What are the cheapest college sports to run?

Good morning to everybody, but especially to the champions of Group C, Brazil. Thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

We’ve written a bit about why women’s flag football is becoming such a popular sport for athletic departments to add. The NFL is willing to help schools with initial startup costs and logistics, the sport is becoming more and more popular at the high school level, fans understand it … and, of course, it isn’t very expensive to maintain.

Lots of schools are going to be interested in sports that have relatively low operating costs. Maybe they want to expand their portfolio to better comply with Title IX. Maybe they want to try and grow student enrollment (or, at least, enrollment of a particular type of student) and thus need low operating costs to keep a reasonable margin. Maybe they just think more sports would be fun.

But as I’ve talked to athletic directors and industry people about flag football (and other sports, like fencing and beach volleyball), it got me thinking: What are the cheapest sports to operate right now?

To find out, we checked the hundreds of FRS reports we’ve obtained via open records requests from public schools all over Division I. (These are the same itemized budget reports that tell us the operating budgets for football, basketball, hockey and other sports.) We then crunched the numbers to find the average spend among the schools in our database and looked for the five smallest average budgets.

Now, an important caveat before I get to the charts. We actually do have FY25 FRS reports from all the public schools that are required to share them. But since private schools (as well as a few public schools in Pennsylvania and Delaware, thanks to quirks in state law) don’t have to respond to open records requests, we don’t have individual budget info for schools like Harvard, Duke or Stanford. If a sport is sponsored by an overwhelmingly large number of private schools, well, I won’t have the most accurate information.

So keeping that in mind, what does our data tell us? Here are the five sports with the lowest operating costs in FY25:

Of course, you don’t have to spend only that much. Several power programs, led by Texas, spent seven figures on their programs last year. Here are the top 10, from our database:

TCU won the national title, but UCLA and Cal Poly made the semis, and Texas and LSU at least qualified for the 16-team championship tournament.

But while plenty of Power Four schools sponsor programs, there are also a lot of schools from lower-major programs that record much smaller budgets. Jacksonville State, for example, reported a budget of just $42,000. Twelve schools reported spending less than $200,000.

The next few sports are unique, in that they aren’t sponsored by very many programs. As of 2026, only about 40 schools in all of the NCAA have varsity women’s triathlon, with only a dozen or so in D-I. Our database only has data from six schools: Arizona, Arizona State, South Dakota, Navy, Northern Kentucky and Chicago State.