I don't think it matters what other sports we offer. We could have afforded to buy out Dakich or Orr; neither were making a very high salary (I think Orr was under $200k in his final years, and I'm sure Dakich was well under that). It's been a willingness to invest in buying out a coach, moreso than simply not having the money, that has been the problem.
I'm not really sure if the lack of football helped Gonzaga, Butler, or Xavier become a quality hoops program. Really, I'm not convinced Xavier even belongs in this conversation since they have a pretty long history of basketball success. The BIG place where not having football comes in, to me, is to SUSTAIN the success once you start to taste it. Butler has found a way to keep Brad Stevens there for 10 seasons already, and is paying him (supposedly) around $1 million/yr. But when he was initially hired he wasn't making any more really than what we paid Jans/Huger. Few has been at Gonzaga since '01, and is making about $1.4 million/yr. I'm sure he was probably making in the $300k range when he was first given the job as well.
To me the question is not whether or not Football is preventing us from being competitive in Hoops (I don't think it has in the least). I do think, however, it could prevent us from keeping the RIGHT coach long term, as I don't think our Athletic Dept would ever be able to pony up the $1 million/yr you need to have to keep a high quality coach at a mid major.
I also think the MAC's overall commitment to football has hurt the conference in basketball far more than it has hurt at BG specifically. The conference keeps sinking money into football and has failed to schedule well in hoops. Even the successful teams (Akron, Ohio, Kent) have not been nearly as good in the last decade as what MAC hoops was on the whole in the decade(s) prior.
