Under the microscope

Grasping for a word to describe why the Southeast Missouri State athletic department has merited a spot under a microscope, Board of Regents member James Limbaugh came up with "rudderless."

"We need to find our direction and find out what we want to be and what it takes to get to what we want to be," Limbaugh said Friday.

His subcommittee for athletics review has been charged with that mission as part of the university's strategic planning initiative. When the Board of Regents began the process in November to update the strategic plan for the university, three areas of urgency were identified. The areas, which Limbaugh said were identified as "top drawer for us in terms of urgency," were on-campus housing/residential life and information technology as well as the athletic department.

"I don't know that we have a problem," Limbaugh said of athletics. "We're not sure where we are, and so I would define us as being, I don't know, for lack of a better word, maybe a little bit rudderless. Let's figure out where we are in athletics and how it relates as a priority of the university."

The university has hired a consulting firm, Florida-based Carr Sports Associates, Inc., to review the program.

"They've interviewed a lot of people and left no stone unturned," Southeast athletic director Don Kaverman said last week. "Anytime you have people of their expertise come in and do a review and evaluation, it's valuable to get that insight."

The review is being done by Bill Carr, who was athletic director at the University of Houston for four years; and Gerald O'Dell, who was an AD at Northern Illinois and the University of Cincinnati. Another associate with the firm, Lamar Daniel, is assisting with Title IX issues. He has worked with the university previously, Kaverman said.

Kaverman said the review will include, but is not limited to, policy and governance issues, the profile of the athletics program, the role of the booster club, fund-raising methodology and the leadership for the department provided by Kaverman and university president Dr. Kenneth Dobbins.

The firm began its review in January and has held dozens of meetings involving coaches, administrators, boosters and other "stakeholders," as Limbaugh called them.

A report may be ready for the Board of Regents in May.

"It's a fluid timetable and we're not holding their feet to the fire," Limbaugh said. "We want something that's accurate based on their independent look-see at how things are from all the stakeholders that they've interviewed."

The university's athletic department completed an NCAA certification, a process which takes place every 10 years, in 2004.

"This is looking at some different areas," Kaverman said.

"I just think," Dobbins said Friday, "we need to look at the whole athletic program and see how our structure and funding compare with our peers and where we want to be with athletics. Athletics has an impact on developing the image and branding of the university."

Image and branding have been topics in the strategic planning committee's recent forums.

Limbaugh, regional president for Montgomery Bank, said the review was similar to any audit that would allow a business to identify its strengths and weaknesses and allocate its resources to address them.

"You identify areas that appeal to your customers and apply your resources to those areas," Limbaugh said.

"Athletics can be a front door and a huge marketing opportunity for any university, specifically Southeast," he added. "They've identified this as an important part of how we brand the university and how we differentiate ourselves to our peers. Frankly, I look at this as a huge opportunity for us."

Limbaugh suspects the answers produced will not include merely throwing money at the department, though funding has been a topic raised by former coaches. Southeast's report to the U.S. Department of Education for the Equity in Athletics reports showed the university's total expenses for 2005-06 was $7.7 million, while Division I-AA schools in the states of Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee (a group of 13 institutions that includes eight OVC schools) spent an average of $11.2 million. Southeast, which competes in the minimum number of sports to maintain Division I status, exceeded the average of those 13 schools only in revenue from women's sports, primarily due to women's basketball, and operating expenses for women's soccer.

"The conventional wisdom is just throw more money at it and it will fix itself," Limbaugh said. "That's a myth, frankly, and I don't think it's accurate."

Limbaugh did concede, however, that revenue growth in the high-profile sports of football and men's basketball can drive an athletic program.

Ticket sales revenue in the 2005-06 school year was 12 percent lower than the previous year, with the football and basketball struggles highlighted in an independent audit accepted by the Board of Regents in December 2006.

"With every university that has football as a men's sport, typically the success of football helps to trigger the momentum of the university from early in the fall semester," Limbaugh said. "There's not a person around here who would not like to be more successful in football last year and men's basketball this year. That's a given. I guess the question is how do we enhance that so they can be successful.

"From a revenue perspective, football and men's basketball drive it, but they don't define the success of your athletic program. Success is defined in a lot of different ways. The program at the university has done a wonderful job to allocate resources as best they can to support men's and women's athletics.

"We're disappointed we haven't been successful in some areas; however, in other areas, we're very pleased with the progress and the performance. It's a yeoman's task to be able to have all these things operate at the same time with the same success. I applaud the efforts of the folks who are involved with this on a daily basis."

Limbaugh said the leadership of the athletic department is right to consider the review an opportunity to gain insight into best practices rather than an indictment of performance.

"It's not that we're bad," he said. "We just want to take it to another level. This is an identification that we want to get better. This is not an indictment of anybody or anything. It's an observation that this is important, and as such, how do we enhance athletics in terms of the mission of the university.

"To say we want to go out and win the national championship in men's basketball in Division I next year would probably be mythical. On the other hand, what do we have to do in order to take small steps to achieve the goals and objectives we think are realistic in an orderly process, and commit the resources and challenge people and hold them accountable in order to do that."

One thing Limbaugh does not expect from the report is a suggestion to return to Division II athletics, where Southeast competed before the move up in 1991.

"I will go on record that it would be a huge mistake for us to take a step backward to Division II," Limbaugh said. "That is not in the playbook, in my mind.

"There are huge opportunities here. We just need to commit the resources here and identify what's important."