You're talking about a group that has been, for reasons that nobody can understand anymore, trying to keep UA D1/FBS football afloat for more than 30 years now. They have failed miserably and so consistently that one would think they've done so on purpose. They STILL insist on dragging out the very expensive corpse called Zips football, bleeding UA and students (with extra 'fees') year after year while nobody attends the grim games at Cavernous Infocision Stadium.
The department is also filled, IMO, with self-dealing folks and has consistently gotten away with not playing by the rules that every other department must adhere to. Around 2016, during one of UA's never-ending series of financial crises, every department was required to axe all GA positions that didn't provide direct in-class teaching support. The self-licking ice cream cone known as UA athletics avoided these cuts. I won't provide specific examples so as to spare those involved, but let's just say that UA athletics more than took care of their own with unworthy and unneeded GA positions while the rest of the campus community suffered those cuts.
I hate to see XC get the axe. It was a very UA move. The new president had a major opportunity to use the Corona crisis to finally kill FBS Zips football, to roll some heads in that garbage department, and to right-size the whole shebang. Nope. He and the idiot BOT instead killed the smallest and cheapest programs they could find.
In the Fall, there will be too many classes taught by adjuncts being paid a couple grand per class by UA to teach. UA will continue to avoid hiring enough tenure track full-timers. Students will again be asked to pay a ridiculous added fee to support athletics. The handful of (mostly) self-pay XC runners won't be there. But hey, the winless Zips football team will trot out dozens of scholarship players and hundreds of thousands of dollars in coaching to likely lose 11 more games in front of 50 fans each week.
Such is UA athletics.