Here's what everybody spent on their golf teams in FY24

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Over the past few months, we’ve published several newsletters tracking the fiscal year 2024 operating budgets of various sports. We did football, sure, but also volleyball, baseball, men’s soccer and others.

The bulk of our operational budget stories have been about tracking spending for large team sports. But what if we ran the numbers for something different?

How about golf?

First, as a reminder, let’s talk about what this data does, and doesn’t, tell us:

This is data that we scrape and sort via the annual MFRS Report that every Division I and Division II institution files with the NCAA. We file hundreds of open records requests to get this data, which is then filed away in the Extra Points Library.

But since this information comes via open records requests, I can’t get data from schools like BYU, SMU or Yale, because those are private schools. There are also a handful of public schools — like Pitt, UCF and Delaware — that don’t have to share these reports with me because of quirks in their state laws or how their athletic departments are organized.

Still, even with those restrictions, we’ve obtained data for more than 170 D-I institutions.

The numbers I am reporting here are the total operating expenses reported on the MFRS Report. That includes institutional spending on stuff like coach salaries, travel, athlete meals, scholarships, sports camps, equipment and more. It does not include money spent via revenue sharing (which didn’t exist in FY24), nor does it include any revenue that athletes made via NIL (brand- or collective-based).

I can’t FOIA that information at scale … yet.

Finally, and this is something I should have fixed in the previous newsletters: This data is from fiscal year 2024, the most recent financial data available. The college sports fiscal year runs from July 1 to July 1, so the data I have is actually from the 2023 season, not last year’s season.

These are big lists. I’ll drop the top 25 budgets for men’s golf and then share the rest of the data, plus a few thoughts, after the jump. All data comes via the Extra Points Library. I’ll share the data for women’s golf in a future newsletter. Turns out, if we include all of those tables in one email, Gmail gets angry and starts sending our emails to spam.

First, here’s the data we obtained for FY24 men’s golf:

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