Quote Originally Posted by Professor Chaos View Post
Despite that NDSU is still spending more on "Facilities and Equipment" than SDSU spends. What's kind of eye opening to me is that NDSU spent $7.5M more than SDSU did on athletics in 2017 yet SDSU sponsors 5 more varsity sports and has nearly 100 more student athletes. I think there's where the AD strategy differ the most between two schools. NDSU prioritizes fully funding all sports they sponsor whereas SDSU prioritizes giving more students-athletes opportunities to compete at the D1 level. That extra 100 student athletes is probably another reason why following NDSU by offering COA to all scholarship athletes in all sports isn't very easy for SDSU to do.
That is a huge thing, and I don’t know it’s necessarily what is best for SDSU or what the athletic department wants, but that’s how it was in DII and if they had dropped a bunch of sports when they made the jump it would have been a publicity nightmare, and if we were to drop the amount of sports we have now it would still be a real bad look. I think I looked it up a while back but SDSU sponsors more or at minimum as many sports as every Big XII school does. It’s insane but it’s pretty much the cards were dealt. It’s also something that’s never talked about when comparing the budgets for the two schools that really matters.

I really shocked by the spending by ndsu on facilities, was that maybe from the new softball fields and basketball arena? I know the city or minor league team helps with the baseball field or owns it entirely similar to the dome, that’s a hefty plus to have two facilities taken care of for you.