Let’s say, minutes after Gordon Hayward’s long, last-second 3-point shot misses falling into the hoop at the 2010 national championship game by mere inches you are asked a simple question:
“Which one of the two teams in the game, the Butler University Bulldogs or the Duke University Blue Devils, would be competing for a title next year?”
What would your answer be? Would you say Duke, one of the best programs in college basketball, led by the winningest active basketball coach in the NCAA? Or would you pick Butler, the Cinderella of the 2010 tournament?
Don’t lie. We all would have picked Duke.
But it wasn’t the Blue Devils who returned to the court of the Final Four this weekend. Despite having the top seed in its region, Duke lost to University of Arizona in the Sweet 16. Instead, it was the Bulldogs who earned a trip to Houston, only to fall again for the second straight year in the championship game – this time around, to University of Connecticut.
Nonetheless, the success of a small school of just 4,500 students – only 3,800 of whom are undergrads – from northern Indianapolis is striking. Despite the fact that they failed to seal the deal twice – and, honestly, played horribly the second time around, shooting worse than any other team in championship history – the Bulldogs have made it to the Final Four two years in a row, developing a model for other mid-major programs.
The secret to success at Hinkle Fieldhouse isn’t just the Bulldogs’ 34-year-old coach, Brad Stevens, however. The secret is not the number of assistants Butler employs – four. Nor is it its players, who count just three amongst its rank from outside the state of Indiana.
No, the secret to success at Butler is something its former economics major coach would understand perfectly: money.
That’s $2,822,892, to be exact, the portion of the Bulldogs’ $12,394,719 athletic budget spent last year on basketball.
In contrast, the BU athletic budget for the 2009-2010 school year was nearly double what Butler spent in the same time period: $25,664,737. The $25.6 million supported 21 varsity athletic programs. Out of 326 returning Division I athletic departments last year, BU was ranked 92nd in total spending.
But, when it comes to basketball, BU falls very close to the back of the pack. BU spent just $1,929,181 on the men’s basketball team last winter, a mere 7.5 percent of the total budget. BU was ranked 139th out of the 326 schools, putting the Terriers right in the middle of the pack.
Money obviously isn’t the complete key to winning. The other factors listed above matter just as much. What drives those factors, however, is money. Spending money on everything from fieldhouse reservations to traveling to playing top-flight teams (Butler’s out-of-conference schedule this year included University of Louisville, then-No. 1 Duke University and Florida State University) has allowed the Bulldogs to attract national attention, which can only drive the reputation of the school.
At a minimum, spending 22.7 percent of a school’s athletic budget shows an unprecedented dedication to the team. No other program at Butler gets nearly as much money as coach Stevens’ squad. While the Bulldogs total athletic budget is ranked 197th out of the 326 returning Division I athletic programs last year, it spent the 98th most on basketball.
The money has obviously been well invested. Butler is now one of the hottest teams in the country. When you see how much it was able to accomplish with so little in comparison to its competition in the title game – UConn – it becomes obvious Butler should be the new standard for mid-majors. If you pay for it, they will come.
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