Lobos need a Hail Mary to meet ticket projections

Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Using that premise, the University of New Mexico Athletic Department’s ticket sales projection for the coming year — $6,430,000 — is the height of insanity.

UNM’s three revenue-generating sports — football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball — generated $5,480,501 in ticket revenue last season. That was $1.7 million short of last year’s projections. By projecting revenues on its defective crystal ball, athletics has operated at a deficit eight of the past 10 years. Yet the number crunchers insist that — despite plenty of controversy and two ongoing state investigations related to possible fiscal mismanagement in athletics — ticket sales will show a miraculous recovery this year. According to UNM, average attendance at last year’s home football games was 20,277; men’s basketball was 11,768; women’s basketball was 4,719 — all down from the previous year. UNM announced Friday via Twitter advance sales of season football tickets has surpassed last year’s. Ticket sales would have to far surpass last year’s to reach this year’s new projections.

Just last month, UNM head football coach Bob Davie said a reasonable average attendance for Lobo football home games at University Stadium would be “21,000 or 22,000,” or roughly half of the stadium’s 40,000-seat capacity.

Deputy athletic director Brad Hutchins told regents in May that a nine-win season and two consecutive bowl appearances made the department confident in its projection for football. A similar rosy, inaccurate picture was painted a year earlier with the same results.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me eight going on nine times, somebody needs to be taken to the woodshed.

At least Chris Vallejos, the UNM vice president now assigned to oversee athletics’ fiscal cleanup, has sounded the voice of reason, noting, “our budget methodology has to change.”

Well, no time like the present. Regents should insist Hutchins take off his cherry-colored glasses, and come back with a more realistic projection — along with an athletics budget within those means. And new Athletics Director Eddie Nunez should make this a priority.

Meanwhile, the $60 million redo of the Pit across the street — where UNM has been unable to sell the high-dollar suites, let alone collect what it’s owed for the past few years — could use a dose of reality, too. Fewer than half of the 40 luxury suites generated any income to the athletics department last season, and only 14½ of those brought in outside revenue — meaning money not shifted from one UNM account to another. That revenue is needed to cover the $2.4 million annual debt service payment the athletics department owes the main campus to cover 2009’s renovation. To date, the accumulated debt athletics owes the university is an estimated $4.6million.

Re-read transparency playbook

UNM officials also need to bone up on state transparency law. This week UNM hired Nuñez to replace former Athletics Director Paul Krebs without ever releasing a list of applicants, much less finalists. Neither interim UNM President Chaouki Abdallah nor Regents president Rob Doughty, chair of the 10-person search committee, have said who was interviewed, and Daniel Parker, vice president of Atlantabased Parker Executive Search, said it’s customary to decline comment as candidates often will not pursue jobs if their names become public. Under the state Inspection of Public Records Act, there’s a flag on the play.

IPRA mandates all applicants for public employment — and their résumés — are subject to IPRA. (The only exception is in university presidential searches; then only the top five finalists must be made public.) The Journal has long argued that the public — even if a search is conducted by a private entity — is entitled to know not only who applied for jobs paid for with public dollars, but also if the search was wide, attracted a diverse pool of applicants, if qualifications prevailed or if cronyism/nepotism played a role.

The state’s flagship research university should, by now, know the law of the land in the Land of Enchantment.