Tag me if you want to call it out.
I’ve been on this board for 20 years. I post religiously during football season as well . I walked on at UK for football and was a practice dummy for a season. I’ve given sweat to the program. It’s why I said I know it isn’t a popular opinion.
Facts are facts. In this new age (as it is currently not considering any future salary cap type changes), hard decisions are going to have to be made by small market programs if you don’t have a mega donor base. We can be average in both and hope to maintain top 30 in both sports or we can put an emphasis on our traditionally superior program that is the University’s flagship, that is the more affordable sport due to less roster positions which means the smaller pot of money goes further and is easier for a small market/donor base to keep up w the big money schools.
Nobody is claiming to want to bankrupt the football program. But we can maintain our 7-8 wins which is over achieving historically and still hope for a “everything clicks” season once in awhile with the right systems and player development (Josh Allen, Cobb, CRod, Benny Snell etc were all developed 3 star types)…we aren’t going to outbid the historical powerhouses in our league anyways…not enough to build a whole 2 deep roster at the level to become a football power.
So unless you’d rather be a 10-25 program in football and get outbid for the top recruits in basketball by Carolina, Kansas, Duke, etc when 2-3 guys can be the difference in a title team or just a solid top 25 E8 program. Then that’s your prerogative. I’d rather make sure the sport we’ve historically been on top of is still the pinnacle and can financially compete with anyone and then make sure football is adequately competitive as well. It essentially comes down to where you want to move an additional 5-10% that’s earmarked football over to basketball rn. Not half the budget or something crazy