Four months ago, NIU received priceless exposure.

Or maybe not so priceless.

The Athletics Department racked up a bill of at least $880,000 during the course of its week in San Diego for the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl.

The opportunity for NIU to go to a bowl game was something it couldn’t pass up. The exposure alone for the university is tremendous.

Whenever you send an entire team, coaches, band, cheerleaders and numerous others to a city on the other side of the country for an extended period of time, you’re going to incur some large costs. That couldn’t be helped.

What could have been helped was the large amounts of money spent to “do it right,” as some might say.

There were thousands of dollars spent on flowers, iPods, clothing and other items the trip probably could have been complete without.

While this is all nice, it’s simply not something a university such as NIU can afford. NIU is not a big-time school. It doesn’t have a number of large donors to help cover massive costs such as going to a bowl game. Putting on a show is nice, but those responsible for allocating money must be more frugal, and now, must be held accountable.

Even Eddie Williams, executive vice president and chief of operations, Finance and Facilities, said he thought NIU could have done a better job of spending its money.

That’s why one can only hope the university learned from this experience for future bowl games.

At a school where we hope to receive money from the governor to help us maintain facilities and where the number of professors is steadily decreasing, we need to do a better job of prioritizing where our money goes and weigh the pros and cons of making such large expenditures in the future.