Gotta spend money to make money
While true, a large amount of money we have spent over the last several years has gone to places where we will get very little money back in return. We spent $50M on McCamish, $9M on the football practice facility, a bunch renovating Bobby Dodd - but outside of that I see little chance of getting a return. We spent nearly $1M per acre to buy 11 acres to develop a golf practice facility. And millions on the women's softball field, Russ Chandler baseball, $12M on the Byers Tennis facility. Dan Radakovich is doing the same thing at Clemson now that he did here. Will be interesting to watch how that all plays out.
Now having said this, I don't think its healthy to have a shiny state of the art football facility and have everything else in shambles. There are arguments to be made spreading money around among the sports.
Also, the $225M in debt (or whatever it is) has to be looked at a little differently than with a normal company. First, the source of this debt are valuable assets, like a mortgage on your house. Your house may not be a source of income for you, but it is an asset with value to back up the debt. This may be dated information, but I believe the value of the assets the Athletic Association owns is about equal to the debt. Furthermore, (again may be dated), I think the Athletic Association's endowment/investments is somewhere around $120M.
My personal opinion (and probably not very well informed, so take it for what its worth) is that this level of debt based on all information is that this is manageable. We have largely finished our major capital investments. But we should work to gradually lower this down over time - servicing the debt gets much more expensive in the out years, so we should turn the spigot off at this point unless funded with private donations and pay our bills.
