He was fair about it. He said that UVA's news came out the day after ours. He just said Syracuse, the University, not necessarily the Athletic Department, just has to make choices. There's no right or wrong answer.
I think Syracuse's campaign was kicked off by the $25M donation that we already had. Based on that, I would assume that any decision from the University to pull from funds would probably happen at the end. Depending on the success of the campaign.
I thought Nate was okay. Kind of snarky and misleading at times, but I think most of his points were valid.
He should have mentioned that the only reason UVa committed funds from their endowment towards building their football operations center was because they had already been turned down by their top candidate for their vacant HC position because of lack of commitment to footlball (they would not commit to build the operations center for Poindexter), and their other top candidate was going to also pass unless he got the commitment.
They were in an impossible position and did the unthinkable. They committed endowment funds for sports facilities.
But I believe I read a report that SUAD did not pay a dime for the recent Carrier Dome renovation. I believe that was fully paid by SU funds. Though maybe donors helped some. I don’t think so though…don’t remember hearing anything about a fund drive though for that initiative.
SU committed over a hundred million of their funds for the dome renovation. Mink admitted as much, though he said there was no choice because the roof was about to collapse. That is BS. It had another 5 or 10 years of life. And they didn’t have to replace the air supported roof with a fixed roof. They could have just replaced the fabric again, like they had done a couple of times before. Remember also there are nundreds of millions more to be invested in coming years for the dome.
Then SU announces a $150 million dollar campaign to build a state of the arm football operations center/sports complex/athletic village.
But UVa commits $10.3 million dollars towards UVA’s new football facility which is budgeted to cost $65 million, so they clearly are more invested in football than Syracuse is.
I find this intellectually dishonest. He is being snarky to be snarky. If you want to be a journalist, you need to be objective, You need to present all the facts and be fair. Nate didn’t do that here.
He is right about one thing though. SU is behind in the facilities war. As they showed him. He didn’t find the story; the story found him. SU gave it to him and he immediately uses it to criticize them.
Sigh.