Time to pony up

[Itsbeenworse]

One constant during all the same outcomes - we dont have the $ to spend on football and athletics like the rest of the conference. We either increase the $ spent on football or we continue the same cycle we've been in. Like the guy said, doing the same thing and expecting different results is crazy talk (or something like that). Big money programs have down times but they swing back to winning. We have a modest streak of winning but will swing back to losing if we can't find the $ to spend on football at a closer clip to the rest of the conference.

[civildawg]

We are paying dan so much that it infuriates me to think about what coaches make less than him. It's eye opening

[Itsbeenworse]

Actually we are paying him middle of the pack or so AND even so spend less or close to it than any other team in the conference on football. Maybe someone wants to look up the actual $ spent; I'm going off memory and think we are lowest in spending on our football budget. 2.5 m is decent for an individual but the coach who beat Dan last night makes damn near double what Dan makes (and LSU did more than double up on what we scored too). Focusing on Mullin's pay ignores the gaping divide that separates MSU football from the winners - it's the total spent on football and we are at the bottom. Just like we are on the scoreboard when we play teams that spend more on football.

[MetEdDawg]

We are at the very bottom here and if I can remember correctly we are 10-15 million dollars behind the team in front of us. I believe this is a two fold problem:

1) The school has done a terrible job at educating graduates about giving back to MSU, especially to athletics. I graduated in 2010 and I never received a single piece of paper about donating until I sent my first payment to the Bulldog Club, and I didn't even know what the Bulldog Club was until I got on a message board and saw people talking about it. The university has to do a better job here. Obviously it's good to have big donors, but if you could get another 5,000 alumni to donate $100 a year (which really isn't much people), that's an extra $500,000 in giving per year. We could use that toward salaries and at least start to close the gap. I have a feeling there are a lot of MSU alumni not giving to athletics because they don't realize the Bulldog Club is out there.

2) Lack of a large alumni base. This is starting to change because we've been slowly increasing enrollment, but if we want to compete, we have to have a larger number of students that eventually turns into a larger alumni base and leads to more money. This may lead to some changes being made on campus so that we can fit that number of students on campus because I think at some point we will want to get enrollment around 25 to 27 thousand students. We've made a commitment to this and hopefully we will educate people about to graduate on the benefits of giving to athletics.

[Todd4State]

Being in the SEC, we have the money is there even if we are near the bottom as far as money goes. If we didn't have it, we wouldn't have built the football complex and enclosed the stadium. The problem is we don't spend it where we should- and that's on the assistant coaches. We need better coordinators and guys that can recruit. If we pay them, they will come.