…budget. It’s that way for all schools but during our independence years it was the biggest source of revenue for BYU athletics, more than TV money, more than ticket sales, etc. One rule BYU had about private donations is they couldn’t be earmarked for a specific team or purpose, they had to be given with no strings attached and then the school distributed the funds across the dept as needed to benefit all programs.

There were ways to get around the “no strings” rule for example when the former BYU baseball player donated $1 million for the heated field in Larry H Miller Park several years ago. He was able to do that because it was to fund a particular project by the university.

So it’s possible for both to be true in this case. Private donations are combined with other sources of revenue and used by the Athletic Dept to fund all their programs. A lot has changed just with the additional revenue from being in the Big12 and we’re seeing BYU Athletics do things we’d never have imagined years ago when we were on tighte budgets in the WAC, MWC or Indy.