Is public image a part of the President's responsibilty for the whole Universtiy?
Right or wrong, for most D1 schools FB or MBB is the most visible aspect of the University. Athletics is the face of the University. Mishandle that and you are throwing away a great PR tool. Benson screwed this up beyond belief. The whopping $1MM "saved" will be lost several times over by lack of revenue to the AD. Catastrophically stupid decision-making IMO. Nobody likes the idea of buying off an underperforming, overpaid blowhard, but it has to be done. It is pretty much what every other BCS school is doing.
Why do they do it? Most administrators who know their head from a hole in the ground realize a very slim portion of the populace equates a school's reputation with it's academics. Only a handful of institutions are on that level (Harvard, Yale, Brown, Stanford, Dartmouth). Look at Cincinnati, their investment in FB has returned to them many fold. It's simple, people will not have any interest whatsoever in taking time or money out of their schedule to watch/listen to or be involved in a bunch of kids taking their Chemistry final. They will pay premium ticket prices to watch FB. If the former were true, The School of Mines would be the flagship of the state.
Benson and the rest of the admin chose to accentuate the least visible aspect of the University. They could have gone on a PR campaign to show the buyout was privately funded and stressed the AD was largely self-supporting while demonstrating that CU strives for excellence in athletics, academics and community service.
Instead they behaved like sniveling little politicians deciding who they could sell out at the lowest political cost. Now they are in full CYA mode. That is not leadership in my book, it is acting like a windsock.