ilovethecats said:BadlandsGrizFan said:ilovethecats said:Jaredkuehn said:This seems more like a well placed publicity stunt than realistic goal to me. I can’t imagine them going from Choate bitching to the media in December, to having funds and the program in place to disburse funds by the following August.
This has been in the works LONG before Choate's comments a few weeks ago. It started gaining traction after our first beatdown in North Dakota in 2018. Most likely before then but I heard the talk not long after.
The way that Waded, Leon and Choate work together has been something to see. I fully expect funds to be available to be disbursed this fall if all goes as planned.
My understanding is that the COA can be funded by a few different avenues of revenue from the schools, NONE of those include funds that are received from the state. If that were the case, it would need to go through the Board of Regents in Montana for approval. No way the BOR allows MSU those funds and not Montana, so thats off the table.
Raising student fees is one way, thats how JMU funds their I believe. I dont think that would go over well in Montana personally. JMU has a ton of rich old Virginia money kids attending the school, a huge portion of MSU and UM students are rural Montanans. I cant see MSU getting the OK to jack up student fees to subsidize their athletic programs.
The final way is through private funding, which is what NDSU does. In this scenario you would assume UM would be able to offer everything and more than MSU seeing that our Athletic Dept makes more than MSUs and we have been more successful in fund raising for quite some time.
I don't dispute and of this and will not for a second pretend I know how any of this works. What I do know is MSU has the best leadership probably in my lifetime. Leon is the best athletic director we've had in a LONG time. I know they've been working diligently on this for nearly two years. They've dotted the "i's" and crossed the "t's". For them to finally go public, they feel very confident this will be a done deal, hopefully as soon as this fall.
My guess is UM follows suit. As they should. And if you're correct, as they HAVE to. Personally I think it's great for both schools and will put us both where we should be year in and year out; 1 and 2 in the Big Sky. If Leon didn't think he could generate the funds for this going forward, it never would have been leaked out. It would have been quietly getting worked on like it has since 2018.
Fingers crossed both schools make this happen asap. :thumb:
Leon is OK, but his predecessor never made a bad decision in his entire tenure as AD.