Ron Kantowski wonders if UNLV can spend enough to join the Mountain West’s upper echelon

Saturday, Jan. 6, 2007 | 7:01 a.m.

There's this anecdote in auto racing where a race car owner approaches a race car chief mechanic and asks if he can make his car go fast.

"Depends," the crew chief says.

"On what?" the car owner replies.

"On how much money you've got."

If the same holds true for college sports, it might explain why UNLV's car has been sputtering along since it joined the Mountain West Conference.

When Chancellor Jim Rogers recently went public with his desire to audit the UNLV athletic program, he cautioned that the process might be easier said than done.

"Financial reports that deal with athletics come from many, many, many sections and departments. So it's very difficult for me to gather that information," he said.

He's right. I obtained a copy of the 2006-07 UNLV athletic department budget summary, and it's nine pages long with hundreds of little boxes and numbers preceded by dollar signs.

This is what Redd Foxx's tax return must have looked like, I thought. And here I thought Boise State's two-minute offense was complicated.

But the facts and figures listed in the U.S. Education Department Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act are more black and white. They indicate that when it comes to spending money, the playing field isn't exactly level in the Mountain West Conference. And that UNLV is on the part of the field sloping downward.

The study, released in June, shows a $19 million gap between the Mountain West's biggest athletic spender (TCU) and its most frugal (Colorado State).

With a total athletic budget of $37.1 million and a football budget of $12.1 million, the Horned Frogs are the Rockefellers of the Mountain West. San Diego State ($30.4 million) and Brigham Young ($30.2 million) are chasing TCU into Millionaire Acres.

New Mexico, Utah, UNLV and Wyoming are back in the $21 million-$25 million bracket. Colorado State, with its paltry (at least relatively speaking) $18.1 million budget, is parked at the Poor Farm.

Although UNLV's budget is competitive with about half of its conference brethren from a bottom line standpoint, it still ranks sixth among the eight teams reporting.

(Because its athletic program is funded by Uncle Sam, Air Force plays by different rules. But if the service academies are funded in the manner of the Defense Department - didn't the Pentagon shell out thousands of dollars on toilet seats for the latrine? - it can be assumed the Falcons are spending more on ballgames than the Rebels, too.)

"Could we use more money to be more competitive? Obviously, the answer is yes," said Jerry Koloskie, UNLV's longtime associate athletic director.

So then the question is, if you're UNLV, how do you obtain more money to use?

I can think of two ways. The first is to field a football program that in a worst-case scenario, pays for itself and, in a best-case scenario, provides a funding nest egg for the Olympic sports, or whatever title the teams that don't draw crowds use to identify themselves these days.

There's no football nest egg at UNLV. There's not even the straw on which to lay a nest egg. UNLV is one of only three Mountain West teams that lost money on football in 2005-06, and with a $3.2 million deficit, it lost more than any other MWC program.

Conversely, although attendance has been down at UNLV basketball games until Wednesday night, season-ticket sales are holding steady. UNLV spent $2.7 million on men's basketball last year with revenues of $5.1 million for a tidy $2.4 million profit.

The bottom bowl at the Thomas & Mack Center is basically sold out thanks to scholarship donors. Even if they don't always show up, as Koloskie says, the money is in the bank.

UNLV has roughly the same number of ticket holders in football as it does in basketball. But with a stadium that can accommodate 40,000, there are a lot of good seats remaining that could be sold to a lot of potential customers.

Cha-ching! Cha-ching! Cha-ching! That's the sound the cash register makes at places such as Ohio State ($60.8 million in football revenue) and Florida ($48.1 million), which, not coincidentally, will be playing for the national championship on Monday. At UNLV, the only sound coming from the cash register is the "No Sales" sign going up amid too many 2-9 seasons.

That's why a competitive football team could go a long way to establishing the athletic program's long-term financial stability and/or viability during cost-cutting times.

"We need to get where 5-7 is a bad season," Koloskie said.

For the short term, home games next season against Wisconsin and Hawaii, which both have huge followings, will pay, or at least help offset, some football-related bills.

But other than that Band-Aid, UNLV's only recourse may be a monkey and a tin cup. People in high places say there are a lot of funds that could be raised if the sports fundraisers only knew on which doors to knock.

The trouble with that approach, as Koloskie says, is that UNLV is a relatively young school that doesn't have the alumni base that schools in the power conferences, and even the Mountain West, have.

People with money are usually more likely to put their name on a library if they or their kids researched a term paper there. That makes fundraising more difficult here, especially in a city in which there are so many ways to spend one's petty cash.

"To some degree," Koloskie says, "people give out of passion. That's the reason that when we go out to raise money there has to be a good product" to sell.

The bottom line, pun intended, is sometimes you get more bang for your buck. See Boise State ($4.5 million football budget), 2007 Fiesta Bowl.

Other times, you basically get what you pay for.