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It seems, these days, everyone has a plan to fix college sports. Congress is desperately trying to pass a bill. Athletics departments are spinning up new ventures. Capital vultures are circling.
All of those parties claim the industry is in an unsustainable economic situation. That without caps on player spending and new revenue streams, the entire industry will collapse.
We here at FOIAball have a much easier plan to fix everyone’s financial woes.
It’s called: Don’t spend $64,000 on a robot.
This week, details leaked about LSU’s long-teased, revolutionary new plan to finance college athletics.
In July, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry invited the school’s biggest donors to hear about an innovation that could “quite possibly change the future of college sports.”
The proposal comes at a time when LSU’s athletics department is expected to run a $25 million deficit next year.
On Sunday, local Baton Rouge publication Red Eye reported that it was a standard-issue private equity deal, with LSU getting a $100 million infusion of capital for a stake in the school’s athletics programs.
Donors who met with Landry this week disputed that. Instead, they described… putting money in the stock market?
According to Louisiana Sports, one attendee said it will be an “LLC that can invest in companies that will generate revenue perpetually.”
Not terribly revolutionary. School foundations have long invested their endowments and gotten decent returns.
But while attendees have been doing their best to distance the plan from private equity, an infusion of outside cash is clearly part of it.
In an interview with Matt Moscona, a donor twice mentioned the $100 million figure cited by Red Eye, implying heavily that some entity is going to give LSU that amount.
"That's what they're gonna try and do [with the money]. Invest it and turn some revenue-generating perpetual money for LSU."
Now, when you and I are in a cash crunch, we can’t just go to a firm, ask for money, and claim it will magically become “perpetual income.” We have to cut spending.
But in the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses atmosphere of college football, no program is willing to do that.
Which is where FOIAball comes in. I’ve got all of LSU’s expenses from its football team over a recent one-month stretch.
Let’s see if we can’t find some excess in the budget.
Want to see the line-by-line absurdity in LSU’s monthly expenses? That’s for paid FOIAball subscribers.
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