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Low-Budget Louisiana Monroe Tackles College Football’s Cold Cash

daniel libit
·6 min read

The multibillion-dollar industry of major college sports has never seemed more prosperous—with college athletes earning NIL dollars and super-conferences coalescing around voracious new media rights deals.

And yet, in these booming times of intercollegiate athletics, John Hartwell has been compelled to fret about the most basic of efficiencies: how to freeze water–cheaply.

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Louisiana-Monroe, which hired Hartwell as its athletic director in January, has spent the last number of years leasing the department’s eight ice machines.

“That is not very prudent,” said Hartwell, a former accountant, who has spent a not insignificant amount of his first eight months on the job doing deep dives into cost-saving measures like this.

He thinks his department would be better served by purchasing eight ice machines, at perhaps $2,000 apiece, as opposed to continuing to lease each of them for over $100 a month.

In the end, Hartwell acknowledges, this would amount to a nominal savings, but at Louisiana-Monroe, the ultimate have-not FBS program, every little bit helps.

For 2021-22, the most recent revenue and expense data reported to the NCAA, Louisiana-Monroe spent just over $20 million, the lowest of any non-military FBS public university in the country. This is familiar financial territory for the school, whose athletics spending ranked last among 107 FBS public state schools in 2019-20 and second lowest, ahead of Northern Illinois, in 2020-21.

Even compared to its fellow Sun Belt Conference members, ULM’s budget is crimped, with expenditures amounting to about a third of its richest league foe, James Madison.

Hartwell came to the university after resigning amid controversy as AD at Utah State, a middling Mountain West Conference school that still has twice Louisiana-Monroe’s budget, with the hopes of returning to his Southern roots. The Georgia native had previously served as athletic director for Troy, another Sun Belt member, and believes he has the requisite resumé to lift the school from the bottom of the FBS budget standings.

“I didn’t come to ULM blind,” said Hartwell, who recalled having a “very direct conversation” with the school’s president, Ronald Berry, before taking the job, in which Berry asserted the school’s commitment to increase athletic spending.

But how?

Last year, the university unveiled its latest five-year strategic plan; among its five pillars was “athletic excellence.” This included developing a “realistic financial model to support a successful athletic program.”

To that end, the school set a goal for the athletic department to fundraise $3 million annually by 2025 and increase its department staffing levels “appropriately and comparably to other Sun Belt institutions.”

So far, Hartwell says the school has begun to make good on this goal with the additions of new trainers and academic advisors.

Karl Benson, who served as Sun Belt commissioner from 2012 to 2019, says the real challenge for Hartwell is whether he can wrangle greater institutional support from his cash-strapped, enrollment-challenged university, as a school like Troy has done.

ULM has the smallest enrollment in the conference, and its athletic department receives the least from student-fee allocations. In 2021-22, ULM athletics reported revenue of $215,971 coming from student fees, while James Madison’s $45.5 million led all public FBS schools in the country.

In 2018, ULM students vehemently voted down a spirit and athletics enhancement fee of $10 per credit hour, and no such proposal has been taken up since. However, one school official told Sportico that the administration was looking ahead to next spring as a potential time when it could pitch a new fee increase that would benefit athletics.

If it can’t reasonably climb up to compete, then why not go the other way?

When Idaho made the controversial decision in 2016 to relegate from FBS to FCS, Benson said he thought that ULM might eventually follow suit. But so far it has continued to stick it out in college sports’ richest subdivision.

“I think there is still some peer pressure [to stay FBS] within the state, pressure within Monroe, Louisiana, to stay up with Louisiana Tech that is 15 miles away, and Louisiana-Lafayette that is 150 miles,” Benson said.

Hartwell said he has been assured that the school will continue to compete in FBS.

In 2020, the Warhawks hired one-time Auburn head coach Terry Bowden, the scion of college football royalty, who had previous success in turning around mid-major Akron from a 1-11 team to an 8-5 bowl-victor by his fourth year.

“I try not to focus on the things I can’t control,” Bowden said in a telephone interview this week. “We are the littlest school with the smallest trophy box, but why does that have to affect our performance on the field?”

The Warhawks open their season Saturday playing host to Army, the return game of a home-and-home series that they lost last year in West Point. Later this month, ULM will go to Texas A&M, the first of two away games at SEC schools, with a matchup against Ole Miss slated for November.

In 2021-22, LMU received $3.34 million from away-game guarantees—the most of any Sun Belt school—which equated to more than three-quarters of the program’s operating revenue that year. Hartwell says it is his “priority” to find a way of breaking the school’s historic addiction to so-called “money games” against Power Five schools, but it’s difficult to see the way forward without a large infusion of institutional cash.

The 67-year-old Bowden, whose contract pays him $430,000 a year, has reconciled himself to that not changing anytime soon.

“I didn’t come here to make demands,” he said. “I am old enough not to sit around and bitch and moan about things I can’t control, and when you are a school like ULM that sits in a region in the country where public education in high school is low and you are trying to be available to a lot of students in the Mississippi Delta and Louisiana, I think keeping the tuition low is important.”

(In-state tuition at ULM is about $9,500.)

The football program, which hasn’t had a winning record or bowl bid since 2012, changed its motto this year to simply, “It’s Time,” as much a call to the law of averages as anything else. Yet Bowden, now in his third season with the Warhawks, projects confidence that he is on track to replicate his triumph with Akron.

As much as the money-fueled developments keep widening the wealth gap between the haves and have-nots—in-state rival LSU spent almost 10 times as much on athletics as ULM—Louisiana-Monroe enjoys some things many other (richer) schools now are desperate to find. For one thing, it has membership to a conference, with an ESPN television deal through 2031.

“Quite frankly, there are some people in other leagues who, maybe five or eight years ago this wasn’t the case, but who now look at the Sun Belt [and wonder] how we can get in that league,” Hartwell said.

There is also the benefit of knowing clearly where you stand, even if that’s at the bottom of the barrel. In college sports’ whirlwind of wishful thinking, it makes for pragmatism.

“If you don’t know what to not worry about, you will worry yourself to death,” Bowden said.

It turns out the problem with having a $20 million athletic budget in FBS is also its favor: you can chew on ice.

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