The complicated math behind Arkansas' decision to drop tennis

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Last week, a major SEC program did something that isn’t super common among P4 schools. It dropped a sport. Well, technically two sports.

Arkansas announced last Friday that the school will discontinue their men’s and women’s tennis programs. Via their release:

Before this news story is used to launch a sea of #takes about the State Of College Athletics or whatever, let’s try to look at as much data as we can.

That’s slightly less than they reported in FY24 ($2,616,170). This data comes from the school’s FY25 NCAA MFRS Report, an annual budget report that every D-1 program files with the NCAA. I have a copy of that report, along with similar reports for over 200 other D-1 institutions. That data (along with tons of other reports) is uploaded and tracked in the Extra Points Library.

Based on the data we have in the Extra Points Library, that $2.3M mark would put Arkansas at 31st among public schools in total tennis program spending. But in the hypercompetitive SEC, it would be second-to-last among public schools, just ahead of Missouri…and Missouri doesn’t even have a men’s tennis team.

Of course, “total expenses” refers to lots of different categories. This number includes spending on team travel, recruiting expenses, coach salaries, administrative salaries, food, equipment, severance payments, and more. So where was Arkansas behind the most?

Our data shows Arkansas was middle of the pack in spending on athletic student aid ($701,030, or 9th), travel, and many other operating expenses. Interestingly enough, it actually led the SEC in spending on athlete food for tennis.

They were near the bottom in coaching salaries ($545,544, while the league average was slightly above $900,000), support staff/administrative spending ($19,794, while the league average was around $103,000), and recruiting ($54,516, compared to the league average of $103,157).

If these numbers are correct (and more on that later), it looks to me that while on the lower end, the operating budget at Arkansas wasn’t so much lower than their peers that competition would be impossible.

This is where things look a little unusual.

Arkansas reportedly had a paltry $3,284 in total revenues tied to their men’s and women’s tennis programs in FY25, and only $9,556 in FY24. Specifically, the school reported earning $2,000 from game guarantees, $1,200 in “other operating revenue”, and a whopping $164 from royalties, licensing, and sponsorships. Combined, that’s easily the lowest number in the SEC. For context, the second lowest program, Mississippi State, reported $118,944 in revenue.

For context, we have FY25 MFRS data for 184 college tennis programs right now. Arkansas would rank 180th in reported revenue, ahead of only Cal State Fullerton, Kennesaw State, Georgia Southern, and Ball State. Central Arkansas reported $336,422 in revenue. Arkansas State reported $219,906.

So if we just look at this like a profit and loss statement, well, this would be an easy decision, right? Arkansas tennis barely produces any sort of revenue whatsoever and costs around $2.5ish million bucks a year to operate. Of course the school should get rid of it, right?

Well,,,,not exactly.

On the MFRS report, the ‘Total Operating Revenues” figure is a combination of many other line items. Those lines include not just the sort of income that you’d typically associate with revenue (like ticket sales, NCAA distributions, game guarantees, parking revenue, etc), but also a few line items that non-industry folks probably wouldn’t consider to be revenue at all.

For example, if a school uses student fees to subsidize the athletic department budget (common among most non-P4 public schools), those fees count as revenue for a sport. So do specific donations, as well as “Direct Institutional Support”, and “Indirect Institutional Support Revenue.” Those categories may not automatically mean cash, as spending on, say, security, utilities, accounting services, tuition waivers, etc. would typically fall into these buckets. But I think it’s important to flag them, since they aren’t revenue in the sense that say, a corporate sponsorship or a ticket sale is revenue.

So for Arkansas State, for example, that $219,906 in revenue comes overwhelmingly from student fees:

If we want to look at college tennis revenue figures without stuff like student fees, direct institutional support or inter-department resource transfers, we need to create a table to look at earned revenues.

Luckily, we have the tools to do that. Here’s the new Top 25, combining men and women:

Now, what we can learn from this exercise is that the overwhelming majority of college tennis programs don’t sell any tickets at all. Selling tickets requires a facility that actually has enough seating capacity that worth it, plus the ability to staff the venue to actually accept tickets. By our numbers, only 14 public schools generated any ticket revenue in FY25, and only one, Texas A&M, generated more than $20,000.

