My wild speculation is that there was an avoidable permit, parking, or vendor/security conflict due to the scrimmage coinciding with the football game.
Yeah, my guess is general lack of UVa hoops content online is a Tony issue; the screw up that sent the game to Sunday probably an athletic department issue.
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I also appreciate all the other posters who have been pestering the UVA social media. Your efforts are neither forgotten nor in vain. Change may come slow but change is still change in the end.
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At the very least, my hope is this prompts them to have to answer a question, or at the very least, prompts one of the beat guys to ask a question. However, I would be very surprised to find out that Tony is unaware that basketball fans like to watch basketball. You don’t need your finger on the pulse of social media to figure that out.
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I guess what confuses me about it a little is that it’s been known for a very long time there was a Duke football game on the same day. I guess they were just really banking on it being a night game and had no plan B if it ended up being earlier in the day? That seems like a weird way to plan things to me. Although who knows, maybe there was an unexpected complication.
All that said, I’m not really upset or anything. It’s just a bit of a bummer and does just make it feel like nobody is really that invested in the event that pseudo kicks off our season.
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That doesn’t surprise me at all. As someone who is likely forgetting about a conference call right now, I can totally see how these things happen, especially for an event that hoops staff constantly signals that they don’t care about that much.
And for me, that’s the crux of my annoyance — basically that this is a symptom of a larger issue: Tony would be just as happy if ACC games were played in a small HS gym in Wisconsin with just parents and locals watching, whereas I would be significantly less happy. And you see that larger issue play out over a number of things: can’t invite fans to Spain because of terrorism, can’t grant an interview to Gameday, can’t let Gameday interview players, shrug your shoulders when UCLA and Texas drop out of the Newark MTE, drop a good noncon game bc you now have to go to Conte and Lawrence Joel 2x per year, etc.
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but may not be on the staff, either way it’s up to the AD’s office to promote our flagship program, that won a Natty less than 2 years ago for goodness sake. We really haven’t taken that and ran from a marketing/social media/branding perspective
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I mean this athletic department sucks this is no surprise
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To “both sides” myself here a bit, Carla’s comments that the hoops program is not profitable on its own are pretty disturbing here, in terms of where hoops is in the hierarchy. Obviously football is king until parents stop letting their kids play, and that trickles up to the higher levels, but hoops would be plenty profitable on its own.
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I remember looking at the balance sheets that are publicly available a little while ago and being somewhat shocked that men’s basketball was a net negative. I wasn’t sure if that is actually the case or its a case of Hollywood accounting where maybe the numbers aren’t that easy to interpret (e.g. maybe some revenue streams are missing), but it was certainly surprising.
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Hoops is almost never more profitable at any school and it has little to do with the actual teams performance and everything to do with TV contracts. Teams are not supported by the number of tickets they sell.
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To reply to this and @MaineWahoo ’s point, I think the NCAA tourney payout gets buried in some larger payout, though I could be wrong. Like maybe NCAA just cuts one check, even though like 87% of it is tourney money.
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In fairness, all things considered, they are pretty good at their primary job of putting good sports on the field and providing student-athletes with a good experience. But they do seem to struggle with fan engagement and brand management/promotion, which are pretty big parts of the job as well.
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To that point, I’d be curious to see what the NCAA payout is compared to the shared payout ACC teams get for Clemson showing up in the CFP. I used to know that number and know it’s substantial every time they make that appearance.
My point was less about revenue generated, that’s always gotta be FB, but more about FAN engagement…where BB is clearly the point program going forward.
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I’ve dug up the financials in the past, so I will look for them later. Though I’m neither an accountant nor do I know much about how athletic departments operate, so I always am left scratching my head, a bit.
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Oh yeah, totally agree. I think we’re kind of saying the same thing. I was surprised basketball was a net negative because we are a championship calibre program playing great basketball. With successful branding and fan engagement, it feels like men’s basketball should at least be breaking even. That said, I know very little about the finances of all this, so I’m somewhat out of my depth.
I get it. I’ve gone down that rabbit hole before but it’s been a while so I don’t remember the specifics.
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I agree with the latter I guess but have they really done a great job with the former? Or is the current administration succeeding on the back of strong hires from Littlepage? And how can we keep pace in non Olympic sports when they operate out of trailers
Here are the 2020 financials:
Here’s 2019:
2021 don’t seem to be available yet. Not clear to me where the Covid disruptions are showing up.
Look at the page that’s in landscape.
A few things that seem to me to be Hoops, even though they are in non program specific:
- I think the NCAA distribution is in the multi millions for ACC teams, so I assume some or most of the non program specific number should be hoops
- the concessions number is fairly low, but the non program royalties/licensing number is very large. I assume that a UVa basketball shirt you buy from mincers is showing up in general royalties, not hoops concessions.
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