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Montana State AD Leon Costello Discusses Opting In To The House Settlement
Montana State athletic director Leon Costello joined the FCS Football Talk podcast last week to talk about a variety of topics.
You can listen to the full episode here.
One topic includes the House settlement — which isn’t 100% finalized yet but is expected to be in the coming weeks — and MSU’s decision to opt in to the settlement. Roster limits mentioned below could be tweaked before the full settlement approval.
Here are some pull quotes from the episode.
Why did Montana State decide to opt in to the settlement, and what are the benefits for MSU?
Costello: “I think first and foremost, as we talked as a conference and as I talked to my fellow ADs in the conference, one of the biggest challenges was going to be the roster limits. A lot of schools had more student-athletes on their rosters than what the limits were going to allow. And we, call it luck, call it whatever you want, we didn’t have an issue. Our football number hovered between 107 and probably 109. And so through natural attrition of graduation and kids leaving the program, that 105 number for us was not hard to get to. And really, the only other sport that we had a little bit of an issue was women’s track, and we were three over. And again, through natural attrition, that number for us wasn’t going to be hard to meet.
So, I think the biggest barrier for schools at our level was the roster numbers, and it just was not an issue for us. I think second, it’s a little bit of a recruiting advantage just because of the timing of everything. I think being able to say we’re opting in and we’re going to participate and being able to give the student-athletes some more benefits, obviously limited with what our resources are. But to say that we’re doing that, I think will help us earlier in recruiting than the schools that don’t. I think that is a definite advantage. But it also allows us to get our mechanisms in place on, hey, how do we do this?
So we’re dealing with all of that now to be ready for the settlement update on April 7, but also hopefully the July 1 implementation date. We’re going to have all that stuff ready to go. And then as more people are opting in a year from now, our systems are already set up and we’re rolling in those systems and how we operate. And I think that gives us a little bit of an advantage for a little bit. Then we can focus on generating the resources to be able to share with the student-athletes.
So we’re doing a lot of internal evaluation on, hey, where do we spend our money? How do we spend our money for the student-athletes? Does it make sense to maybe not do some of those things and give them cash right in their hands? It’s really, I’m looking at this more of a reallocation of the funds that we are currently using to support the student-athletes, but using it in a different way because that’s how they want to see their support.
It’s a lot of conversations with student-athletes, with our coaches on what’s best for the programs. And I would say we’re getting really close. We’re not quite there yet on exactly how that’s going to look, but we’re really close. And I’m excited about what opportunities or benefits this could bring us and what advantages we might have for a little bit over our peers.”
FCS-level schools don’t have the mounds of money to revenue-share a whole lot, so when you reallocate your funds as you mentioned, how do you balance facilities upgrades with instead using that money to put into the pockets of players?
Costello: “When you were here, you got to tour the Bobcat Athletic Complex. That’s a facility that we knew we needed in a timeframe that we needed. Now, it doesn’t generate any money for us, but it was something that we needed for our program, for the student-athletes to be able to, one, recruit and retain, but also develop them. And it has all the bells and whistles in there for those reasons. Same thing with the indoor facility, which we will complete here at the end of May, hopefully move in the first week of June, is that we know if we’re going to compete for championships and play in late November and all of December and January, that we need a place that we can get some good work done.
Now, that building might be able to generate a little bit of money, but it’s not a huge driver for revenue. So getting those facilities done with our donors was really important during this timeframe now as you look back on it, because you’re exactly right, we’re going to be asking donors to help support us with the student-athletes now, but they’ve already contributed to the two big projects really that we needed.
As I look at what’s ahead for Montana State, I look at the stadium, but the stadium is different from the Bobcat Athletic Complex and our indoor facility because we can design it and build it to help us generate revenue that’s going to help support these student-athletes. And so I think the timing of everything really worked in our favor as what kind of facilities we were needing and we were able to complete. And now as we look, we’re going to design the renovations in our football stadium to help us generate revenue to accomplish the goals that we have post-House.
I think those are going to work hand in hand. We have some mechanisms within our state that should help us drive some revenue to help pay for some of those renovations instead of just focusing solely on donors that are going to help us build that. And so I think a combination of donor money, generated money, that’s going to help us pay for that. But in the long run, once it’s done and we’re generating the money, we can decide where we use that money. And obviously a big part of that conversation is going to be how we support the student-athletes.”
If the settlement is approved as is, teams that opt in to the House settlement no longer face scholarship limits, but they face roster limits. So a football program could go up to 105 scholarships unless an individual conference sets a scholarship cap. Big Sky leaders decided to keep the football scholarship at 63. What are your thoughts on maintaining the 63-scholarship limit?
Costello: “When we talked about it, it was what’s going to be best for all parties right now. And again, I think there’s a, we don’t know what we don’t know. Where is all this going to go? And so status quo as far as that probably makes some sense. As I look at Montana State, where we’re starting, kind of our baseline is we’re going to support all of our sports the way we’ve supported them in the past. So the scholarships that we were giving five years ago and one year ago, we’re going to continue to do that for all of our sports. That’s our baseline. And then as we hopefully continue to grow in revenues, we can then decide where we want to put more of that money. Maybe it’s scholarships, maybe it’s NIL, maybe it’s rev share, however we want to do that.
But I think this allows us to have a baseline level, but it allows us to grow into and ask the question, is this the right spot to be? I know I raise the question in our meetings, well, who says that 70 isn’t the right number? Or who says 75 or even 85 isn’t the right number?
But to do it that right away, I felt might have been more of a knee-jerk reaction. So I said, let’s be in this space for a little bit. It’s kind of like, as we looked at the facility, is like we want to live in the facility for a little bit to see what we actually need in the building.
So I think in this case, we want to live in this new realm and see where we think we need to go. And we don’t need to make any really knee-jerk reactions right away. I think everybody really felt comfortable with that because there’s no competitive advantage. Everybody’s kind of doing the same thing as we speak right now. And really, the only advantage is, hey, maybe being able to offer a little bit of money through NIL or rev share. And that’s no different than what schools were doing previously with cost of attendance or Alston funds, because there were some schools that were doing it. There were some schools that weren’t. And if that’s really the only difference, then I think we all felt like we were in a good spot.”
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