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64 ILLUSTRATED VOLUME 25, ISSUE 3 f tional, let's get on board, figure out how to put a plan together and make it work.' We'll see where people come out on that." Q: From a financial standpoint, with tickets sales down … Burke: (interrupts) "I don't have the exact number, but the football hit to budget was $3 million." Q: Where do you make that up? Burke: "You pull it out of your savings account. You can't do it forever, but thank God we built the reserves to weather a storm like this. But make no bones about it, we're going to turn an operating profit — when you look at the EADA for last year and this year — we're going to turn an operating profit before debt of about $5-$5.5 million. The debt is about $9 (million), so you're going to pull $3-4 million from savings. We've got that, but we can't do that indefinitely." Q: You have the reserves, you have the Big Ten (Network) money. How much is lack of ticket sales a drain on the whole athletic department? Burke: "It just means I'm taking money you'd like to hold in reserves for, if all of a sudden, Darrell said, 'I have a $1 million project I want to do,' I don't (finger snap). If I had that $3 million, it'd be a little easier. So it does put pressure on you to prioritize. Thank the lord we've got it. I think the university also, I credit Mitch (Daniels) and the Board, I think they're taking a good, hard look at the current situation between ath- letics and the university to see what other people are doing, what's fair, what can be done. I'm hopeful that there will be some good outcomes out of that. I don't want to pre-judge it. But Mitch really understands and appreciates the fact that we are self-supporting. Some of our fans think it's silly we take credit for being self-supporting. Mitch doesn't, and he's my boss, so he wins. But he also understands we've got to compete. "I look at our reserves as being a university re- serve. It's just designated for athletics. I know we're going to get into cost of attendance next year in some way, shape or form, that's probably a million-dollar in- crease. I've got to be able to find the resources to do that. So when we started about three years ago, we put together this 10-year rolling financial master plan, it's really been a great tool to kind of keep everybody on board as to here are the assumptions, here's what we built in, for maintainence, for debt service, here's are our forecast. In a business of our size within the university, you probably need to hold between $30-45 million in reserve. That's about where you should be. We're probably down in the low-to-mid $20s. That's not a good picture if you keep chopping away $3 (million) a year." Q: You told the returning players after the IU game that this would be the last December they won't travel, which would mean at least doubling your win total next year. Is that at least your ex- Tom Campbell The south end zone patio (left) was a hit with fans, but much work needs to be done to re-energize Ross-Ade.