Here's who spent the most and least on FY25 softball budgets

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

So far, we’ve published operational budget data for college 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.

So today, I’m happy to share the data we have on softball programs. But please, before the Twitter aggregators or message board people take this data out of context, let me explain what this data actually means and why I’m missing some of it.

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.

From previous editions of these stories, I’ve heard that some coaches have complained that this number is wrong. If you think that’s the case, feel free to reach out to me, but I’m just repeating what your school sent the NCAA.

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. I’m a few hundred new Extra Points Premium Subscriptions away from having “speculative lawsuit money”, so for now, I am at the mercy of what schools can be compelled to disclose via open records.

This data also comes from FY25, or July 1 2024-June 30 2025. That means this data would be for the 2025 college softball season, when Texas defeated Texas Tech.

And finally, we can only obtain data from schools that respond to open records requests. Private schools, like Baylor, Dayton, Stanford, etc., do not have to respond to FOIAs and thus do not publish their MFRS reports.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’ve gotten a few more of these since our last series of data comparisons, but we’re still missing a few.

We are currently missing data from Air Force, Alabama State, Alabama A&M, Alcorn State, Army, Coppin State, ETSU, Georgia Tech, Jackson State, Morgan State, North Alabama, Texas Southern, Troy, UNC-Asheville, UL-Monroe, UMBC, Tennessee State, and UT-Martin. 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]. Let’s not bring billable hours into this, right? I don’t want to do the appeals paperwork unless I REALLY have to.

First, here are the average budgets for teams that earned at-large bids and won their conference tournaments:

Sure, some of this is probably skewed a bit by the very top end. Oklahoma led the nation by a lot once again, with a total operational budget of $7.7 million. Tennessee, the second highest-spending program, only reported $5.8 million. The average SEC operational spend was about $3.5 million, the largest in the P4.

Softball, even moreso than baseball or basketball, is a pretty chalk-heavy postseason. Only one team, (Florida Atlantic (team budget of $1.7M), earned an at-large bid from a non P4 conference. None of the 16 national seeds came from schools outside the P4.

You also don’t have many examples of teams spending a lot of money, only to absolutely suck. Missouri was the highest-budget program to miss the postseason, at $3.7M, but they also played in the toughest league in the country and still finished with a top-50 RPI. Colorado State ($1.9M, RPI #201) and Rutgers ($2.6M, RPI #187) are probably your two best examples of not getting bang for their buck, but compared to baseball, basketball, and other sports we’ve examined, that’s not too bad.

One reason for that, I suspect? Paying huge severance payments to fired coaches isn’t really a thing in softball. Only four colleges period reported spending on softball severance payments in FY25, and only one (South Carolina, at $225,866) spent more than $30,000. It’s easier to spend money on your actual program when you aren’t paying people who don’t work for you anymore millions of dollars.