Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
You all know I spend a ton of my day working on college sports data questions. Thanks to NCAA finance reports, university vendor deals, administrative correspondence and other standardized data sets, I can often get solid information about where athletic departments get revenue, how they spend it and on what sports. That’s the cornerstone of the Extra Points Library.
But I don’t have hard and fast data for one question I get asked all the time: How much are schools paying the actual athletes?
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I usually have a general idea about the payroll obligations for a particular team. I can look up what a school’s operational budget is for individual programs, and I talk to general managers, athletic directors, agents and other industry types on a regular basis. But because athlete payrolls are generally not considered to be disclosable public records, and because nobody really wants to go on the record, it’s easy for speculation to run absolutely rampant on social media.
The good folks at the Athletic recently published an estimate of Power 4 football payroll obligations, attempting to pin down a range for each major program, thanks to myriad conversations their reporters had with sources across the sport. I feel confident this list is very likely to be at least directionally accurate.
But why a range? Why not try to pin down some actual numbers? Well, from the story:
Few people inside a college football program building know their school’s exact numbers. And even if they do, many don’t feel comfortable sharing it, even anonymously.
Even if they do talk to a reporter, coaches will often undersell their own budgets. This may be to temper fans’ expectations or to keep their players from asking for even more money.
School administrators, on the other hand, have the opposite incentive. They want people to think their number is higher than it really is, which makes them look like great fundraisers.
And in the background, seemingly everyone associated with a program loves to tell you how much their competitors have. This is especially the case if they believe a rival program has considerably more money than they do — so they can go back to their bosses or boosters and say, “See? We need more.” We examined their figures more skeptically when developing our estimates.
I can add two more reasons why a range makes more sense in this context: At least in P4 football, player contracts are often similar to professional contracts, where there’s a top-line number that could be very different from a guaranteed number, which is also different from the maximum possible payout if every incentive is triggered. Because there’s no formal and enforceable salary cap like in the NFL, it’s entirely possible for a total payroll obligation to meaningfully shift, depending on who plays and who does what over the season.
It can also get a little messy nailing down exactly how much money is a school’s obligation, rather than the obligation of a brand, an MMR company, a shoe company, a donor collective or some other third-party source. Some elite athletes really do have honest-to-goodness endorsement contracts that fall outside the scope of what the athletic department is responsible for. Others have, uh, various forms of more creative accounting.
So a range makes sense to me. Here are three takeaways I had from looking at the breakdown:
It makes sense that Ohio State, Texas and Oregon would be at the very top of the market. Ohio State and Texas are unique in that they’re not only massive institutions with massive fanbases and national brands, but they also sit in uncommonly large metropolitan areas without significant competition from professional sports. (Sorry, Blue Jackets.) Columbus was third in Nielsen’s ranking of top college football television markets, after all. That means these programs are unable to tap into corporate activations in a way many other huge programs, like Georgia, LSU, Alabama and USC, simply can’t. And Oregon, of course, is a bit of a special case with its relationship with Nike.
You probably need to spend a lot of money to compete for national titles, but you don’t need to be at the top of the market to sign elite recruits or be highly competitive. A lot of fans assumed Indiana football was suddenly spending near the very top of the market last year when the team won a national title, even though their coaching staff and administration denied it. That’s true this year, too, although the Hoosiers (according to the Athletic story and to folks I talk to) are probably in the top quarter, at least, of the Big Ten. But other programs that are mainstays at the very top of the recruiting rankings — Georgia, Alabama and even USC — aren’t at the top of the payroll charts.
A few schools that surprised me: SMU, Oklahoma, UNC, Virginia and Arizona all were lower than I expected. TCU, Georgia Tech, Rutgers and Nebraska were higher than I expected. And Florida had a way larger range than I expected.
What did you think? Anything else jump out to you?
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Other stuff we worked on this week:
A Mississippi State professor examined the Lane Kiffin drama in a historical context, which was just an excuse for us to write about the Wally Butts case again.
The conversation around “saving non-revenue sports” via the Protect College Sports Act has really bothered me, because I don’t think the conventional wisdom is really grounded in the empirical reality. I examined what the actual numbers are telling us about sports cuts and athlete participation and why we all need to decide exactly what is MOST important about collegiate Olympic sports. We can’t optimize for everything!
Are there meaningful risks with the creative gimmicks — I mean, uh, promotions — that Group of 6 programs are running this season? At what point does college football become minor league baseball — i.e. every night is Star Wars Night? Is that even a bad thing?
We added a few new updates to our stadium concession stand simulator and a few quality of life updates to ADS4000 AND Who’s That Football Team. Play them all here.
We’ve also added a ton of new documents to the Extra Points Library. Over the past week, I’ve put a particular focus on adding new financial data for Division II schools, as well as more contracts around campus dining and hospitality.
You can support our work by subscribing here. There’s plenty in the free subscription, of course, but premium members get all four newsletters a week, all of our computer games and the warm and fuzzy feeling that comes with supporting independent sportswriting.
I’ve been making plenty of calls and have some more #reporting for next week that I’m excited to share. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you on the internet.
