Good morning to everybody except James Harden, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
So far, we’ve published operational budget data for football, volleyball, softball, baseball, women’s soccer, men’s basketball, and women’s basketball. We’ve noticed that fans care about this stuff, sure, but coaches, agents, parents, and ADs seem to really care about it.
We’ve covered just about all the team sports that our readers have asked for, except for one. Men’s hockey. But first, an important announcement from our partner, Silver Waves Media:
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Men’s hockey is slightly different for us to calculate. Unlike the vast majority of D-I sports, several D-II institutions compete at the D-I level for men’s hockey, sometimes at an elite level. Those schools would not normally be part of our typical FOIA process, but data analysis wouldn’t be complete without them.
So we spent a little extra time to obtain that information. It isn’t exhaustive (we’ll get to that in a second), but I do think we have enough here to be useful.
But first, the usual caveats:
Here is where I got this data, and what it actually measures
I obtain this data by filing tons of open records requests to obtain each school’s FY25 MFRS report. This is an itemized budget report sent to the NCAA each year, and while imperfect, it is the closest thing we have to a standardized budget dataset in college sports. It is more accurate, specific, and standardized than EADA data or other datasets you see floating around the internet, in my professional opinion.
This data does not cover athlete payroll, House settlement payments, NIL, etc. This data comes from the Total Operating Expenses line item on the report. That includes coach and staff salaries, coach buyout and severance packages, recruiting spending, team travel, food, software costs, buy games, and everything that goes into running a program BESIDES athlete payments. In hockey, this is slightly less of an issue than it might be for football or basketball, but plenty of D-1 teams do share House money with hockey players. That won’t show up in this figure.
The MFRS data might be the most accurate dataset we have among public schools, but that doesn’t mean it is flawless. There can be meaningful differences in how different schools decide to allocate specific expenses. Other factors, like state law, university accounting policies, higher cost of living, and more, can skew individual line items. I’d recommend coaches, academics, reporters, and others use this data as a starting point for conversations, not as a cudgel or as the Unassailable Word of God.
TL;DR, I’m sharing what the schools told the NCAA they spent.
This data also comes from FY25, or July 1, 2024-June 30 2025. That means this data comes from the year Western Michigan won the national title, beating Boston University. The data from the most recent hockey season (with Denver as the national champion) will be available to us in early 2026.
And hey, speaking of Denver, a quick reminder: we can only obtain data from schools that respond to open records requests. Private schools, like Denver, Boston College, Harvard, Northeastern, etc do not have to respond to FOIAs and thus do not publish their MFRS reports. For college hockey, that kinda sucks, because a lot of the schools that compete in D-I are private schools.
We are currently missing FY25 MFRS data from Alabama State, ETSU, Ferris State, Troy, UNC-Asheville, and Tennessee State. If you happen to have the FY25 MFRS report for any of these schools, I’ll happily give you free premium Extra Points in exchange (and/or give you any of ours). Feel free to send that data, or any other contract/MFRS data the Extra Points Library is missing, to [email protected]. Always happy to trade docs/comp access.
Okay, enough jibber jabber. Let’s talk data.
