do whatever it takes to "succeed" at major college football (acknowledged, these reports consider the overall athletic department budgets):
SFGateUC Berkeley's plan to sell special football seats to pay off nearly half a billion dollars in stadium debt has long inspired skepticism, as if Cal were setting up a lemonade stand to finance a home mortgage. Cal analysts, using numbers supplied by the athletics department, call the effort encouraging, while a Stanford University sports economist says it won't be enough. $445 million burdenThe campus carries $445 million in debt for the renovation of its once-seismically unsound football stadium - which cost $321 million and opened Sept. 1 - and its new student athletic center, which cost $153 million. Barsky and other skeptics call this debt burden a "noose around the campus' neck" that could prevent Cal from pursuing other worthy projects requiring it to borrow money, like retrofitting buildings that don't meet seismic standards. [...] concerns are fueled by UC's practice of pledging all forms of revenue - "including tuition," according to Cal's fact sheet on Memorial Stadium - when it obtains debt financing. Cal officials wondered the same thing when sales of their "endowment seating" proved less sprightly than anticipated after Memorial Stadium's grand opening on Sept. 1. The idea was to find new ways to raise money - and hire sales professionals to figure out how. [...] last fall, seating and ticket sales had been managed by Cal's development office - the people who solicit charitable donations from alumni and others. The professionals are also expanding the sales pitch for endowment seating beyond alumni, to corporations. Beginning in 2014, Cal will get additional TV revenue from college football's new playoff system, and will earmark a portion for stadium debt. Some of the more glittery new spaces, like the University Club with its romance-worthy views of the bay and Mount Tamalpais, will be rented out for events, while office space in the complex - left unfinished for lack of funds - will be completed and leased to other departments or off-campus agencies. Big challenges aheadYet they warn in their report that the intercollegiate athletics department could be at a disadvantage when trying to lease out "potentially challenging" space, in part because Cal is less equipped to manage its real estate compared with other universities.
https://www.sfgate.com/collegesports/article/Cal-scrambling-to-cover-stadium-bill-4604221.php
It's like the student debt "crisis" and the athletic department debt "crisis" have something in common.......
