1. Finances. "But it’s also a fundraising venture for a department that lost $6 million in revenue from the canceled 2020 football season alone.
“It’s no secret that football is a huge engine for us. We generate $6 million on ticket sales that’s suddenly gone. We’ve always known that football is a huge source of revenue, and I think it took a pandemic to show us that when it’s gone, you’ve got to make some significant adjustments.
“We really went into hibernation last summer. We took furloughs, we took renegotiated pay cuts, we took voluntary leave without pay, we solicited donors … we did a lot to really bring our expenses to a halt. And that’s helped us. We’re certainly going to need to have some help with bridging this gap and getting out of fiscal year ’21. We’re talking millions of dollars. But I feel good about where we are right now. It’s been a team effort.
“Playing a couple (football) games really helped us. No recruiting, you don’t have those expenses. You’re not traveling teams around. That’s a big help too. But we’ll have to work with the university and bridge this fiscal year ’21. The great thing is fiscal year ’22 looks really good. We’re playing at Washington. We’ve got Griz-Cat back into Missoula. That’s a really big deal. That’s huge revenue for us. Looks like we’re going to have full stadiums. That’s great revenue for us. But we’re talking multi-million dollars that we lost, and we’ve got to find a way to bridge that gap.
“We’re down probably in the $5 million, $4 million range. You don’t have the revenue but you’re also not putting a team on a charter and paying for hotels and all that. For us it was good not to incur the expenses of a spring specific to football, but then to generate a little bit of revenue as well.”
2. Lady Griz. [Looks like there must have been questions about appearing to go away from recruiting a lot of MT players.]
"“I don’t think it’s the end of an era, I think it’s making sure the Lady Griz program is relevant and competitive. And if that can be done with all Montana young ladies, so be it. I think it’s foolish to say you’re going to move away from something just to move away from it. That’s not the goal at all. The goal is to win championships in a very competitive conference. Things have changed with the advent of the transfer portal and the one-time transfer rule and international recruiting and certainly the increased level of play in the women’s game, but this wasn’t a conscious effort to say, ‘We’ve done that in the past, we’re not going to do that ever again.’
he understands what the Lady Griz program was and what it was built upon. But I think it’s foolish to say you’re just going to close a door because you want to close that door. That’s not the intention.
“If that can be done with young ladies from throughout this state, awesome. If we need to do that in a different way while still staying core to what’s important to us, that’s great too."
