Lobo hoops ticket surge helps carry UNM Athletics budget into the black

Aug. 28—The business side of college athletics is pretty simple, really.

Fans watching — on television or in the stands — usually means the books close in the black.

At UNM, as successful as Olympic sports have been in recent years and as hopeful as the entire university community continues to be that this is the year football begins to realize the same revenue potential as so many other college programs across the country, the driving force of revenue generation for the Lobos remains men's basketball.

In the 2022-23 season, with a long-awaited successful season that included a 14-0 start, sellouts during conference play, thrilling overtime and buzzer-beater games down the stretch with postseason implications, the 34% increase in average home attendance at men's basketball games was one of the driving forces in the UNM Athletics Department closing its fiscal year 2023 books with more than $37 million in revenue generation and at $296,155 in the black.

Technically, it's six consecutive budgets balanced for Athletic Director Eddie Nuñez, though this is just the second in a row in which the department met its budget without a bit of help that wasn't in the original projections.

There was some federal assistance that came from COVID-impacted seasons and a few late-year, unbudgeted transfers from the Board of Regents or other main-campus coffers in the early years of his tenure when the department was trying to recover from several pre-existing financial situations and a decade-long lull in hoops attendance.

"Even with football and women's basketball and some of the other sports, when you look at parking and concessions and all those different things, we actually did better than we anticipated in all those, but then you add men's basketball ... it really added up," said Nuñez.

"The success in (men's) basketball — we were projecting it to be higher than the previous year, but still being conservative and not trying to overdo it because we knew where the season-ticket numbers were leading into the year, but what ended up happening was people came through on single-game ticket sales and it ended up doing really well."

Despite the last-minute cancellation of the expected sold-out rivalry game against New Mexico State University in November, which one department official said cost the school "north of $400,000", Lobo men's hoops enjoyed seven games with 14,500 or more fans in the Pit after having only two such games since 2015.

As a result, Lobo men's basketball ticket sales brought in $3.8 million in ticket revenue, not counting any revenue generated from the sales and rentals of the 40 suites in the Pit, which still go toward repaying the 2010 renovation.

Those ticket sales were a half million more than the $3.3 million budget projection UNM had last summer, and, maybe more noteworthy, were the driving force behind success with some other budget lines overshooting projections.

While the Lobo Club's record-setting year in fundraising in 2023 ($9.3 million brought in) can be, at least anecdotally, linked in large part to the success of the men's basketball team, the athletic department's "Special Events and Other Revenues" budget line can see a more direct correlation.

That is the department's budget line where such revenue sources as ticketing fees and parking money resides. In 2023, UNM projected $2.8 million in such revenue and collected $4.6 million — an overshoot of $1.8 million.

Some areas that came up short for UNM's budget based on last summer's original projections:

—Bringing in about $500,000 less in revenue than projected in its multimedia rights partnership,

—About $340,000 more on department salaries,

—Almost $400,000 more on travel expenses,

—Almost $500,000 more on student costs (grant-in-aid costs went up with tuition).

PEER DATA

While different schools report parts of their athletics budgets in different ways, the most commonly referenced, closest to apples-to-apples database for peer comparisons on such things comes from the annual Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act.

Though fiscal year 2023 data is not yet available, a look at the EADA data available for FY22 shows UNM's overall budget of $44.9 million ranked just 9th largest among the 11 full members of the Mountain West, which had an average of budget of $51.9 million.

Only Utah State and San Jose State in FY22 had smaller athletics budgets.

In that same reporting year, UNM's combined institutional and state subsidies were $17.2 million — 10th in the 11-team Mountain West.

That means UNM's quest to close the funding gap with its Mountain West peers is largely dependent on self-generated funds — things like those ticket sales, concessions and fundraising.

Nuñez and UNM, as well as NMSU Athletics, continue to lobby Santa Fe each year for more state assistance to help close the gaps with the conference peers they are competing with each season — those in the Mountain West for UNM and those in Conference USA for New Mexico State, which is in its first year in that league and also finds itself looking up at much of the league in terms of state support.