The University of Tennessee football program hauls in three times more revenue during the season than UTC’s total athletic budget for the year.

The Volunteers, consistently competitive in the powerful Southeastern Conference, generated $31 million during the 2006-07 football season, records show. By comparison at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, athletic director Rick Hart, whose teams play in the midmajor Southern Conference, manages a $9.5 million annual budget for six men’s and seven women’s sports programs.

“We literally have conversations about hundreds of dollars,” Mr. Hart said.

Mr. Hart credits Matthew Pope, UTC’s associate athletic director for internal operations, finance and marketing, for helping him stretch each dollar.

“I come to him with ideas on things I want to get done, and he’s got to figure out how to pay for it,” Mr. Hart said. “He does a good job of telling me no or telling me that if we’re going to do that then we’ve got to cut something somewhere else.”

All that penny-pinching talk might sound as if UTC has to do everything on the cheap, but Mr. Hart, in his second year as athletic director, said the department is working to increase revenues and expand fundraising.

“We will not run a second-class program,” he said.

The Mocs have held their own in many sports in recent years despite limited resources. Mr. Hart sees a future with UTC on equal financial footing with the seven other football-playing programs in the SoCon.

“It makes you hungry because you think what could we really do if we could reach our potential and maybe give them a little more support,” he said.

Mr. Hart came to UTC in May 2006 from the University of Oklahoma, where he spent seven years working in the Sooners’ athletic department, including as the senior associate athletic director for external operations. The Sooners’ budget when he arrived in 1999 was about $23 million, he said. By the time he left — after the Oklahoma football program returned to the ranks of the nation’s elite — the budget had grown to about $70 million.

At UTC, Mr. Hart handles athletics on a much smaller scale.

In the 2006-07 fiscal year, according to the U.S. Department of Education, UTC broke even with revenues and expenses of $9.5 million.

The Mocs will not have the luxury of a budget on the scale of Oklahoma or Tennessee, which generate tens of millions of dollars in revenue through football alone. UTC’s football program never will have a home stadium that seats 80,000; Finley Stadium seats about 20,000. (The UTC football team will, however, open its 2008 season at Oklahoma — whose stadium holds 82,112 — and UTC’s athletic department will be paid $475,000 for the game. It will receive $460,000 for a game at Florida State two weeks later.)

Athletic departments at midmajor universities such as UTC cannot keep up with revenue streams that national powerhouses generate through television contracts, bowl games and endorsements. Instead, they must look at what their peers are doing, Mr. Hart said.

Mountaineers on top

No school in the Southern Conference or another midmajor translates fundraising limitations into success on the playing field better than Appalachian State University.

In December 2007, the Mountaineers defeated the University of Delaware in Chattanooga’s Finley Stadium to win their third consecutive Football Championship Subdivision (formerly I-AA) national title. On Sept. 1, Appalachian State pulled off one of the biggest upsets in college football history, knocking off then-No. 5 University of Michigan, a I-A school.

The success is boosting the athletic department’s coffers in Boone, N.C.

Since 2004, the last season the Mountaineers failed to reach the playoffs, Appalachian State’s revenue from ticket sales rose from $400,000 to $1.5 million, athletic director Charlie Cobb said. Over that span, he said, the athletic department budget increased from $7.5 million to $10.5 million.

“This is our moment in the sun,” he said, “and we’ve got to make the most of it.”

The Mountaineers are using the financial windfall to upgrade facilities, increase salaries of coaches and give their athletic programs larger budgets, Mr. Cobb said.

However, Appalachian State also is using restraint in planning athletic spending.

“We want to grow these revenues but make sure that our expenses grow at a slower pace,” Mr. Cobb said. “We’re being very careful not to get out ahead of ourselves.”

One area where Appalachian State thrives and UTC lags is in fundraising.

The Mountaineers led all FCS schools in attendance this fall with an average of 24,218 per football game and are expanding Kidd-Brewer Stadium.

If UTC wants to compete at the highest level, Mr. Hart said the Mocs need to find a way to commit more resources that will help the program perform well consistently. Last year, the Mocs finished 2-9 and haven’t had back-to-back winning seasons since 1990-91.

The UTC athletic endowment program is “very immature,” Mr. Hart said, but the January hiring of Scott Koskoski as the new assistant athletic director for development is a big step forward.

Mr. Koskoski came to UTC from James Madison University, where he was in charge of the Duke Club, James Madison’s version of UTC’s Blue and Gold Club.

Mr. Hart said he wants the new hire to tap the Mocs’ alumni, fans and donors for donations and endowments that could make UTC even more competitive.

“When we hired Scott to come in and lead that effort in January, that was, aside from the coaches, probably the most important hire we’ll make from a departmental perspective because it’s critical to our success, our growth and to achieving a lot of the goals we need to achieve,” he said.

Mr. Koskoski said UTC was probably 10 to 15 years behind schools such as James Madison, Appalachian State and Georgia Southern in fundraising programs, but he believes the Mocs eventually can make up that ground.

“I hope that six months from now, not only our current donors, but our prospective donors are much more educated about greatest needs and highest priorities and the things that can transform our athletic program,” he said.

“I think I can get us there quicker because I’ve been around and I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t,” he said.

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