What is Villanova doing that we aren't??

[RBHoya]

I'm shocked, SHOCKED, that there is not a thread with this exact title already on this board.

So you'd think Georgetown and Villanova would have similar football programs. They're comparable schools overall, though Georgetown has a little better academics and more graduate programs, which makes it a little more well-known and well-respected nationally. Both are "basketball schools" that also play football. We have a substantially bigger endowment, IIRC. Other than that there are a slew of minor differences but I can't think of many other major differences.

Yet, they're playing for a national title and we're one of if not the worst program in the country. How, exactly? I've been to their stadium, it's better than Georgetown's (obviously) but it's not state of the art or anything. From what I know of their students/university life, football games are another thing that people sometimes do and sometimes don't do on Saturdays. It's not like they are some middle of nowhere school where all the students flood the football stadium on Saturday afternoon.

If anybody can shed some light on this I'd be curious. I'm sure they're giving out tons more aid/full scholarships than we are, which I'd guess is the main difference. If so, how? Can't imagine the program itself earns that kind of money, but who knows. Is it just a matter of their school putting out more money for football aid than we are? Is there something more I'm missing?

[PhillyHoya]

I don't know much about the numbers but they definitely get better talent than we do but then again, southeastern PA is a football hotbed so it makes that job easier.

[vcjack]

Dec 15, 2009 16:34:30 GMT -5 PhillyHoya said:

I don't know much about the numbers but they definitely get better talent than we do but then again, southeastern PA is a football hotbed so it makes that job easier.

The DMV is a hotbed as well, we just don't recruit it for some reason.


As for the bigger question, I've wondered this myself. Nova is about as comparable (athletically) to us as they come and they've seem to have done tremendously better than us with football.

Is it all coaching? Playing in a worse conference with no scholarships? Worse facilities? Recruits swayed by shirts telling them "Friends don't let Friends go to Georgetown"?

[FormerHoya]

Dec 15, 2009 16:16:23 GMT -5 RBHoya said:

Is it just a matter of their school putting out more money for football aid than we are?

Yes. You can lock the thread now.

[hoyadad09]

The two major components are coaching and scholarships. I think with a better coaching staff this years team wins at least 3 games, maybe more. You have to remember that parents have a big influence on where thier child ends up. So if the kid has a decision to make and the decision is do you go to Villanova for free or do you come to Georgetown for tens of thousands of dollars a year, obviously Georgetown loses out some of the time because for the parents it may be a financial no brainer and since they'd be paying it's ultimately thier decision. How often that happens I have no clue.

[DFW HOYA]

If you compare the EADA (Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act) forms between the two schools they are much more alike than people would know: Villanova has a $26 million budget, has the same sports as Georgetown except for water polo (has) and men's rowing and sailing (does not). What's different?

1. Football scholarships. Villanova commits to 63 and takes a loss every year. Even this year, when Villanova drew MSF-sized crowds in the playoffs, will not get them out of the red ink, but the positive goodwill and publicity can't be discounted. I have never heard a firm number on Georgeotwn's football grants-in aid, but it is very small and this is the single biggest reason for non-competitiveness in the PL, far outdistancing coaching.

2. Facilities. As excerpted in a recent bio of the Villanova AD: "The most recent capital undertaking is the Davis Center for Athletics & Fitness that serves as a state-of- the-art practice facility for use by the men’s and women’s basketball programs and greatly mproves the recreational and fitness offerings for the campus community. The $18.7 million facility, which opened in November of 2007, represents the largest capital project in University history to be funded entirely through donor support. Other facility upgrades under Nicastro’s watch include the Villanova Ballpark at Plymouth Meeting; a new softball complex; the Villanova Stadium Turf Replacement; the installation of a new track in Villanova Stadium, new track & field throwing sectors and numerous team locker room enhancements."

During this ten years he has been there Georgetown has, completed...well, next to none of these.

It's been almost three years (Feb. 9, 2007) since the elder Thompson dropped the gauntlet on what will happen if a new practice facility isn't built for his son. People can say "We Are Georgetown", think Top 20, etc. and assume the good times keep rolling, but no one should be surprised the day the walls come down on a hoop program without a practice facility.

3. Endowed scholarships. Villanova has six endowed scholarships for men's basketball, covering the head coach and the starting five. Georgetown has one such gift.

[kchoya]

Dec 16, 2009 10:41:33 GMT -5 DFW HOYA said:

3. Endowed scholarships. Villanova has six endowed scholarships for men's basketball, covering the head coach and the starting five. Georgetown has one such gift.

Jay Wright is on scholarship?

[Jack]

So if Villanova is giving 63 football scholarships but still only drawing MSF-like crowds, can anyone say that is a worthwhile ROI? Yes, the team is winning and can point to a few NFL players, but that is a hell of a lot of scholarship dough for something that clearly isn't energizing the student body too much. Unless Brian Westbrook and Howie Long are underwriting the operation, how can Villanova justify it?

