UNM’s toughest call?
University needs to look at Athletics’ big picture before considering Davie future
It’s a recurring dilemma right out of the University of New Mexico athletics playbook.
You have a coach whose program is struggling to put check marks in the win column, fans in the stands and ticket revenue into an athletics department that has rung up deficits for a decade. The coach, who makes about $900,000 a year in total compensation, has three years to go on a contract that was renewed a couple of years ago. And he has a buyout that would cost about $1.2 million if UNM decides it’s time to part ways at the end of the current season.
In short, it’s as easy to argue you can’t afford to keep him as it is you can’t afford to let him go.
Bob Davie’s football Lobos are struggling, and some unhappy fans are once again demanding a change. Fans, especially Lobo fans, have a propensity to do that.
But no doubt UNM Athletic Director Eddie Nuñez knows — as the Journal’s longtime sports guru Rick Wright puts it — that the perception and the reality created by paying Davie to go away, given the administrations’s controversial decision to cut other programs, including men’s soccer, would be nothing short of toxic.
Of course, cutting soccer to try to help stop the cherry-red ink bleeding all over athletics’ balance sheet complicates things. So does UNM paying coaches Rocky Long and then Mike Locksley to go away before hiring Davie in 2012 to try to get finances in the black and checks in the win column.
Fans, taxpayers and lawmakers are understandably sick and tired of watching golden parachutes from UNM athletics float away with scarce dollars — even if they understand that’s college athletics.
Then-Athletic Director Paul Krebs gets the blame for pushing Long out the door at a cost of almost $680,000. Long, a UNM legend as a player, fielded teams that won games, if not titles, and getting 30,000 fans in the stadium wasn’t unusual. He’s since gone on to bigger and better things at San Diego State — including yet another win over the Lobos here in Albuquerque this month.
Locksley was a disaster on and off the field. His parting wad of cash: $750,000.
And this “pay them to go” dynamic isn’t limited to football. UNM paid basketball coaches Craig Neal ($1 million), Ritchie McKay ($600,000) and Fran Fraschilla ($305,300) when they were shown the door. President Louis Caldera got $713,000, and Bob Frank a $362,136 five-month paid sabbatical and the option of a $190,000 tenured faculty position.
In fairness, Davie has a firstclass résumé, including an assistant coaching position at Texas A&M and five years as head coach at Notre Dame. He appeared to be taking the team upward until UNM’s 3-9 record last year and a rough 3-6 start this year going into this weekend’s game with Air Force.
Now, fans are voting with their seats. Last year’s average game attendance was 21,194 — well below projections. Now, that looks like the good old days. Four home games into the 2018 season, the Lobos are averaging 17,000, with a high of 18,804 against Liberty in game two. And that’s total distributed tickets; the actual crowd Saturday looked about half that.
Last season, the football program was about $400,000 in the red on missed ticket sales projections; UNM athletics was projecting $1.9 million in ticket sales, a pie-in-the-sky projection given it has not reached that number since the 2008 season, the final one under Long. This season they’re on track to bring in even less in ticket revenue.
Davie’s team has had some tough breaks this year — losing the starting quarterback and defensive leader to injuries. His best remaining defensive player has been suspended for getting into a fight with a teammate, who ended up hospitalized.
So Nuñez and President Garnett Stokes have another tough decision to make, and one they will need to explain to various constituencies, including fans.
As part of that, given the financial pressure and upheaval over soccer, they need to re-assess what UNM wants to be in college athletics and what that will cost. Perhaps that discussion should include whether it remains a Division I football school.
Many argue a Division I football program is required to stay in the Mountain West Conference. And that, unlike Olympic sports, football has the potential to generate — rather than lose — revenue.
But at this point, UNM doesn’t come close to filling the upgraded football stadium that seats 40,000 (but even an anemic football crowd is several times the size of the typical fan turnout for soccer), and the Lobos sure aren’t going to match the fan bases of power schools like Michigan or Texas A&M.
Time for a reality check. Where does UNM go from here? Some might say the issue is Bob Davie, but history shows it’s so much more than that. It’s about what UNM wants to be — and realistically can be — in the world of college athletics. It’s time UNM owned up to that, made a studied decision on the way forward and laid out its case for that course of action.