Published: July 05, 2008 02:08 am      

COLUMN: Athletic budget byproduct of wins, losses

MORGANTOWN — The financial news out of Cale Catlett Drive has been a whole lot better than the news from Wall Street these days, the West Virginia University athletic department doing a whole lot better than a Fortune 500 company.

In the Coliseum, where the WVU athletic business office is located, assistant athletic director/finance Russ Sharp is jokingly being referred to as “The $50-Million Man,” the Mountaineer athletic budget expecting to rise above $50 million this year.

In 2006-07, the last year where figures are available as the current fiscal year that just ended on June 30, athletics showed a $4.25 million profit and expects to come close to repeating that for 2007-08. That comes on the heels of a record $10,756,366 profit in 2005-06, thanks to collecting half of the $14.5 donation Milan Puskar made to the athletic department.

What’s more, the Mountaineer Athletic Club, the fundraising arm of the athletic department, raised more than $14 million in this past year for only the second time in history, the other time being when Puskar made his generous donation.

One would guess that if the Mountaineer athletic department is celebrating such good times, the celebration must be even bigger in the Rich Rodriguez camp.

Rodriguez is being sued by WVU for the $4 million in liquidated damages his contract says he must pay the school.

Damages? It would be hard to prove damages when football revenues stand at or above $25 million, when donations are soaring, when profits are being taken in and when the men’s basketball program is also flourishing as never before.

The problem is such a clause as the liquidated damages clause in Rodriguez’s contract is less about damages than it is about risk.

Football coaches will tell you it takes a couple of years, up to four, actually, to get their program established. By the same token, it is safe to assume it could take up to four years for it to deteriorate if they leave.

Rodriguez, like so many successful coaches who leave for a different job, leaves behind a talented roster and solid ticket sales based off their success in the previous season.

The damages do not rise to the surface immediately. Consider, for example, the University of Miami when Butch Davis left. Larry Coker took over a team that lost in the national championship game and then won a national title in his first season. By 2006 the Hurricanes were struggling to beat Nevada in the MPC Computers Bowl and Coker was gone.

No damages would have shown in that first national championship season, but there certainly were very real and large damages that grew out of Davis leaving.

Certainly, no one knows how Bill Stewart will do as he replaces Rich Rodriguez, but what they do know is that because of Rodriguez’s and the school’s success, much is now at risk and potential damages far exceed the $4 million buyout.

“There is an extreme amount of risk,” Sharp said. “Since we are self-supporting, football and basketball has to succeed to support the other sports.”

The reason the budget grew to $50 million was because of the success Rodriguez and now Bob Huggins have had, just as the tremendous facilities expansion came as a direct result of that success.

Over the past few years the Coliseum has been renovated, a soccer stadium built, a wrestling facility built and suites added to the Puskar Stadium. What’s more, there are ambitious plans for the future, beginning with a $24 million basketball practice facility and renovations of Hawley Field for baseball and an costly expansion of the out-of-date Natatorium.

The truth is that such projects might not have even been undertaken at this time had the administration known Rodriguez would renege on his promise of being at West Virginia for a long time.

If football falls from the national heights it has reached under Rodriguez, one would expect attendance to drop, television appearances to disappear, home sellout crowds that bring $2.2 to $2.3 million after taxes would shrink and donations would dry up.

And, to be honest, one can not take it as a given that the football program will remain at a Top 10 level forever. Certainly, a case can be made if the program slips within a couple of years that it would be a direct result of Rodriguez’s decision to leave, a decision that would have created extensive damages.

E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.