Their other sports are doing just fine. Mens basketball team was in the big dance and football team made the FCS playoffs. Things went well with the womens teams too. Let me guess you are a Bison fan.
Says the guy with a Carson Wentz avatar...
Chris Klieman makes more in six months than Bubba Schweigert will make for the biennium. David Richman makes three times what Brian Jones makes. All four of those men are good coaches, but UND skimping on salaries will make it hard to retain their coaches if other mid-majors are looking for some fresh blood and make them equally difficult to replace.
UND's major programs aren't succeeding because of their resources; they're succeeding in spite of them, and they need to really commit to those programs and their coaches if they want to be competitive when they leave the Big Sky next summer. That says nothing of their non-revenue programs, which have dealt with equally-substandard coach pay AND awful facilities, despite UND's athletics programs getting way more institutional support (to the tune of about $2M) than NDSU's.
Womens Hockey lost $2M last year? how is that possible? they average around 1,000 people a game which makes them one of the top teams in terms of attendance in NCAA Womens Hockey, if they are not able to keep their team, how do 95% of the other schools keep their teams?
Shame on you for making me quote Rob Port, but since you asked...
And just to put an exclamation point on all this, let us look at the finances for the UND women’s hockey program for 2016. The document below, which comes by way of a lawmaker in Bismarck, shows that the had over $2.1 million in expenses in 2016 while generating just over $212,000 in revenue for a more than $1.9 million loss.
The loss is actually larger, too, because if you notice about $156,000 of the “revenue†for the program was subsidies from the university.
Link (mentioned document is at the bottom of the article)
More than a quarter of the team's costs were scholarships; another $400k+ for coaches, and then $350k+ for travel. No way the school could justify those costs.
As for why other programs can stay afloat, presumably either the institutional support isn't as much of a burden, or they have other sources of revenue to put into those programs (like Wisconsin and Minnesota, which are supposed to get something like $8M more in TV money in 2017-18).