# | School | 2024 | 2025 | YoY Change ($) | YoY Change (%) |
1 | Michigan State University | $9,378,079 | $9,109,098 | -$268,981 | -2.90% |
2 | Arizona State University | $5,712,126 | $8,617,473 | $2,905,347 | 50.90% |
3 | Pennsylvania State University | $5,376,785 | $7,927,486 | $2,550,701 | 47.40% |
4 | University of Minnesota, Twin Cities | $6,015,636 | $6,963,571 | $947,935 | 15.80% |
5 | University of North Dakota | $6,287,896 | $5,950,239 | -$337,657 | -5.40% |
6 | University of Wisconsin-Madison | $5,493,097 | $5,468,279 | -$24,818 | -0.50% |
7 | University of Michigan | $4,994,078 | $4,711,413 | -$282,665 | -5.70% |
8 | The Ohio State University | $4,660,818 | $4,686,484 | $25,666 | 0.60% |
9 | University of Massachusetts, Amherst | $4,005,794 | $4,176,408 | $170,614 | 4.30% |
10 | University of Massachusetts Lowell | $3,549,173 | $3,889,753 | $340,580 | 9.60% |
11 | University of Nebraska Omaha | $3,143,899 | $3,851,419 | $707,520 | 22.50% |
12 | University of Minnesota Duluth | $3,184,298 | $3,568,733 | $384,435 | 12.10% |
13 | University of Maine | $2,837,372 | $3,481,893 | $644,521 | 22.70% |
14 | Western Michigan University | $2,462,279 | $3,477,123 | $1,014,844 | 41.20% |
15 | University of Connecticut | $2,824,662 | $3,445,767 | $621,105 | 22.00% |
16 | Minnesota State University, Mankato | $3,352,782 | $3,262,015 | -$90,767 | -2.70% |
17 | Miami University (Ohio) | $3,049,432 | $3,239,855 | $190,423 | 6.20% |
18 | Michigan Technological University | $2,743,721 | $2,960,960 | $217,239 | 7.90% |
19 | University of Alaska Fairbanks | $2,789,485 | $2,848,209 | $58,724 | 2.10% |
20 | University of Vermont | $2,361,232 | $2,818,676 | $457,444 | 19.40% |
21 | St. Cloud State University | $2,814,161 | $2,693,632 | -$120,529 | -4.30% |
22 | Bowling Green State University | $2,476,133 | $2,687,942 | $211,809 | 8.60% |
23 | Northern Michigan University | ? | $2,608,482 | ? | ? |
24 | Bemidji State University | $2,450,341 | $2,461,066 | $10,725 | 0.40% |
25 | University of New Hampshire | $2,992,272 | $2,447,821 | -$544,451 | -18.20% |
26 | U.S. Air Force Academy | $2,285,562 | $2,351,255 | $65,693 | 2.90% |
27 | University of Alaska Anchorage | $2,779,341 | $2,011,333 | -$768,008 | -27.60% |
28 | Lake Superior State University | $1,648,851 | $1,996,995 | $348,144 | 21.10% |
29 | U.S. Military Academy | $1,484,961 | $1,505,374 | $20,413 | 1.40% |
N/A | Ferris State University | $1,630,543 | ? | ? | ? |
I do not currently have the FY24 data for Northern Michigan, or the FY25 data for Ferris State.
Wait, what on earth are schools like Michigan State, Penn state, Minnesota, etc spending all that money on?
It isn’t severance payments to coaches (only three schools reported anything there, with nobody spending more than Miami’s $211,104). It isn’t payments for Buy games (only North Dakota spent over $100K among D-1 schools), or even travel (although it is kinda wild to see a few Big Ten schools report spending more than the $652,862 that Alaska-Fairbanks spent in FY25).
While coaching salaries were near the top of the list, the biggest reason why Michigan State and Arizona State are so far ahead of the field appears to be what they spent on “Athletic Facilities Debt Service, Leases and Rental Fees.” Both programs reported spending comfortably north of $2 million there. North Dakota spent over a million, and nobody else cleared $150,000.
Does this stuff correlate with winning? Kinda….
We ran the budget numbers against the Pairwise rankings for the 2025 season. Here’s what we ended up with:
I’m not really comfortable stating anything super conclusive about the data because we’re missing so many schools, and this is just one season. There are 64 teams that compete in men’s D-1, and we have financial data for less than half of them.
Still, high-spending teams like Michigan State, Minnesota, Penn State and Ohio State all made the NCAA Tournament. Michigan, Arizona State and North Dakota only just missed the field. I’d argue that the only “high spending” program that was actually bad in 25 was Wisconsin, who finished 13-21-3.
Minnesota State was the only D-II program to make the NCAA Tournament field (they won the CCHA Tournament), and nobody else was even close.
I could be very wrong, but my educated guess is that most of the private schools near the very bottom of the national pairwise rankings (programs like Canisius, RIT, Stonehill, St. Lawrence, etc.) are closer in budget to the Bemidji States of the world than the Michigan States. While we haven’t found a 1:1 connection between total budget and postseason success in any sport so far, there’s usually at least some correlation.
What about revenues?
Here’s the Top Ten, via Extra Points Library:
If there’s interest, I might tweet some of the budget data for sports like lacrosse and wrestling, But for anybody else interested in running their own reports, check out Extra Points Library.
Lastly, please take one minute and answer the question below. Thanks