[eb59]

Does anyone know how close their stadium is to the actual campus?

[DFW HOYA]

Dec 16, 2009 11:29:34 GMT -5 Jack said:

So if Villanova is giving 63 football scholarships but still only drawing MSF-like crowds, can anyone say that is a worthwhile ROI? Yes, the team is winning and can point to a few NFL players, but that is a hell of a lot of scholarship dough for something that clearly isn't energizing the student body too much. Unless Brian Westbrook and Howie Long are underwriting the operation, how can Villanova justify it?

Actually, Howie Long is a major donor.

Villanova drew 7,111 a game in 2009, which would be akin to Holy Cross--CAA teams draw larger road crowds than PL teams do so that helps. Snowy conditions limited its quarterfinal home game to 2,661, which was the MSF reference I was making. The stadium seats roughly 11,000 and while it isn't much to look at, it is on campus.

graphics.fansonly.com/photos/schools/nova/sports/c-otrack/track-250.jpg

Then again, if GU was drawing 7,000 a game, it wouldn't be 0-11 right now because they probably wouldn't stand for it.

Villanova justifies it because it is important to them, donors support it, they pick up $500K a year playing a I-A team like Pitt or Temple, and it remains a recognized sport for them, all of which are fine by me.

[CAHoya07]

Dec 16, 2009 11:41:01 GMT -5 eb59 said:

Does anyone know how close their stadium is to the actual campus?

As DFW said, it's on campus, and if my memory serves me correctly, it's pretty close to the Pavilion.

Glad we're doing a comparison here, a pretty obvious one that I've mulled over in my head for a few years now, but didn't know any specifics.

[hoyawatcher]

If I am doing my math right Villanova has just under $2.5 M in scholarship money expended plus other ancillary costs for coaches, facilities, travel, etc. For grins let's say tickets cover the ancillary costs and they are $2.5 M in the hole for football. A large amount of money but shouldn't be huge for a school like Villanova (or GU) with as illustrious an alumni group as it has.

For them FB has to be part of the milieu that leads to a healthy athletic department. Given the litany of projects DFW Hoya they seem to have a solid contribution base to the department. I would expect some of Howie's and other FB linked money funded the range of projects there.

While not the level of advertising that Davidson got for their BB run, Villanova will get a lot of publicity for their trip to the finals of the FCS championship. Davidson will freely admit that their application base went up substantially both in terms of quality and quantity after the Curry led NCAA run for them. They are a similar small academically oriented school which BTW gave my kid a scholarship offer so I had a chance to talk to them a lot about this. Kids (even academic kids) look at sports teams a lot when deciding where to apply.

Other schools I am associated with use the FB games in particular as opportunities to bring alums back and hit them up for donations. To put it mildly I am not at the level that gets the invite to the prez's box for some polite arm twisting but several I know are. And it is quite effective. It doesn't take a lot of these gifts to more than make up for the $2.5 M. But you have to have something worth coming back for and it seems Villanova does. I would expect that several of GU's FB alumns are doing quite well now and would love to come back for a good FB game. And that the GU prez would love to hit them up for some academic and athletic gifts.

Anyway, without knowing the specifics of Villanova's operations I can envision it being well worth a $2.5 M investment in FB. But it means you have a well oiled machine working around it to take advantage of the opportunities it presents.

[SoCalHoya]

Maybe we should poach Villanova's AD? I have no idea who that is, and whether the person would take the job, but maybe he or she has some good ideas.

[hoyahopeful]

Dec 16, 2009 12:33:54 GMT -5 SoCalHoya said:

Maybe we should poach Villanova's AD? I have no idea who that is, and whether the person would take the job, but maybe he or she has some good ideas.

What about going after the AD from Delaware?

[hilltopper2000]

DFW makes a good point. Villanova and Georgetown are very similar in terms of overall financial commitment to athletics. Georgetown spends just under $28 million annually. It spends about $7.5 million on basketball and about $1.5 million on football. GU has $23.6 in revenues, with $9.7 million from basketball and $1.5 million from football. Villanova spends just under $26 million on athletics, with about $6 million to basketball and about $4.6 million for football. Villanova has about $25.6 in revenues, with $7.1 million from baskeball and $4.6 million from football.

Obviously, we could close the gap a great deal by taking from baskeball for football. But this would be insane. We could also cut from other sports.

The most popular solution on this board would be to focus more on fundraising for athletics or direct funds from other areas of the university. This is all fine, but I think it is worth noting that Georgetown is under very different financial pressures than a school like Villanova, and so has a little less flexibility to simply move some funds over for a new practice facility.

