Santa Barbara was early shifting donors into NIL. They had to do it to keep the top 25 baseball program from defecting to the SEC. UCSD has the potential to become a juggernaut. Their central campus runs like a business and they have a fundraising machine in place.

Kinda. The funds are largely redirected donor contributions that would otherwise go to team Aggie, facilities campaigns, etc.

Les is still a young coach? Jim Les?

That would cost more than the staff makes in total. For. One. Player.

Check out the ucsb crowd tonight.

UOP also in 86 and that was a better team having just beat Minnesota.

Can’t win with high school kids at this level. Les needs the support to pay market rate for guys in order to compete in the Big West let alone with Nevada. The good teams are old.

Extremely relevant! Cal was averaging 10k per game a decade ago. They just had 3k for Florida State. There was a shift in athletic spend at Cal and Stanford to de-emphasize football and basketball that played a big part in the failed Pac 12 media deal, the LA schools leaving and the conference falling apart. Davis has been doing many of the same dumb things as Cal.

So UCI gets the benefit of people that live an hour away on game night but Davis isn’t part of the Sacramento market? The size of the metro area is really not a limitation to this equation. Consistent attendance of 3,000 would be perfectly reasonable for where the program is currently situated. There are 30k students and not 1k of them regularly attend basketball games. Attendance and the in game production are worse than the end of the D2 era. You have to ask why and what can be done to fix this. The administration got really lazy with the D1 move and assumed that more support would materialize naturally from the BWC schedule. The AD and Mrak have a new group of leaders and they are falling into the same trap.

Enthusiasm for football should help hoops attendance. I used UCSD and UCI as examples for a reason. If UCI, which has always been a heavy commuter school, has a budget 50% more than Davis for MBB that seems like a problem. Similarly, this board likes to reference the student demo for lack of interest in sports. UCSD was a high academic D3 program about 7 minutes ago and had the foresight to make sure that when they moved up the program had the resources to compete immediately. They funded at well above the CCAA levels and were dominating that level when they moved up.

That’s not what I’m saying. History has shown that moving up with a plan to phase your way into a competitive level of funding after the move is a losing strategy. Davis needs to get up to the next level of funding in football and basketball before the move, not after.

UCSD has a basketball GM and together with UCI is light years ahead of Davis in recruiting and funding NIL. It’s no accident that they’re winning and students are engaged in hoops.

No doubt. But there were some other options.

Agree. The location of Aggie Stadium really did not help in this regard.

The number that Davis has agreed to fund is pretty well known and it is both too small and too late. See Plough’s comments on football funding. If they want to do this they have to do it now and the university needs to make it happen. Limping up another level is a suicide mission and a blueprint for dropping football and crawling back to the Big West for everything else.

TV lighting, replay, scoreboards, and the wiring to broadcast a game. At least that’s to start. It’s a much longer list.

247 uses the composite for marketing purposes. It was a smart move. They became the official metric because of it, while others only published their own ranking. You can use their ranking tool to sort to your liking. Whether Hero sports is sophisticated enough to understand this (they’re not) is not 247’s problem. And again, the ranking services are projecting guys based on an NFL evaluation at the individual level. These are not constructive methods to predict success at the FCS level let alone evaluate a recruiting class, which really should be measured relative to roster construction and scheme.

This fletcher guy is a real dope. Hope the free tickets wood has provided at the new hornet stadium make it worth his while.

The absurdity is using ranking services that really only cover the top 500 prospects in any class as a metric to evaluate FCS recruiting. ESPN focuses on the southeast. Rivals and On3 are spotty. 247 has good coverage in the west. But even at 247 the whole point is to provide content to their subscription sites. In the west that’s primarily SC, UCLA, UW and the Arizona schools. The top 250 or so prospects are covered by the national recruiting analysts. These aren’t the guys that end up in the Big Sky, and the Big Sky is a good conference. On the 247 formula anyone above an 84 that goes FCS has had his non-committable fbs offers dropped and isn’t a priority for 247 to reevaluate. Davis has had a bunch of these guys on the cusp. There has also been significant grade inflation over the years. Anyone in the 247 database starts with 3*.

There is room for about 1,200 in upper hickey and it obviously lacks the infrastructure necessary for even D3 competition at this point. We’re dancing around the same issue here and with football. The issue is money. The money is not coming from donors so either the university takes a massive step forward in its prioritization of MBB and FB or it is heading into a suicide mission in the MWC.

Huge! His magic beans are really delivering.