How to talk about college football budgets without sounding like a dumbass

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

We are absolutely neck-deep in college football coach-firing season, even though the leaves haven’t even begun to flirt with turning orange. UCLA and Virginia Tech opened after three games, Oklahoma State followed this week, and several other FBS gigs are likely to open in the next 30 days.

The question that launches a thousand blogs/sports radio segments is: “Is SUCH AND SUCH JOB A GOOD JOB?” That’s a great and fun question! But discussing it usually veers into talking about budgets, and this is where I see a lot of folks run into problems.

I wish this weren’t the case, but college football budgets really are complicated. The absolute best tools we have aren’t completely standardized and have significant gaps. Arguably the most important budget line items don’t show up on any publicly available budget reports. And what’s on the spreadsheet, very regularly, doesn’t mean exactly what you think it might mean.

For all the sports talk radio hosts/local reporters/bloggers/people who want to sound smart at the bar in my life, let me try to walk you through a few misconceptions, and help you argue like a Serious Professional:

This is already an oversimplication, but when we’re talking about budgets and “how good” a job is, there are typically two different budgets we’re talking about: the operational budget and the player payroll.

The operational budget is what a university spends to run the day-to-day operations of a football team. This is the data that gets included on each school’s annual MFRS report and will show up in USA TODAY, the Knight-Newhouse Database and the Extra Points Library.

We’ll get to the specifics in a second, but the operational budget includes what schools spend on coaches, support staffers, travel, meal, recruiting operations, software, scholarships and more.

Here’s an example of where this data comes from. This is a page from the FY24 MFRS report from the University of Buffalo, showing what the school reported in athlete travel expenses, including football:

Nothing in any MFRS Report, EADA Database or public filing includes House payments, direct athlete compensation, NIL brand deals or anything related to athlete payroll.

So how do we better understand which schools have the highest “payrolls”?

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