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Cigarboy sucks!

Well, it doesn't necessarily amount to much. The message to the Loyola Community forwarded by Olga Hancock is signed by T Kelly who says that HE and Fr Garanzini are pleased to announce the hire. Fr Garanzini's statement quoted in the press release may reflect some involvement in the process, but it could also have been written by anyone in the PR office. The indisputable good news is that more money has been flowing into athletics, even if some of it was squandered by the last administration on various outsourcing initiatives.

Kiloton Kelly taking credit for something? You don't say...

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Cigarboy sucks!

I am really happy with this hire. Without meeting him, it's really a puzzle as to why he wasn't a finalist the first go-round. He was also a finalist for the Oakland University job. Maybe there was some wildly outlandish prerequisite/emphasis on fundraising (there usually is at most colleges).

At first blush-- and some on Twitter have already written as much-- it might seem like a lateral move for Watson. But Loyola has about 6 times as many students and a total athletics budget 34% higher than St. Bonaventure. I also imagine that there are goals somewhere (if not, there should be) for bumping up the athletics budget to the $14-15 million range within the next couple of years. A $15 million budget would put us 6th in the conference, from our current 8th place. Our men's basketball budget is currently 6th overall in the conference and 3rd of the 4 private schools, just barely above Evansville (who has the lowest overall athletics budget of all MVC schools) and $1.5 million behind Bradley.

With 2 1/2 times the enrollment of Bradley or Drake, there's no reason why we should be so far behind on the athletics budget, especially since we're in the most costly market in the league with the highest tuition. The only explanation is for years we operated athletics on a comparative shoestring.

Everybody at St. Bonaventure seems to really like and appreciate the guy. But according to their message board, they have their own version of Tom Kelly, who may have helped push him away...

http://bonabandwagon.proboards.com/thread/12569/

JCT, you seem to be saying that the reason the budget is inadequate is that the budget is inadequate. Why is it? As far as I know, there are complex reasons. There is some history that goes back to the Loyola financial crisis around 2000 and I don't blame Fr Garanzini for putting basketball on the back burner when he got here and the very survival of the university was up in the air. Partly related to that is losing and apparent disinterest by the administration over a longer period of time, all of which underlie the more immediate cause which is a lack of attendance/media attractiveness and financial support from alumni. Now it has to be a bootstrapping operation and an extremely difficult one. I don't know how bad things were at Bonaventure in 2007, but it seems that Watson had to deal with some of the same stuff. So I am also happy with this hire. It sure beats bringing in someone whose experience was in the Big Ten.

I think the Bradley b-ball budget is skewed somewhat by the fact that they pay Geno Ford an ungodly salary of 700k to 900k, which makes him the most overpaid coach in the country other than Oliver Purnell at DePaul.

http://www.blogs.dixcdn.com/kentstatesp ... t-bradley/

First, staying on topic, congrats to Steve Watson. I'm really thrilled that this is over and we have a really qualified candidate.

That said, Geno Ford makes 900k? In the immortal words of Harry Caray, "How does he look his boss in the face when he collects his paycheck? He must be wearing a ski-mask and carrying a revolver because he's just striaght up robbing the organization."

Operating on a below-appropriate budget is something that dates back way before the financial crisis. It's historic. Budget disparities were not as drastic in men's basketball before the early 1980s, when TV and Tournament money began to accelerate increasing financial separation between teams and conferences. The rise of the old Big East made several schools previously similar to Loyola (private, basketball-only, even some with lesser basketball pedigrees) into perennial NCAA contenders. Notably, Loyola has not reached postseason play of any kind (NCAA, NIT, CBI, CIT) since 1985, when it was done mostly with local players recruited from 1981-84.

Before the mid 80s, many larger schools considered basketball an afterthought. Florida made their first NCAA Tournament appearance in 1987. Between 1974 and 1989, Texas made only one appearance in the tournament. Arizona made only three NCAA appearances before 1985, and they've missed only one since.

The financial crisis didn't develop fully until Baumhart left and Piderit came in (1994), when the Medical Center was separated from the University budget. Unfortunately, that was just about the time frame where the old MCC was breaking up, and schools like Xavier, St. Louis, Marquette, Dayton, and Evansville were bailing out to conferences with higher average budgets and revenues. Loyola had to remain in the MCC/Horizon, where the athletic budget was almost always in the mid-lower range of the conference.

The financial problems of the late 90s/early 2000s surely stunted any attempts to catch up, and now that the university is financially healthy we need to make up for many years of sub-par marketing and three decades shut out of postseason play. You can't do it by winning alone-- even if we went 22-10 this year and reached the NIT, it wouldn't make much of a difference given the anemic season ticket base and being off the radar for years. Even if we can't produce an above .500 team this year, we can at least begin laying the groundwork in marketing, promotions, higher recruiting budgets, technology, facilities, etc.

I know this is somewhat off topic but can someone explain to me the financial crisis that Loyola went through. I am a student now and do not really know about it and am curious about it.

The administration separated the Medical Center finances from the University around 1994 or 1995, while enrollment was somewhat stagnant or falling. There were some other problems going on around the same time (Loyola dropped Dentistry as a professional school which angered a lot of steady donors), but the Medical Center was the big change. The separation caused a sudden operating deficit for the university, and Loyola began seriously drawing down the endowment, which was once considered one of the top 50 endowments among colleges-- I believe I saw somewhere it was 41st nationally when I was attending in the early 90s. The problem wasn't fixed totally until 2005 or thereabouts, and Loyola missed out on a lot of the high growth years for college endowment investments in the late 1990s. The years between 2004-2010 were spent trying to re-build endowment funds. So essentially, the athletics programs were put on a far back burner from about 1996 to 2010.