Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
Before we get into it, let me quickly shout out today’s sponsor, the Chronicle of Higher Education:
If you want to really understand college athletics, you also need to understand the college part. The Chronicle is an indispensable part of my media diet, and if you enjoy Extra Points, I think you’d enjoy reading them as well.
Over the weekend, Oklahoma captured the national title for Women’s gymnastics, while Stanford claimed the Men’s championship. Congrats to both of those programs!
That’s a great sign for us to continue in our series of sport-specific national budget analysis. We’ve previously written about volleyball budgets, softball budgets, basketball, and much more. Today? Let’s share some gym numbers.
But first, another important reminder about 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.
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 schools won’t share it with me, and the courts aren’t making them right now. If I’m able to obtain that kind of information in a standardized way, I promise I’ll share it ASAP.
This data also comes from FY25, or July 1 2024-June 30 2025.
And finally, we can only obtain data from schools that respond to open records requests. Private schools, like BYU, Dayton, Stanford, etc., do not have to respond to FOIAs and thus do not publish their MFRS reports.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. A handful of other schools have not yet responded to our repeated requests, either because they limit FOIAs to in-state residents (so we have to pay a stand-in) or because they’re simply very slow at responding to requests.
We're close to having data from everybody, but we’re still missing budget info from a handful of schools.
We are currently missing data from Air Force, Alabama State, Alabama A&M, Alcorn State, Coppin State, ETSU, Georgia Tech, Jackson State, Morgan State, Texas Southern, Troy, UNC-Asheville, UL-Monroe 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).
I know I’ve got some athletic department staffers at many of these schools who read Extra Points. You can leak me your report at [email protected].
Now, let’s get to the budgets. First, the total expenses for men’s gymnastics programs from FY25:
School | FY25 Operating Expenses |
University of Oklahoma | $2,145,307 |
University of Nebraska-Lincoln | $1,646,942 |
University of Michigan | $1,490,348 |
The Ohio State University | $1,410,824 |
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | $1,290,533 |
Pennsylvania State University | $1,230,406 |
University of California, Berkeley | $697,803 |
U.S. Military Academy | $510,814 |
U.S. Naval Academy | $493,644 |
William & Mary | $318,573 |
That’s…a pretty short list! That’s because there are only 15 programs with D-1 Men’s gymnastics programs at all, and Stanford, Simpson, Springfield and Greenville don’t have to respond to FOIA requests.
Your Bank Should Pay YOU More
Switch to SoFi Plus and get 3.80% APY on your savings. That's like…10x what old banks are giving out. Plus get 1% matching of recurring investments. Why wait to switch?
What SoFi Plus includes:
• 3.80% APY on savings (seriously!)
• Unlocks 20+ perks and $1,000+ in annual value with qualifying activities.
• All your money management in one app
• Rewards points on everything
America's most rewarding financial membership for just $10/month. Your money deserves better.
1 See full terms and conditions. Cancel anytime.
What about the women? Well, that’s a much larger chart… in multiple ways:
School | FY25 Operating Expenses |
University of Oklahoma | $5,060,503 |
Louisiana State University | $4,384,268 |
Clemson University | $4,118,391 |
University of Alabama | $3,599,107 |
University of Utah | $3,591,143 |
University of Florida | $3,533,663 |
University of California, Los Angeles | $3,517,276 |
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick | $3,140,372 |
Auburn University | $3,085,105 |
University of Michigan | $2,967,764 |
University of Georgia | $2,956,998 |
University of Washington | $2,798,054 |
University of California, Berkeley | $2,783,134 |
University of Iowa | $2,757,269 |
University of Missouri, Columbia | $2,687,000 |
University of Kentucky | $2,618,551 |
Oregon State University | $2,330,476 |
Pennsylvania State University | $2,297,625 |
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville | $2,284,589 |
University of Nebraska-Lincoln | $2,233,355 |
Michigan State University | $2,218,294 |
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities | $2,144,275 |
Arizona State University | $2,111,518 |
The Ohio State University | $2,079,309 |
University of Maryland, College Park | $1,970,298 |
University of Arizona | $1,780,567 |
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | $1,697,779 |
Iowa State University | $1,689,633 |
North Carolina State University | $1,580,576 |
West Virginia University | $1,536,655 |
Boise State University | $1,520,058 |
Utah State University | $1,463,912 |
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | $1,432,913 |
University of New Hampshire | $1,234,711 |
University of California, Davis | $988,767 |
San Jose State University | $935,583 |
Southern Utah University | $920,172 |
California State University, Sacramento | $880,397 |
Eastern Michigan University | $840,320 |
Central Michigan University | $829,098 |
Ball State University | $817,680 |
Western Michigan University | $816,091 |
Towson University | $765,710 |
Kent State University | $748,604 |
Northern Illinois University | $703,276 |
Illinois State University | $644,888 |
Bowling Green State University | $566,686 |
Southeast Missouri State University | $512,849 |
William & Mary | $425,541 |
The biggest thing that jumps out to me about this data is that gymnastics is one of the rare college sports where the women’s version of the event not only has more participating institutions, but those schools spend much more. Volleyball is the only other obvious example that comes to mind, although I’m sure there are one-off additional exceptions.
Oklahoma, the highest-budgeting program in both sports, reported spending twice as much on the women as they did for the men’s program.
Trying to calculate the relationship between spending and success is a little harder for us in gymnastics because there isn’t an official RPI ranking. But using data from Road to Nationals, we came up with the following graph for women’s gym programs. If there are other data sets we should be using instead, I’m all ears!
This might be the strongest correlation between spending and results from any sport we’ve studied so far. The data from the 2024 season tells a similar story.
You can run similar reports on school-specific or sport-specific spending via the Extra Points Library.
We’ll have similar breakdowns of spending (and later, revenues) on wrestling and football in the near future. But if you have other suggestions, leave them in the comments!
