Thanks to whoever found the site that describes all NCAA schools' revenue and spending details.

https://ope.ed.gov/athletics/#institution/search

Once again, though, one thing that stands out more than any other is how differently schools account for athletics - both revenues and spending. They all have to report the same items, but they are allowed to show some revenues and expenses as "not allocated to a specific team".

It's hard to imagine that Texas could spend more than $76 million in one year that they couldn't figure out how to allocate to a particular sport or team. Or Ohio State the $63 million they report. By contrast, Alabama "only" fails to allocate $37 million of its athletics spending.

But, for what it's worth, here is what some of the perennial football powers reported spending on football in 2015-16 (numbers in parentheses are $millions):

Alabama (56)
Florida State (42)
Auburn (42)
Notre Dame (39)
Georgia (39)
Ohio State (37)
Michigan ((36)
Oklahoma (36)
Clemson (35)
Florida (32)
Washington (32)
USC (31)
Wisconsin (31)
LSU (30)
Texas (30)
Texas A&M (30)
Nebraska (27)
Oregon (24)
Stanford (24)
Louisville (23)
Oklahoma State (19)
Georgia Tech (17)
Kansas (14)

Those last three are included just to show the disparity between the big spenders and their poor cousins. It's easy to see why Kansas is so bad, but what about Oklahoma State and Georgia Tech? Don't they greatly outperform their resources?

And, frankly, I am at a loss to imagine what Alabama is spending all that money on. I know they pay Saban the big bucks, but they report total salaries, not just for football but for all sports combined, both men's and women's, of $19 million. Even if $13 million of that were for football, that means they spent $43 million on something else they were willing to claim was football related.

To put that in perspective, if all of it were for salaries for non-coaching personnel, and the average salary and benefits for those people were $60K a year, that would be enough to have a staff of 700 people - just for football! Apply that same estimating method to what Texas doesn't allocate to any particular sport, and you have an athletics staff of nearly 1,300.

How is that possible?

Okie State is awash in Pickens' money. I'm skeptical that they are really spending that much less on football than most of the others on your list.

I suspect the reporting requirements are loose enough that a school could choose to attribute certain expenditures either to football or to general athletics.

Louisville is getting a really good return.

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(09-19-2017 06:49 PM)Wedge Wrote:  Okie State is awash in Pickens' money. I'm skeptical that they are really spending that much less on football than most of the others on your list.

I suspect the reporting requirements are loose enough that a school could choose to attribute certain expenditures either to football or to general athletics.

I had that thought, too. Figuring that not all of the unallocated spending reported by the schools was football related, but that some of it was, I added one half of the unallocated spending to the football spending and then re-sorted those same schools. The Cowboys still ranked ahead of only Kansas and Georgia Tech. By this measure, they were still $24 million behind their in state rival Sooners. In fact, they would have trailed OU by that measure even if they reported ALL of their unallocated spending as football related.

A school not on this list, Syracuse, did allocate most of their expenses by sport, and their football spending was about $23 million. So there clearly are huge real disparities within the P5.