Every college athletic director everywhere dreams of having a booster like T. Boone Pickens. A lot of schools have to slum it around, picking up donations of $1 or $2 million at a time. That’s chump change, lawya; Pickens dropped $165 million (!) on Oklahoma State not so long ago, a donation designed to pay for football stadium renovations and an “athletic village” to shame even the most humble of Chinese Olympics organizers. Pickens keeps his donation game tight.

Unfortunately, it appears much of that donation was kept, for expansion purposes, in T. Boone’s hedge fund. The market has not been kind to that scrill:

Darren: If I’m a fan of Oklahoma State and want that money to grow, what am I rooting for to happen?

Pickens: Well, 10 percent of the fund is in raw commodities and we’re either long or short oil or long or short natural gas. Then, 90 percent of the fund is in equities, the stock market. It’s a long-biased portfolio, so fans should be pulling for oil and gas equities — you know the ones that have taken the biggest hit — and their probably pulling for the price of oil and natural gas to go up. But not right now. We’re actually out of the market right now. So I’m not in the market. So for now, I want those prices to come down.

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