Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
The data certainly isn’t perfect, but if you’re patient and willing to send a lot of emails, there’s a fair amount of college sports financial information floating around. Thanks to the annual NCAA MFRS reports, for example, we can see what schools report for not just their total athletic department revenues and expenses, but also specific line-item expenses (and revenues) for each specific sport.
So we can get an idea of what public schools earn from softball ticket sales, or from selling hot dogs and soda pop at basketball games, or from from losing 84-0 in a football game. This data makes up a major chunk of the Extra Points Library, as well as our reporting.
But you know what you can’t get, or at least, yet? Athletic payroll data.
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The House settlement kicked in right after FY25 ended, so direct athlete payments didn’t show up on that year’s MFRS reports. Across the country, most schools in most states have strongly resisted disclosing anything resembling even aggregated data about athlete compensation, citing either FERPA or trade secret rules. Some states even changed their laws to make those exceptions more explicit. College athletes are essentially the only university vendor or contractor whose payment information is usually exempt from open records.
Some outlets, most recently the Athletic, have done an admirable job of estimating team payrolls, thanks to hundreds of conversations with GMs, agents, coaches and others. A few outlets have even managed to get crumbs of data out of schools. CalMatters, for example, got some payroll data from a few California institutions. Last year, I managed to get a few tidbits via open records requests from schools including Western Michigan and Sam Houston. But this is the exception.
Then, earlier this week, one intrepid reporter managed to get some of the most detailed information yet on athlete payrolls. Not by filing a FOIA or by winning a lawsuit … but by doing the reading.
Friend of the Newsletter Piper Hutchinson of the Louisiana Illuminator dug deep into materials publicly posted after last month’s University of Louisiana Board of Supervisors meeting and discovered that, whoops, multiple public schools in the system had shared their House payment distributions.
The PDF appears to have been removed from the university website, but not before Hutchinson and dozens of other reporters (including me) quickly downloaded copies.
Tucked away, deep in a 70-plus-page PDF on budget details, are athlete payment breakdowns from Louisiana Tech, Northwestern State, UL Lafayette and Southeastern Louisiana.
From the story:
Louisiana Tech reported budgeting $1.98 million to pay players, of which $1.2 million will be used for football, nearly $500,000 for men’s basketball, $200,000 for baseball and $86,000 for all women’s sports.
Northwestern State’s $750,000 will be spread out, with $300,000 for football, $350,000 for men’s basketball and $100,000 for all women’s sports.
The University of Louisiana at Lafayette budgeted $1.5 million for revenue sharing, of which $591,895 is for football, $647,500 for men’s basketball, $120,600 for baseball and $157,354 for all women’s sports.
Southeastern’s revenue sharing was erroneously reported in the wrong budget category in the UL board meeting documents. School spokesman Mike Rivault clarified in a written statement that its budget for paying players is $454,000, with $404,500 for men’s basketball and the rest for all women’s sports.
It shouldn’t shock anybody that those figures are nowhere near the maximum permitted under the House settlement (slightly north of $20 million a year). According to the Extra Points Library, the largest of those athletic departments, UL Lafayette, spent roughly $46 million across its entire athletic department in FY25; no athletic department at that size is going to be able to spend half of its entire budget on direct athlete payments.
It’s also not a surprise that these figures tended to skew overwhelmingly towards men’s sports, and specifically, men’s basketball. I do think it’s interesting that by allocating six figures to baseball, programs like Louisiana Tech and UL Lafayette are paying more than many Big Ten and Big East schools. College baseball isn’t so much of a thing up here in the north, where the weather sucks deep into April. But in the Sun Belt, a league that regularly sends four or more teams to the NCAA tournament? It’s a huge deal.
My hope is that early next year, once the FY26 MFRS reports are able to be FOIA’d, enough public schools will actually have disclosed how they’re distributing their House money that researchers can begin to build useful data sets. The total amounts of money mentioned here line up with similarly resourced schools in the CalMatters story and what I’ve heard through the grapevine, but it’s always good to have actual receipts.
Kudos to Piper for doing the thing we were all told to do in college but often neglected: the damn reading.
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Here’s what else we’ve been cooking this week:
The Senate is likely to pass the Protect College Sports Act early next week. I wrote about why I hope it doesn’t become law, since the bill’s language doesn’t really address the problems it seems to be trying to address.
TV ratings are increasingly important … but how do they actually work? I called around to try to better understand how the methodology has changed, what ratings actually measure and why the figures might look different year over year.
We also ran a freelance story on the saga of Dink Pate, a former G Leaguer who never actually enrolled in college and is trying to start his career amid the legal confusion over eligibility rules.
I pushed more QOL updates around Who’s That Football Team, as well as new quiz questions.
And the Extra Points Library should hit 17,000 total documents by the time you sit down for lunch today, with even more to come.
We can do all of that stuff, plus pay our freelancers, developers, social media team and more, thanks to your support. You can keep independent media alive and get everything we publish, by upgrading to a premium subscription.
And if you can’t swing that, by simply recommending Extra Points to your friends, you can get yourself free premium access, a cool Extra Points pin and even more rewards.
Thanks for reading, everybody. Enjoy the weekend, and I’ll see you on the internet.
