With stipends set for athletes and a down year in donations, the WSU athletic department recorded a $13 million deficit in 2015.

Down about $440,000 from 2014, the Cougars still produced a second consecutive deficit of $13 million within athletics. With lower-than-expected revenue from the Pac-12 Network distribution, WSU athletic director Bill Moos remained hopeful about the future of Cougar Athletics.

“We were being optimistic trying to compare it to the Big Ten Network, even though their footprint is significantly larger,” Moos said in a conference call last Tuesday via the Seattle Times. “Because we own 100 percent of ours and they own 49 percent of their network. They grew very fast, to almost $10 million per school. We were looking conservatively, by now, being at about $5 or $6 million. We thought that was fairly realistic.”

In addition to having less funding from donations and the Pac-12 Network, WSU increased its coaching at support staff salaries by just under $2 million combined. WSU is also still paying for the buyout of former men’s basketball Head Coach Ken Bone, at $1.8 million, in addition to paying current Head Coach Ernie Kent.

Moos acknowledged that the Cougars are still in the bottom half of the conference when it comes to athletics spending, and believes WSU remains competitive despite the deficit.

“We’re down at the bottom in terms of what we’re spending. This isn’t a lavish program that’s throwing money out the window,” Moos said via the Times. “I think we’ve made the moves that need to be made to become competitive and stay competitive once we get there.”

Reporting by Lars Hanson