(Bill Moos, on Cougar Calls, talks AD revenue and expenses from 2014…) "We went into the year projecting a pretty big deficit, and then we added to it by design to get it all behind us. An example of that being a buyout of the previous men's basketball coach and the staff, and then the hiring of the new one. There was quite a difference there. Instead of paying monthly in regards to the coaching change, we decided to make it a one-time check and that was about $1.8 million, so that added to it. The bowl bonuses in football, we did not have factored in yet and really the full impact of the debt service on our new facilities hit us. We knew this was happening, we have a pro forma that shows us becoming solvent in 2019. We could hit that in 2018, just depending on some other revenue streams. The article in the Spokesman Review was not accurate. I believe it said we're getting $7 million and change from the institution, and that's not true. That number we were talking about is not institutional but our donor base monies for our CAF - which I want to take our people that are putting their skin in the game, believing in what we're doing. Another positive that was not included in that piece is, I recall, our attendance at Martin Stadium, which we had three sellouts out of six homes games and operated at 96 percent capacity for all six games. Boy, that's really helping us and that will show in the next year's budget. You see, we're on a fiscal calendar - July 1 to June 30. The report was on the budget that had just finished last summer."
(Bill Moos, on Cougar Calls, talks Martin Stadium expansion…) "I'll go back to my years at Oregon. I got there in 1995 and that was a Rose Bowl year. I got there afterwards. The Ducks were picked to finish last in the Pac-10 and surprised everybody. We were drawing maybe 20,000 and so we built that kind of the same way we're doing here: expanding the base, building our fan base, getting excited, getting better players, changing the culture. In 1998, we sold out every game and that's just three years, and it's been sold out ever since. But, we didn't expand the stadium until we were sold out for; let's see … 2002, so it's still a ways down the road. I know we have issues, we have night games; everyone has night games. Sometimes we have Thursday games; everybody has Thursday games. We have a fan base that the bulk of it is from Spokane and the Tri-Cities; that's two hours. Oregon's bulk is from Portland; that's two hours. We have a lot of similarities there, but we're going to have to fill [Martin Stadium] for two or three seasons before I think I can justify expanding. I think two or three years from now, just like now, it's going to be fun football to watch, we have good players - you know, people talk a lot about Oregon and say, 'how come they're here?' They've got great players. They have people that believe in them and it didn't just snap a finger and have Phil Knight walk in. That's not the way it went at all, not even close. The impact of Phil's money on the Oregon program pales in comparison to the new TV money that we're seeing at Washington State. We went from $2.8 million in Pac-12 monies to an average of $20.5 [million]. That's how we've been able to invest in facilities, invest in coaches and their staff and a lot of other infrastructure. So our pro forma shows us getting into black ink in 2019, it could be 2018. I applaud President Floyd for entrusting me with this plan because I really felt we needed to make those investments before we had the money to do so or we were going to get left in the dust. We're going to announce a recruiting class in a couple of weeks that for the large part has chosen Washington State because of Mike Leach and because of the gorgeous facilities that we have that can develop them into great major college football stars."
This post was edited on 1/12 1:55 PM by Britton Ransford
