UNM athletic director has to make do with very little
By all measures, Paul Krebs has set a standard seldom matched in college athletics
Beginning many years ago as University of New Mexico students involved in intercollegiate sports to recent service as regents, we have witnessed the tenures of many athletic directors. Paul Krebs became the athletic director in June 2006.
Across the performance of all 22 intercollegiate sports along with multimillion-dollar upgrades of the facilities for almost all of those programs, Paul has been the most successful AD in modern school history (“modern” omits Roy Johnson and Pete McDavid).
He is nationally known and respected in the world of college sports.
He was associate AD at Ohio State and AD at Bowling Green before coming to UNM. He currently is Mountain West representative to the NCAA Council and serves on the NCAA Competition Oversight Committee and chairs a subcommittee of that committee.
Complaining fans should recognize that an AD does not recruit players, an AD does not coach and he or she does not win or lose games. The critical search for, selection and retention or termination of coaches who are responsible takes place in a complicated environment. The pressures are financial, internal and external.
UNM sports are in the spotlight to the point that sports news can be front-page news. We believe when Paul has been able to make decisions independently with little or no compulsion from outside, but within available funds, he has made great coach hires.
Unfortunately, New Mexico is not in a Bowl Championship Conference. Those schools, some not on a par athletically with UNM, enjoy $100 million or more budgets fed by television and bowl revenue distributions. At UNM the budget is $33 million. The department receives just $4 million in student fees and $2.8 million in state funds, ranking it low in both categories among Mountain West Conference schools. The balance must be raised by donations, contracts and game receipts.
The Lobo Club this year raised more than $4 million to cover the cost of scholarships. Paul negotiated an eight-year contract with Learfield Sports, increas- ing marketing revenue from corporate sponsorships and media coverage. He obtained a six-year contract with Nike as sole outfitter for UNM teams.
The economics are made more difficult because Paul must devote about $3 million per year to service the debt on renovation of The Pit. The dean of Arts & Science does not have to carve out of his budget debt service on Smith Hall, nor the deans of the School of Law to service the cost of their building, etc.
Paul has been an extraordinary CEO of a big business operating at the razor’s edge of available funds while implementing a South Campus Master Plan that has combined baseball, softball and tennis facilities in an attractive park-like environment. Virtually all recent facilities upgrades have been accomplished by donations without the use of public funds.
In this Athletic Department, “student” comes before “athlete.”
The four-year graduation rate for the players is 48 percent compared to 20 percent for all students. This year there were 163 Lobos who were named Mountain West All-Academic, leading the conference. In the past four years the programs have had 16 Academic All Americans.
Paul Krebs wants success for every team in every game as much as the most avid fan. While navigating the very competitive and complicated business side of college athletics he has lead an athletic department that does the right thing by the student athlete, complies with NCAA rules and demands high ethical standards by not only coaches but every employee.
In the long run that is the true measure of his performance.