Greg Byrne is loathe to make excuses, but he’s got a pretty good built-in defense for any athletic shortcomings Mississippi State might experience.

In a recent series of stories examining the support of college athletic programs during a down economy, the Orlando Sentinel had a chart that showed the total athletic revenue for schools that play Division I-A football. Checking in at 75th on the list – and last among BCS conference schools – is Mississippi State, which reported $30,440,090 in revenue that year.

That’s not even one-third of what Florida raked in, and only Vanderbilt and Ole Miss didn’t bring in at least twice as much as MSU.

“I don’t like excuses,” said Greg Byrne, who’s entering his second year as State’s athletics director. “We go out there on that field and the courts in competition, and we can’t have people be a part of Mississippi State that will make excuses.”

Byrne doesn’t deny the challenges a school like MSU faces, though. If Florida’s cash flow is the Mississippi River, State’s is a large creek.

Byrne said three areas in particular are stress points for his department’s checkbook:

- Giving student-athletes a “first-class experience – within the rules – academically, competitively and socially,” Byrne said.

- Keeping up in the facilities race. MSU has the biggest football video board (price tag: $6.1 million) in the SEC, is getting ready to build an $11.5 million basketball practice facility, and is putting together a master plan to upgrade and add to existing facilities.

- Personnel costs. With Tennessee shelling out $3.325 million this year for its assistant coaches, and Alabama and LSU throwing wads of cash at their respective head coaches, it’s tough for MSU to match offers.

Same goes for Ole Miss, particularly that last point.

“I have not seen any indication salaries will subside,” Ole Miss Athletics Director Pete Boone said. “We can hope, but I haven’t seen that yet.”

Boone’s department ranked near the bottom of major colleges in 2007-08 revenue, too. Its total of $34,769,709 was 65th in the country, 11th in the SEC and ahead of only three other BCS schools.

Like Byrne, Boone is trying to find ways to generate more revenue. The largest source is SEC and NCAA distributions, but the biggest one schools have some control over is ticket sales.

MSU brought in more than $8.75 million from ticket sales in 2007-08, and there’s been a big push to increase football season ticket sales this year. The school topped the 2001 record of 38,440 season tickets last week and is now setting its sights on the 40,000 mark.

Ole Miss, which won the Cotton Bowl in coach Houston Nutt’s first season and is a top-10 team in most preseason rankings, is also seeing a surge in sales.

‘We’re talking real dollars’

“Once we reach our capacity for season tickets in football, which is probably around 51,000 seats, then ... we’re talking real dollars,” Boone said. “We’ll have increases in basketball season tickets. too, but we’re talking hundreds of thousands, not millions.

“After that, the only revenue opportunities we’ll have will be in tweaking things.”

Tweaking is one way.

A word used by Kentucky AD Mitch Barnhart to describe Byrne’s handling of money is “creative.” In a good way.

“I think part of it’s effort,” Byrne said. “You can’t be afraid to ask somebody to support the program. I remember a line I heard a long time ago: ‘A good fundraiser gets turned down more often than a bedsheet.’

“And so, when that happens, you get told no, you brush yourself off and you go on to the next one.”

Byrne has a background in fundraising. That was his main job at Kentucky and at State before becoming AD last year.

Membership in the Bulldog Club is currently about 8,000, with nearly 3,000 joining up over the past three years. And Byrne’s fundraising staff is scouring the alumni and fan base for more.

“We have to have a higher percentage of our alumni base and fan base supporting the Bulldog Club than our peers,” he said.

MSU and Ole Miss, along with the rest of the SEC, will receive a big boost from the television megadeal with ESPN and CBS – about $16 million a year. But, as Byrne noted, that won’t close the gap between the Floridas and MSUs.

Still, he sticks to a no-excuses policy. The same could be said of Boone.

“We have to go out and compete in everything we do, period,” Byrne said. “And we need to have coaches, we need to have people in our athletic department that aren’t going to back down to anybody.”