College Finances

I've already talked about why college athletes shouldn't get paid and now I'll go into finances of D1 schools. There are a lot of different angles that we can take to look at how much money each college makes or doesn't make throughout the course of an academic year.

Football can be a major moneymaker for the athletic department but not all the time. Why? Mostly because of salaries and the amount of money that each program puts into their players. The sheer number of people that are on staff for most football programs is crazy. Here is Minnesota's coaching staff, Michigan's, and North Dakota State's. It's just an astronomical amount of people for 120 (at the most) players. Here is a chart for coaches' salaries as well as salaries for the rest of the staff.

Let's use Michigan as an example. They seat roughly 110,000 people in their stadium. They have seven home games every year. Their seats average $75.00 per ticket (from what I gathered, probably based off of opponent as well). With those two numbers in mind, they make $8,250,000 per game just on tickets. If we average that out to $8 million per game based off them played different opponents, that's $56 million per year on just ticket sales. Depending on who controls parking (some universities do and some athletic departments do) they could get a couple million more on top of that.

Their coaching staff makes roughly $7 million all together. The question becomes do they include the administrative staff, strength and conditioning staff, the equipment staff, the grounds crew, the athletic trainers, or the communications staff. There are a lot that go into the every day things as well as the game day staff. With just the additional staff members, I have to think that's another million. And you can't forget game day security and staff, which adds up over the course of the season. I could go on and on about the expenses that go into everything. Let's give it a $10 million number. So, $56 million now goes to $46 million quickly.

If you look at a school like Indiana, whose stadium seats roughly 52,000 and tickets cost around $50 per ticket. That's $2.6 million per home game just from ticket sales. They have six home games this year for a total of $15.6 million per season on ticket sales. A drastic difference compared to Michigan. On top of that, I couldn't imagine them selling out all of their home games, so we could probably bump that down to $13 million pretty easily. With roughly $3 million in coaches' salaries that money goes away pretty quickly.

One expense that generally isn't included in the numbers is scholarships. Almost all schools force the athletic department to pay the school for each scholarship athlete. A few have waivers but because the school generally needs the money, they make the athletic department pay for all. Each FCS school can offer 85 scholarships for their football team. Let's take a look at a school like Minnesota. About 3/4 of their scholarship athletes are from out of state. In state tuition is just over $12,000 per year. So, 20 athletes cost the football/athletic program $360,000. On top of that, there are 65 out of state athletes. Out of state tuition costs just under $20,000. That's another $1.3 million for out of state athletes. For a grand total $1.6 million that the football program costs the athletic department.

Minnesota's number looks to be extremely low. In part because of out of state tuition is so low compared to other schools. Some schools make their out of state tuition look like private college tuition. At Duke (I chose them because they are private, they could have a waiver or partial waiver as well), tuition for all students is just over $47,000. Football scholarships cost the athletic department almost $4 million per year. Every school is a little different

Here is a look at each school's revenue and expenses from 2011-12 just for football. Now, looks can be deceiving according to those numbers because of the revenue from Big Ten Network (it says it in the article). The last question I have for that is, do they include coaches' salaries? Regardless, they a spend a TON of money on their athletes. Yes, they generate a lot of money but they spend a lot too.

Now, here is something that people don't understand about bowl games and how the school generally looses money when they attend. Here is why. Imagine sending 150 people down to a tropical place for 7-10 days. Here is the list for payouts to each individual team for going to bowl games. Well that's a lot of money for anyone. Those bowl games are mostly scams and here is why. While I was at West Virginia, the football team made it to the Fiesta Bowl. The Fiesta Bowl requires each school to sell 12,000-15,000 tickets. If they don't sell their tickets then the school has to pay for them no matter what. They sold 8,000 tickets under their allotment and had to pay the Fiesta Bowl for them. $100 a ticket, that's roughly $800,000 the school has to pay. Here is more on that. The Fiesta Bowl gets those tickets back and then sells them again in order to fill the stadium. Making double the money isn't bad.

In the WVU case, they spent close to $2 million for going to Fiesta Bowl. The catch is, all the money is shared with all the other schools in the conference. The Big East had eight teams playing football and WVU had to split what they "made" with everyone else. I believe the athletic department lost money because of the revenue sharing for the conference.

Football (at the D1 level) isn't the only sport that offers full scholarships. Other sports include Men's and Women's Basketball, Women's Volleyball, Women's Tennis, and Women's Gymnastics. Men's and  Women's Basketball could definitely make money for the athletic department but not all do. I would say Volleyball could make a little bit of money but not much, in part because attendance and ticket prices aren't as high. There is no chance tennis or gymnastics makes money.

Other sports can actually make the school money. Not the athletics department, but the school. Partly because of the tuition being paid by the athletes. One example is my wife's team. There are roughly 85 athletes for their track and field program (cross country included) and only 18 scholarships. That's just over $800,000 made for the school in tuition if all the girls are from the state (not all are). Their budget is good but I don't think with everything that they get in travel, coaches' salaries, etc, that they actually lose money. If they do, they aren't losing much.

With all of that being said. At many of the big time universities football does make money for the athletic department and men's basketball probably does as well. Although, they need to sellout most of their games to make that happen. Generally speaking, football does help out other athletic teams in regards to funding but those coaches and athletes get an absurd amount of resources that those other sports can't even dream of.


Note: I could off a little on some of these numbers, but not by much. If football or basketball wins, they draw more, this more money to the department. All reports are based off of how the departments report them. That is generally different for each institution.