Interview with Portland radio show host and all-around good guy Jon Canzano:
On WSU's $127.5M war chest earned from Pac-12 the settlement:
"We reduced our athletics budget this last year by about $10 million to $11 million. And that is painful as hell. We let people go who worked for us for 30 years. I mean, it was not an easy set of decisions to make. The reason I bring that up is you’ve got really two choices here. You can say we’re going to use some of those dollars, the majority of those dollars, to ensure that Washington State and Oregon State get the same (TV distributions) we would have gotten from media rights and not 20 percent of what we would have gotten from media rights. I think at least for the next two years, we’re looking at the conference providing a reasonable subsidy coming back to each institution from that war chest to help us preserve our competitive budget and … give ourselves time for that last question about where are we going to be (conference-wise) and what that’s going to look like.
I think that has been the approach much, much more so than, ‘Hey, let's sit on a huge bunch of money that we're going to go use to buy schools.’
I think cutting our athletic budget by $30 million so we can go buy somebody else, I think what would happen is people would say, ‘Well, Kirk, that’s great, but you just gutted us forever. Maybe that was too hasty a decision.’ So I know everybody looks and says, ‘Oh, you got all this money.’ But if you start looking at the media for the two schools over a couple of years, some of the legal stuff coming down the road, the need to keep a small conference office there, fees that we do have to pay to the Mountain West and other places to participate, you can burn through it pretty quickly. And we just want to make sure that we’re preserving some of those dollars for the future, but that we’re maintaining as much as possible the excellence we have in our programs right now."
On WSU's $127.5M war chest earned from Pac-12 the settlement:
"We reduced our athletics budget this last year by about $10 million to $11 million. And that is painful as hell. We let people go who worked for us for 30 years. I mean, it was not an easy set of decisions to make. The reason I bring that up is you’ve got really two choices here. You can say we’re going to use some of those dollars, the majority of those dollars, to ensure that Washington State and Oregon State get the same (TV distributions) we would have gotten from media rights and not 20 percent of what we would have gotten from media rights. I think at least for the next two years, we’re looking at the conference providing a reasonable subsidy coming back to each institution from that war chest to help us preserve our competitive budget and … give ourselves time for that last question about where are we going to be (conference-wise) and what that’s going to look like.
I think that has been the approach much, much more so than, ‘Hey, let's sit on a huge bunch of money that we're going to go use to buy schools.’
I think cutting our athletic budget by $30 million so we can go buy somebody else, I think what would happen is people would say, ‘Well, Kirk, that’s great, but you just gutted us forever. Maybe that was too hasty a decision.’ So I know everybody looks and says, ‘Oh, you got all this money.’ But if you start looking at the media for the two schools over a couple of years, some of the legal stuff coming down the road, the need to keep a small conference office there, fees that we do have to pay to the Mountain West and other places to participate, you can burn through it pretty quickly. And we just want to make sure that we’re preserving some of those dollars for the future, but that we’re maintaining as much as possible the excellence we have in our programs right now."
