Here are all the FY24 FOOTBALL operating budgets

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

A few days ago, I helped out the folks at On3 with a story about college football recruiting budgets. On3 used the Extra Points Library database to pull what every public FBS program reported as recruiting spending from FY24.

That’s not what their boosters spent on NIL, or what the school allocated for revenue-share, or anything that directly went to athletes. That chart simply reflected what schools declared for their spending on recruiting, travel, events, staffing, etc.

There are some surprising figures on that list. Ohio State, the defending national champions and regular Top Ten Class-Signer, isn’t in the top 20 in recruiting spending for FY24. But Minnesota, Rutgers, Georgia Tech and South Florida were. Ohio State and Michigan were 24th and 25th, respectively.

That got me thinking. If just tracking recruiting spending left lots of questions, or at least, didn’t easily line up with what folks would assume would be big budget football programs … what about total spending?

So I decided to look up what every football team’s total operating expenses for football were from FY24.

A quick note about what this chart means, and also doesn’t mean

I’ve done newsletters that track reporting revenue and spending before, but in case this is your first one, let me remind everybody that I get this data from each school’s MFRS report that they file annually with the NCAA. This report is a standardized (well, sort of) itemized budget that every school in Division I and Division II has to file.

But I can’t FOIA private schools, and even though I sometimes ask them nicely, those schools always decline to share this information with me. So I won’t have data from programs like Notre Dame, Baylor, Boston College, Miami, Yale, etc.

There are also a few public schools that won’t appear in these sheets. Pittsburgh, Temple, Delaware, Delaware State and UCF’s MFRS reports are not subject to open records requests, thanks to quirks in their state laws and/or how their athletic departments are configured. A tiny number of schools have also, for whatever reason, simply ignored my requests over the past six months. If any of you have data for Troy, Texas Southern, Mississippi Valley State, UMass-Lowell, Alabama A&M, Jacksonville State or VMI … I’ll happily pay for them. But I haven’t been able to get them myself.

Finally, the term total operating expenses includes reported spending on stuff like coaching salaries, severance payouts, team travel, recruiting, bowl trips, administrative staff, facility debt service and others. It does not include player payroll.

Finally, this is from FY24. So not last football season.

Okay! Enough with the preamble. I’ll drop the top 20 below, and the full list, plus some #context, after the jump.

All data via the Extra Points Library:

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.