Athletic directors will say that the numbers submitted to the DOE aren’t necessarily an apples-to-apples comparison of football spending. Plus, the strange 2020 season would have skewed the per-win comparison since teams played vastly different schedules depending on their conference. Why stop at 2019? The 2019-20 school year is the most recently available data. ![]() This is the one place private schools must report their athletics revenues and expenses, so it allows us to include Notre Dame and Stanford and Baylor and the like in the comparison. I downloaded a file that showed the total football expenses for all 130 FBS schools from 2010-19. ![]() The DOE then places them in its Equity In Athletics database. Where do these numbers come from? The schools submit them to the Department of Education to prove they’re complying with Title IX. And to add insult to hiring Charlie Weis and Les Miles when everyone knew they couldn’t win there, Kansas spent about four times as much per win as Sunflower State rival Kansas State, which was the most efficient program in the Power 5 at $2.27 million per win. It’s nearly three times what Clemson - which won two national titles during this span - spent per win ($3.19 million). That’s more than twice what Alabama - which won four national titles during this span - spent per win ($4.32 million). We probably do need to praise Kansas State, Oklahoma State and the like more for their efficiency.įrom 2010-19, the Jayhawks spent $8.96 million a win. And Doug, we’ve chastised Kansas, Arkansas and Tennessee pretty frequently through the years for throwing good money after bad. Nothing is more expensive - financially and psychologically - than stinking.Then the Bulldogs started doing more with more. We knew Bill Snyder was a wizard, but Mike Gundy might be as well.So perhaps when this study is done 10 years from now, this bullet point will simply become “Hiring a special quarterback can make a program spend very efficiently.”) (These data come from a time before the current system that allows players to be paid. A special quarterback can make a program spend very efficiently.Hiring the right (or wrong) head coach remains the most important financial decision an athletic department will make.After finding the answer to Doug’s question, there isn’t an easy answer as to exactly how much a program should reasonably expect to spend to field a successful football team.īut a few things came through loud and clear. Spending the most doesn’t necessarily equate to winning the most, just as spending the least doesn’t necessarily equate to winning the least. The data show that isn’t necessarily the case. We buy and subsequently sell the narrative that if a school builds a swankier facility or beefs up its off-field staff that success is just around the corner. ![]() We in the media are guilty of propagating this myth, too. But we often hear coaches complain - usually off the record - that they would succeed more if their schools would simply spend more. I knew some schools spent money lavishly for a seemingly shaky return on investment. I generally know what college football programs spend in a year, but I wasn’t sure what specific programs spent each year unless I’d recently done a story on a program’s finances.
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