Start with what it costs to be competitive in the Big West, which is 3.5 to 4. Add 50% to compete with Nevada.

Wife is former UCD coach. She bolted to Oregon and took her best player along. Joyner played for Bob and coached under Randy Bennett. Must be desperate to get back west to take that job.

Totally agree. The program will not be successful no matter who the coach is without an investment of resources and an institutional commitment to be competitive. These changes can’t trickle in following the move up, they need to happen now to lead the move up.

Which makes him the oldest coach in the conference.

The academic excuse is just not reality. In this era just about anyone with a pulse can get into Davis as a transfer athlete. What is the vision for the program?

Santa Barbara was early shifting donors into NIL. They had to do it to keep the top 25 baseball program from defecting to the SEC. UCSD has the potential to become a juggernaut. Their central campus runs like a business and they have a fundraising machine in place.

Kinda. The funds are largely redirected donor contributions that would otherwise go to team Aggie, facilities campaigns, etc.

Les is still a young coach? Jim Les?

That would cost more than the staff makes in total. For. One. Player.

Check out the ucsb crowd tonight.

UOP also in 86 and that was a better team having just beat Minnesota.

Can’t win with high school kids at this level. Les needs the support to pay market rate for guys in order to compete in the Big West let alone with Nevada. The good teams are old.

Extremely relevant! Cal was averaging 10k per game a decade ago. They just had 3k for Florida State. There was a shift in athletic spend at Cal and Stanford to de-emphasize football and basketball that played a big part in the failed Pac 12 media deal, the LA schools leaving and the conference falling apart. Davis has been doing many of the same dumb things as Cal.

So UCI gets the benefit of people that live an hour away on game night but Davis isn’t part of the Sacramento market? The size of the metro area is really not a limitation to this equation. Consistent attendance of 3,000 would be perfectly reasonable for where the program is currently situated. There are 30k students and not 1k of them regularly attend basketball games. Attendance and the in game production are worse than the end of the D2 era. You have to ask why and what can be done to fix this. The administration got really lazy with the D1 move and assumed that more support would materialize naturally from the BWC schedule. The AD and Mrak have a new group of leaders and they are falling into the same trap.

Enthusiasm for football should help hoops attendance. I used UCSD and UCI as examples for a reason. If UCI, which has always been a heavy commuter school, has a budget 50% more than Davis for MBB that seems like a problem. Similarly, this board likes to reference the student demo for lack of interest in sports. UCSD was a high academic D3 program about 7 minutes ago and had the foresight to make sure that when they moved up the program had the resources to compete immediately. They funded at well above the CCAA levels and were dominating that level when they moved up.

That’s not what I’m saying. History has shown that moving up with a plan to phase your way into a competitive level of funding after the move is a losing strategy. Davis needs to get up to the next level of funding in football and basketball before the move, not after.

UCSD has a basketball GM and together with UCI is light years ahead of Davis in recruiting and funding NIL. It’s no accident that they’re winning and students are engaged in hoops.

No doubt. But there were some other options.

Agree. The location of Aggie Stadium really did not help in this regard.

The number that Davis has agreed to fund is pretty well known and it is both too small and too late. See Plough’s comments on football funding. If they want to do this they have to do it now and the university needs to make it happen. Limping up another level is a suicide mission and a blueprint for dropping football and crawling back to the Big West for everything else.

TV lighting, replay, scoreboards, and the wiring to broadcast a game. At least that’s to start. It’s a much longer list.