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

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

So far, we’ve published operational budget data for 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 highest performing newsletters.

So today, I’m happy to share the data we have on women’s volleyball programs! We’ll do this again for hockey, football, and perhaps a few other sports, over the coming weeks.

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. 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. That means this data comes from the 2024 season, which was won by Penn State. Data for the 2025 season (with Texas A&M as the champion) will be availbile next year.

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 Private schools, like BYU, Dayton, Stanford, etc., do not have to respond to FOIAs and thus do not publish their MFRS reports.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’ve close to having data from everybody, but we still have few stagglers that haven’t shared their information with us yet.

We are currently missing data from Air Force, Alabama State, Alabama A&M, Alcorn State, Coppin State, ETSU, Georgia Tech, Jackson State, Morgan State, North Alabama, Texas Southern, Troy, UNC-Asheville, UL-Monroe, UMBC 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]. Let’s not bring billable hours into this, right? That just ends up being more expensive and frustrating for everybody.

The distribution of budgets and postseason opportunities looks a little different in women’s volleyball than basketball, softball or soccer:

The orange dot belongs to my alma mater, Ohio State. When you look these charts up in the new and improved Extra Points Library (more on that next week), “your school” will always be highlighted.

The average budget for an at-large bid-winning program in 2024 was $2.7 million. Unlike some of the other women’s sports we’ve studied so far, we actually have (some) examples of teams earning at large bids while spending under $2 million (like South Dakota State, NC State and Florida State). While Nebraska and Wisconsin spend far and away more than almost everybody else on a year-to-year basis, there are plenty of successful programs who aren’t dropping north of $4 million.

Aaaaand we also have a few examples of schools spending north of $3 million, only to miss the postseason entirely.

Here’s every operational budget we have, plus a little more #context on what schools dramatically increased, or decreased, their budget from FY24:

I’ll give you a hint. Nebraska is #1, with a total reported operating budget of just over $7 million. But I bet you won’t guess #2.