 Email me! Let’s Discuss Advertising Too! Follow us on Twitter! Lubbock In The Loop. Check out Lubbock In The Loop for a list of Lubbock restaurants that offer curbside delivery. Podcasts. Check out your guys, Spencer and Michael, on 23 Personnel Podcast, a Texas Tech athletics podcast where food and sports clash at the goal line, as well as Keith Patrick and Dinger Derby, the only, yes only, podcast about Texas Tech baseball. |
Avalanche-Journal’s Don Williams reports that the various teams have been asked to reduce their budget from as little of 3% to 20%, depending on each team’s situation. I had a little trouble following along, but in addition to the budget cuts the athletic department as a whole has refinanced some debt, which cut $9.425 million from its operating budget and got a lower interest rate (I think).
Thus, the overall budget appears to be around $78 million rather than the $93.64 million that was projected:
Now Tech is removing the $9.425 million obligation from next year’s annual athletics operating budget. In addition to about $1.9 million in savings from the refinancing, Botros said the department will tap reserves for the first time in several years to cover the other $7.5 million.
Tech has been paying off debt at the rate of $11.4 million annually in recent fiscal years. The amortization schedule called for debt reduction of $9.425 million for fiscal year 2021 and annual reductions of about $7.4 million each of the four years after that.
The new schedule after refinancing was not immediately available, but Botros said more of the debt is being shifted to later years, considering the obligations were scheduled to be less than $1 million a year for fiscal years 2032 through 2036. The ending date, August 2036, remains the same.
“Some of those final years, 2030 to 2036, the payment gets really, really low,” Botros said, “so we’ve kind of extended that amortization of the current debt when we refinanced, because it’s at such a low rate. So those payments are going to go up, but we’ve tried not to extend the full length of our longest loans.”
Botros said the department can balance the budget at $78 million if football teams can play the 2020 season with stadiums at 50 percent capacity. Gov. Greg Abbott recently told athletic directors of the state’s universities to not expect better than that.
That last part is pretty important, which is that the only way that Texas Tech meets its budget is if the stadium is at 50% capacity and given the current state of events, I’m not entirely optimistic. And Botros also goes on to state in the article that Texas Tech needs to make $7 million by August 31st in order to break even, but feels strong that Texas Tech will be able to do that.
Avalanche-Journal’s Don Williams does an excellent job of recounting the time in July of 1970 when Lubbock hosted the Coaches All-American game a mere 47 days after an F5 tornado ripped through Lubbock and killed 26 people. This is really good and I’d just ask you to read the whole thing if you can.
I thought for sure this would be a slow weekend and was I wrong. On Saturday, Texas Tech football dropped their new uniforms, which, in my opinion, an improvement over the old uniforms. Additionally, the Pac-12 decided to cancel all of their non-conference games, so that means I need to scrap my preview of Arizona because Texas Tech and the Wildcats are no longer playing this year. I should also add that expected today is the news that the governing body for junior college football will announce that they will play in the spring. As was pointed out by Keith in the STP Slack, the most recent commit, Demeco Roland, will most likely graduate in December and not play another snap of football until he arrives at Texas Tech. Roland’s commitment post is coming up today.
Here are some tweets.
🎥: @joonees__ and @allisonbloss told us how resources from the @JTMTalkingtonLA have helped them grow as individuals! 👆
🔴#WreckEm⚫️ pic.twitter.com/mYm4xGOmct
— Texas Tech Volleyball (@TexasTechVB) July 10, 2020
In Beard we trust!
🔴#4To1 | #WreckEm⚫️ pic.twitter.com/GgSypw45PD
— Texas Tech Basketball (@TexasTechMBB) July 11, 2020
Is there anything @PatrickMahomes isn’t good at? 💪
🔴#WreckEm⚫️ pic.twitter.com/GWOBYOEJLn
— Texas Tech Football (@TexasTechFB) July 12, 2020
Another day, another magic show 🤷♂️ pic.twitter.com/qbDmzKon48
— Dallas Mavericks (@dallasmavs) July 11, 2020
Oh, I’m so sorry, I’m not sure how that Luka tweet got included in all of this.