To the extent that tennis programs directly generate revenue, it’s most likely to show up via sports camps. 39 different programs reported sports-camp-related revenue via tennis in FY25, with 19 of them generating more than $20,000.

So yes, on paper, college tennis basically can’t become "profitable”, because it lacks most of the traditional pathways (tickets, concessions, alcohol, television) to generate revenue. Other than camps, fundraising, and corporate sponsorships, there aren’t many levers to pull.

For an institution that opts into the House settlement, the new roster limit for men’s and women’s tennis is 10-full scholarship athletes per team. So a school could theoretically dramatically expand their scholarship spending from the pre-House settlement era (the limits used to be 4.5 scholarships for men, 8 for women)…or simply expand the roster and not expand scholarships.

The gap between roster size and scholarship spending is critical in understanding the math behind many Olympic sports, but especially college tennis. College tennis rosters tend to skew heavily international, even at places like Arkansas. On the current men’s roster, only one athlete is from Arkansas, and only one other athlete is from the United States. The others are all international athletes.

The kind of athlete who is capable of playing D1 college tennis is also typically the kind of athlete who is financially capable of paying full tuition. If a school might otherwise struggle to recruit those types of students, an athletic team could be “profitable” without ever selling a single ticket.

Full estimated room and board at Arkansas for a non-Arkansas resident is about $52,879.90 per year. So just four athletes a year, across both teams, paying the complete full price would bring in more than $211,000 a year to the university in tuition. That’s real revenue, but it won’t show up on the MFRS report.

This is a major reason why schools like Youngstown State, Western Carolina, Grambling and Longwood can afford tennis programs, even as Arkansas has decided it can’t. They’re all calculating revenues and expenses differently.

In FY25, as an athletic department, Arkansas generated about $195 million in total revenues and spent about $184 million. Getting rid of their tennis programs, on paper, doesn’t even shave 2% off the total operating budget. It matters, but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter that much. It also makes me think that even if Arkansas officials decided that they’d need operating spending ~$3.5 million in order to compete in the SEC, they could have done that.

Just based on these spending reports, I would think Arkansas could have maybe done more to lessen the financial burden of their tennis programs on the general budget. There’s no reported sports camp income, and virtually nothing from donor contributions, sport-specific endowment revenues, or corporate engagement. If tennis was really important to the UA community, either they weren’t showing it, or the school wasn’t letting them.

But even if Arkansas were awesome at all that other stuff, tennis isn’t going to self-generate enough money to be athletic-revenue neutral. This is not a sport you operate if your goal is to profit from direct athletic revenue.

So if the school decided that funding a sport that is overwhelmingly played by foreign students doesn’t fit the department’s long-term, institutional goals, well, that could be defended. If the school decided that it would be better for fans and community members to instead reinvest that cash savings into the school’s golf and volleyball programs, I think that could be defended too. Marginal increases in the operating budgets of those sports may be more likely to lead to better competitive outcomes.

I don’t think there’s much evidence to suggest that the school is slashing a program in the hopes that the (tiny) savings will materially improve football or basketball program outcomes, especially since the tennis savings can’t really be directly converted into football payroll. Arkansas is already fully funding their House payments, after all. If that actually is the plan…then I’d say that’s a dumb plan.

I don’t automatically think that Arkansas reaching this decision means another 20 P4 programs are going to drop Olympic programs in the short-term. Different schools have different Title IX compliance obligations, different risk and bad-press tolerances, different donor pressures and different enrollment pressures. Schools can also almost as easily just slash scholarship and operational spending without actually dropping the sport, achieving similar results without bad press or as strong of a threat of lawsuits.

Did Arkansas absolutely have to do this? No, I don’t think so. Most schools don’t have to drop any sports in order to balance the books. Arkansas wanted to do this. Whether they were justified in wanting to do that depends a lot on what they’re hoping to accomplish.

If anything, this all shows that the math is complicated…and not everything that’s important is easily captured on one chart.