STILLWATER — Chad Weiberg reached into the pocket of a leather-bound portfolio and pulled out a small card.
A little bigger than a baseball card, it had all of Oklahoma State’s athletic accomplishments from the 2021-22 school year on one side, and a list of expected revenue and expenses for the athletic department in the 2022-23 fiscal year on the other.
Weiberg, now 20 months on the job as OSU’s athletic director, shows the card to those considering a donation to the athletic department, so they can see what their money will be used for.
On the revenue half of the card, the biggest item, of course, is the Big 12 Conference distribution, which was estimated at around $41 million for the current school year, and thus about 41% of OSU’s roughly $100 million athletic budget.
But other items include ticket sales, donations from POSSE members, Cowboy Sports Properties media/sponsorship revenue, trademark licensing and concession sales. But in Weiberg’s eyes, those lines all come from the same source: OSU people.
Totaled together, those items were expected to produce roughly $55.1 million, or well more than half of OSU’s budgetary needs.
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“It’s still our people that drive what we do,” Weiberg told The Oklahoman earlier this month. “As big as this one line item is (pointing to Big 12 revenue) — and that gets a lot of media attention because of conference realignment and media contracts and all of those things. But what I don’t want to get lost in this is that it’s still our people that really drive our success.”
Oklahoma State athletics nets nearly $1.1 million profit for 2021-22 fiscal year
For the 2021-22 fiscal year (July 2021 through June 2022), OSU’s athletic operating expenses totaled $103,317,155, according to the department’s annual athletic revenue and expense summary sent to the NCAA, which was obtained by The Oklahoman.
Revenue reached $104,404,398. That left the athletic department with just shy of $1.1 million in profit, though that included a one-time institutional support payment of $12,934,006 from the university. That was done to help the athletic department overcome a loss of $14,192,693 from the COVID-impacted 2020-21 fiscal year.
The department cushioned the blow of the COVID-19 pandemic with staff reductions, furloughs, pay cuts and other methods. But nothing was going to be enough to outweigh the loss of revenue from stadium capacity reductions to 25% for all sports, amended travel costs and other issues created by the pandemic.
“I think we did an excellent job of managing that as best we could,” Weiberg said. “Everybody in this department deserves credit for that. We tried our best to manage it and I think we did a good job, but there’s no way you’re overcoming all the losses.”
Athletics was one of multiple revenue-producing departments at OSU to receive funding from the university to rectify losses sustained during the pandemic.
With that payment of $12.9 million to balance the budget, Weiberg sees athletics being back on track as fully self-sufficient going forward, as it had been for several years before COVID.
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“That is the goal,” Weiberg said. “We’ve got a great relationship with campus, and one of the reasons is that we try to be good stewards of our resources and not rely on resources from the institution that can be used for other needs.
“We want to be competitive, and we know that’s important to not only us, but to the university. But we want to be able to do it without burdening the institution to help us with that.”
Oklahoma State athletic budget continues to increase
OSU’s athletic budget was less than $90 million just a few years ago, but has grown significantly the last couple of years, and will continue to grow. Weiberg doesn’t know exactly where OSU falls among Big 12 universities in budget size, other than acknowledging that everyone in the league is behind SEC-bound Texas and Oklahoma.
“I’m not gonna sit here and say we’re third, but we’re not that far from third,” Weiberg said. “But we’re probably not that far from 10th. I just think the rest of us are really in a pretty close range at that point, which is probably how it should be.”
Donations to the POSSE — which stands for Providing Opportunities for Scholastic and Sports Excellence — accounts for roughly $32.4 million of OSU’s athletic revenue. Of that, about $10 million goes to the university to fund athletic scholarships. The rest goes toward sports operating costs and various other items.
One expense that Weiberg is proud to keep low — as was his predecessor, Mike Holder — is the athletic department’s debt costs. For the 2022-23 fiscal year, OSU’s debt service was expected to be $2.4 million for principal and interest payments on facilities, which Weiberg believes to be among the lowest in the Big 12.
“That’s important to us, because if that number is higher, then obviously, it’s got to come from somewhere,” Weiberg said. “It takes a lot of people to make that possible. We’ve built a lot around here, but not with debt, because we’ve had donors step up and help us make all those things possible.
“For us, that’s necessary, because we don’t start with one of the biggest budgets in the country, so we’ve got to find every way we can to be as competitive as we possibly can.”
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