Here are (almost) all of the public school football operating budgets for FY25

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

So far, we’ve published operational budget data for college volleyball, college softball, baseball, women’s soccer, men’s basketball, and women’s basketball. We’ve noticed a lot of interest in this information…from coaches, ADs, fans, researchers, and more. These tend to be some of the highest-performing newsletters.

But the one sport that we get asked about the most? Of course. It’s football.

Today, I’m happy to share the operational budget data we have for college football, both FBS and FCS institutions, as well as some analysis and context. Before we get to the numbers and before people scream at me on Twitter, some important clarifications.

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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, granular, and standardized than EADA data or other datasets you see floating around the internet, in my professional opinion.

But 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. 

I’d love to share data about what schools are paying athletes! But House settlement payments aren’t part of the FY25 data, and schools across the country have resisted efforts to share virtually ANY athlete compensation data via FOIA. I do not have the lawyers to win that fight on my own.

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, and other factors, like state law, university accounting policies, higher cost of living, and more, can skew individual line items. I’d recommend coaches, 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 2024 season, when Ohio State won the national title. We’ll get the budget data for the 2025 season (world champion Indiana Hoosiers) next January.

And finally, we can only obtain data from schools that respond to open records requests. Private schools, like BYU, USC, Notre Dame, etc., do not have to respond to FOIAs and thus do not publish their MFRS reports. A few public schools, like Pitt, Temple, Delaware, and Delaware State, are exempt from state open records laws.

And even though these reports were supposed to be filed to the NCAA back in January and thus subject to open records requests, a few institutions have still not responded to our (polite, but repeated) requests.

We are currently missing FY25 MFRS data from Alabama State, ETSU, 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 boring disclaimers! Let’s get to the data. Data for everybody else, plus some important #context, after the jump.

And as always, users can pull additional itemized data for any program and sport in the Extra Points Library. I can’t put every single fully itemized report in an email without Gmail banishing me to the spam folder forever.