Hearing a $4 million cut could be coming for the 2026 budget and a $8-10 million cut from the 2027 budget. Is anyone else hearing these numbers. If true UL is done in every sport.
I don’t think Maggard will be at UL by the time football season rolls around next year.
I fully expect him to be gone at end of athletic year. Who could blame him. We are in dire straits financially for foreseeable future. But, I think he shares part of blame with the departments total lack of marketing efforts, skills.
He is one of the main reasons we’re in dire straits. When your program produces $15ish million a year, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out, you can’t spend $40 million every year and not expect a correction.
Going to look great on the ledgers with the SEZ still on the books and now adding another 50 million.
Support staff in football alone was close to 2 mill
You earn less in ticket sales that what you pay the receptionist. .. probably a problem
I’m going to say here, that I don’t really blame Maggard. Sure, we’re frustrated with him now, but the dude spearheaded us (from my view, I’m not some “insider”) to go all in on being competitive in football. He hired Napier, when everyone thought we were hiring Pry, and he gave Napier a pretty damn good money bucket for assistant coaches.
I think Maggard thought that if we could be a Top 25 ranked program, attendance and additional donations would roll in.
He was wrong, as was I, because I thought the same damn thing. Common sense, right. I’ve heard businesses owners and residents in Acadiana tell me for years, that “Once USL/ULL/UL gets serious and gets us a winning football program, I’ll be all in”. Well guess what….that didn’t happen.
1- Martin Hall seemed to do everything it could to discourage “becoming LSU” with policies discouraging a good, nice, rowdy college football atmosphere.
2- The Acadiana community and many of such business owners and other folks who talked about supporting the program when they would become winners didn’t materialize. For one reason or another, it didn’t.
Maggard gambled, and for the ride we had from 2018-2021, I’m appreciative of that gamble, but unfortunately, it looks like it only paid off for short term football success and didn’t pay out in terms of long term support to sustain our athletic program. And we’re likely going to get left behind by our current peers, once again, just like what happened in the late 80s/early 90s.
There is a lot of truth in this. But there is also a lot more to the point about local business owners not following through on getting involved. Probably a conversation for the tailgate but trust me when I tell you, the fundraisers, Learfield (especially Learfield) and support staff hired specifically to cater to local donors absolutely destroyed the relationships between UL and said businesses. I have about 20 anecdotal examples. Not to mention how this admin handled raising prices across the board. And IIRC, we had 2 Saturday home games in 2020, when Billy really made it clear he was doing something special here.
Maggard also never understood the political ramifications of Hudspeth’s comments in this area. And Billy was extremely hamstrung by Covid.
Even with all that, Bryan is first an administrator. I’ll have to wait to say more about that side, but he knew what the hell he was doing.
Maggard did some good things for UL but he peaked along time ago. Time for a change.
In the years with limited Saturday games due to multiple mid week home games, the admin never adjusted tailgating prices or procedures. They remained (higher) full price- full season passes only. It’s not the sole reason why the tailgating scene fell off greatly but an example of not connecting or understanding the fan base
That being said, overall Maggard is the best AD we’ve had in a very long time and it’s not close
Believe those numbers are for the University and not specific to athletics. With that said they have already told athletic staff to limit spending to only essential items for the remainder of this fiscal year. Which just started on July 1st. EVERY university in this state is in a financial bind. Some more than others and I don’t see this improving anytime soon. The way it is going we all better power up our pressure washers and get back to cleaning.
Let’s be real, we should have 4 universities in this state. LSU, UNO, UL and La Tech.
Every other university should be turned into JuCo/Vocational education centers.
OK. Let’s do this. We’ve been through worse. We’ll suck it up for a few years and regroup then.
It’s actually a good thing that we have a local guy as head coach. It means more to Des. Any other guy would just leave or phone it in when faced with a budget cut.
I’m over complaining now. We have to deal with the cards we’ve been dealt.
We’re Cajuns. This is what we do. We make Gumbo out of nothing.
Might be a good time to revisit student fee for athletics? $150 fee per semester, with 20,000 students, that’s 6M generated annually.
Do other group of 5 schools have athletics fees?
Google JMU student athletics fee. You will be amazed how much they make students pay.
Dude! Thats crazy
Even cooking a gumbo now-a-days is expensive lol. Love the optimism though
Can always try, but Louisiana mandates a student population vote to charge such fees.
I think only a couple other states, handful at the most, across the country require the same. So our own SBC and G6 peers are all able to supplement their athletic budgets with student fees and other “institutional support”. I want to say the data from about two years ago shows Coastal Carolina’s budget as 80%+ coming from “institutional support”. Our figure was slightly over 50%.
Personally, I’m 100% against using student fees for NIL. Sorry.
NIL was supposed to be Boudreaux’s BMW Auto paying an athlete to help him advertise his dealership. Not for fees a university mandates an actual fulltime student to pay to then be turned over as extra income to an athlete.
Totally agree.
NIL should not be connected to universities in any way. And since amateurism is dead, scholarships should go away too.
