Purdue Football Schedule Unkind To Athletic Department Budget

August 1, 2012 / Football
Purdue Exponent, Lauren Westberg

http://www.purdueexponent.org/sports/article_a7caf212-17c6-5dac-9399-30048583aeec.html

Although the athletic department has announced a $1.6 million deficit in its budget for this upcoming year, athletic director Morgan Burke said it is nothing to worry about.

“We tend to be conservative in the budget, that’s how you avoid surprises,” Burke said. “You don’t budget anything you aren’t entirely sure you’re going to have.”

Burke said that a large reason for the deficit is Purdue’s home game schedule.

“You will always have a challenge when Notre Dame is not at home; you lose about a million,” he said. “We do have Michigan and Wisconsin, but our first game is on labor day weekend, and we have another home game on October Break and the Indiana University game is the Saturday after Thanksgiving. All those factor into the biggest reason why.”

Glenn Tompkins, former senior associate athletics director in charge of business, said another reason was due to the Mackey renovations project debt starting to come in. The debt is $4.7 million per year for the next 20 years, he said.

Tompkins said the projected budget deficit was originally higher at $1.75 million, but the athletic department was able to decrease the amount to $1.6 million. Tompkins doesn’t see the reported deficit projection as a problem, either.

“I fully expect that by the time the fiscal year is over that we will at least break even,” he said. “We’ll end up covering the budget deficit over the year.”

Because the department budgets conservatively, Tompkins said, it will not budget the revenue it is not completely certain of getting. But there are at least three big sources of revenue that the athletic department is almost certain of receiving funds from: profit sharing from the Big Ten Network, receiving from the NCAA supplemental distribution surplus and Big Ten bowl game revenue sharing.

As a way of assurance for their report of this projected budget deficit to the Board of Trustees, the athletic department has also prepared a prediction of the next ten years’ budget. After the 2012-2013 fiscal year, there are no more projected deficits.

Should the athletic department not break even this year, Burke said there are still the athletic reserves to take from, so there is no debt.

“We are not going to overdraw because we have a saving account that we pull from,” Burke said. “That’s why you have a rainy day fund.”


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