On the expense side, let's just talk about faculty and financial aid. Georgetown has much more financial pressure when it comes to competing for faculty and students than does Villanova. GU has to face the Ivies with much larger endowments when it recruits both. I'm sure everyone here is familiar with the pressure for financial aid, but it is worth noting that the university is also under tremendous pressure to retain top faculty. A simple review of the salaries Georgetown professors make vis-a-vis Villanova professors shows how this would impact the money available for things like increasing the athletic budget or asking for donations for athletics when the same donors could be courted for endowned scholarships or professorships.

At Georgetown the average full professor makes $155,900; the average associate prof makes $101,000; and the avarage assistant prof makes $80,500. These numbers put GU around Dartmouth, Rice, Cornell, Brown, etc.--what you'd expect. Are they bit low for a city school competing with those institutions for faculty? Yes, but not shockingly so. (Northwestern, for instance, isn't that far ahead.) At Villanova, on the other hand, the average professor makes $117,600; the average associate professor makes $86,400; and the average assistant prof makes $68,300. It is in the same range of Quinnipiac, Santa Cruz, and Arizona St.

So while Georgetown's endowment may be 3 times the size of Villanova's, and the unversity will raise much more money on any given year (I don't know the numbers, but I would assume that, on average, GU raised 4 or 5 times what Villanova does), it is dealing with a massive gap between its current status and the financial support for that status.

This is not say that there is no room for improvement when it comes to structural support for athletics. There clearly is. But it is worth understanding the althetic situations in the broader context of what the unversity is doing--which is consistently punching above its weight class when it comes to faculty and students--the heart of the unversity.

[hoyawatcher]

Hilltopper - thanks for the numbers. Very interesting. I am floored that GU runs a $4.5 M deficit on the athletic association (if I understand the numbers correctly). In reality I think the question is can they continue to run that kind of deficit long term as opposed to could they or should they put any more in? They won't be putting any more in for sure.

But in the end I think it does still come back to fundraising. If GU wants to have a broad BE athletic program they are going to have to come up with more funding - plain and simple. For both facilities and endowed scholarships. Or GU is going to have to cut back on the number of sports it supports - something I am sure it doesn't want to do. But the new AD will have his work cut out for him/her.

Also, given what I believe is about a $15K difference in costs for tuition/room/board between the 2 schools I would expect GU to have a cost structure a couple of million dollars higher than Villanova.

[HoyaSinceBirth]

It's cray to me how many sports Georgetown does support we actually have more sports than most of the BE schools. I think only ND has more.Coutning track and field and swimming and diving as one sport E.g. cinci has 14, Uconn 22, Lville 21, ND 24, Pitt 17, Georgetown 25, rutgers 22, USF 16, cuse 20, Nova 22, WV 16.
It jsut seems surprising we support so many sports when compared to other schools with bigger athletic budgets. No wonder some(all?) are strapped for cash.

[LetsGoNova]

From the outside, it's difficult to see how Georgetown is able to sustain its program at the non-scholarship PL level. For one, it's clear that the PL is going to move to a partial- or full-scholarship model in the near future. If G'town wants to remain in the league, do they make that commitment? Can your budget expand by another $1-1.5MM per year?

With other pressing athletics facilities concerns (practice facility, student workout facilities), can GU justify completing the MSF with general fund monies?

And this ignores the issue of the coming shift in the BCS leagues. Georgetown was lucky to get through the last Big East reorg with the national visibility of the men's basketball program intact (as was Villanova). If Pitt or Rutgers jumps to the Big 10, does that start the dominoes falling that breaks up the Big East? Is Georgetown happy being in a Catholic league with the Catholic BE schools and Xavier? You may not have a choice.

Just recently, there have been rumblings at VU that we may upgrade our program to FBS. We likely wouldn't lose any more money than we currently incur (football runs a $4M deficit subsidized by transfer payments from the General Fund), and it protects the golden goose of men's basketball. Then, if a BE split occurs, VU stays with the football schools and, say, a Memphis. Not ideal from a rivalries perspective, but by far the better option for long-term visibility and competitiveness.

No easy answers here. But I can't see why, beyond the facility issue, Georgetown couldn't and shouldn't be at least Lehigh or Holy Cross in terms of football commitment and on-field success.

[CAHoya07]

And Villanova wins the national championship. I don't like to say this much, but congratulations, Nova. Not sure how excited your campus is about it, but a great accomplishment. Their second national title of the year (women's cross country).

I hate to be the doom and gloom guy on the football boards, but if Georgegtown can never even sniff the middle of the Patriot League standings, let alone the the title, playoffs, or the national championship, what's the point?

[eagle36]

www.footballscoop.com/?cat=24
Akron: Ron Powlus will serve as the quarterbacks coach / passing game coordinator. Former Georgetown assistant Jim Miceli will join the staff as running backs coach. Miceli will also have the title of assistant head coach.
on Akron's web page
www.gozips.com/ViewArticle.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=10800&ATCLID=204861599