The UConn athletic department is paying out big bucks to defend itself against the recruiting violations first reported by Yahoo! Sports a year ago.
According to the Hartford Courant, UConn’s legal bills have already exceeded $700,000, and that may just be the beginning.
The Courant reported that UConn will pay$375,000 to Overland Park, Kansas law firm Bond Schoeneck & King PLLC, in addition to the $338,000 the firm already received from the university.
“There is no taxpayer money or student tuition monies involved,” Mike Enright, a spokesman for the UConn athletic department, told the Courant. ” All of these bills are being paid through self-generated funds by the athletic department.”
Yet as this USA Today database shows, UConn needed $8.2 million in student fees and $5.6 in university funds to balance the budget in 2008-09.
With a $13.8 million deficit, all the extra expenditures come back on students and taxpayers, eventually.
Paul McDowell, UConn’s chief financial officer, confirmed a recent Wall Street Journal report that the investigation into the recruitment of Nate Miles is ongoing.
“At this time, the investigation is ongoing, with interviews of relevant persons continuing, and with the ongoing provision of information and responses to NCAA questions,” McDowell wrote in an email to the Connecticut Office of Policy and Management obtained by the Courant.
In the email, McDowell said the school’s fees “are more than double those of most years due to the NCAA investigation of the men’s basketball team” and that the university is uncertain how much it will ultimately have to pay in legal fees.
“We can’t speculate on how much this is going to cost us because we don’t know when the NCAA investigation will be concluded,” Enright told the Courant.
Even with the ongoing investigation, UConn coach Jim Calhoun just inked a five-year contract extension, retroactive to July 2009, that will pay him $13 million.
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TheFinger / May 12, 2010
if they’re innocent why shell out the big bucks to defend allegations that aren’t true? smacks of guilt.
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JonHuskyMS / May 12, 2010
Thanks for the … umm…. stimulating comment….
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ChicagoUK / May 12, 2010
That is a lot of money but it is not relevant to compare the budget of the athletic and non-athletic parts of the school. I believe UCONN is like UK, where athletics are a self-funding entity. It is probably money well-spent if the income generated by UCONN basketball is considered.
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TheFinger / May 12, 2010
likewise.
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calidog / May 13, 2010
Are we really supposed to be alarmed that Uconn is spending an extra 300K to protect the program that makes the school $12 million a year. A will be waiting the article about how the biggest user of Institutional support in the country has to have a helicopter for their football coach.
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