Look! I FOIA'd all the operating budgets for Women's Basketball in FY25

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

First, I’m thrilled to announce that yet another D-I athletic department has signed up for Extra Points Library! Welcome, McNeese State!

Now, athletic department administrators and coaches at McNeese can get access to the most up to date athletic department data, from budgets to contracts to salaries, all at an affordable price. For more info on how you can bring Extra Points Library to your organization, click here.

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Yesterday, I published the data we’ve obtained for the operating expenses for men’s college basketball programs. Of course, the men aren’t the only folks playing in March Madness this week…the women’s tournament is here as well. So in that spirit, I’m happy to share the budget information I’ve obtained for D-1 women’s basketball programs.

I guess I wasn’t blunt enough for the aggregators, so let me try again. 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. 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 is not from this basketball season. It is from last basketball season. The budget data from this basketball season will be finalized in Jan of 2027.

And finally, we can only obtain data from schools that respond to open records requests. Private schools, like Stanford, Duke, Yale, etc do not have to respond to FOIAs, and thus do not publish their MFRS reports. A few public schools, like Pitt, Temple, UCF, 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 are currently missing data from Air Force, Alabama State, Alabama A&M, Alcorn State, Army, Coppin State, ETSU, Georgia Tech, Florida, FIU, Jackson State, Morehead State, Morgan State, North Alabama, Texas Southern, Troy, South Alabama, UNC-Asheville, UNC-Greensboro, UC-Santa Barbara, UL-Monroe, UMBC, UT-Chattanooga, 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).

Based on the data I have, your best performing programs last year reported operational budgets of at least eight million bucks:

The average spend for a program that made the NCAA Tournament as an at-large team was roughly $7.1 million. For teams that won automatic bids, it was much lower, at $2.7 million.

Here are the top ten programs who recorded the ten most, and least, efficient cost-per-win figures in WBB from FY25:

And the bottom ten:

Here’s the full list of operational budgets. I'll go ahead and spoil this one for you…the top spending program was UConn, who just edged out South Carolina with a FY25 total operating budget of $13,169,775.

The rest of our data, after the jump: