Ranking football spending among all Divison I schools and conferences

It’s raining money on football: in 2023, $2.7 BILLION spent on FBS publics' football, $826 million to coaches,? and a $25 million gap in median spending between the Haves and Have Nots.?

The 2022-2023 fiscal year in college sports proved to be a boon for college football and college football coaches, with the median of FBS spending on football per public institution $22.5 million, $7.5 million for its 11 paid football coaches, and approximately one-third (33.1%) of all expenses for football were paid to coaches, according to data provided by the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database.

There is a clear dichotomy in spending for the Haves (Power 5) and Have Nots (Group of 5).? The median of Power 5 spending on football per public institution was $37.1 million, $11.6 million for all its football coaches (an average of $1.05 million per coach), or 31.2% of all expenses for football paid to coaches.? The median of Group of 5 spending on football per public institution was $11.6 million, $3.1 million for all its football coaches (an average of $280K per coach), or 25.6% of all expenses for football paid to coaches.? IN OTHER WORDS, the median amount in 2023 paid in the Power 5 for football coaches was the same as the median total amount of spending for all football expenses for the Group of 5.? In 2023, there was a $25 million gap in total football spending between the Power Five and Group of Five medians.

Over a ten-year period (2014-2023), the median of FBS public institutions (both Power 5 and Group of 5) has seen an increase of over 50% in spending on football in the past 10 years (see below):

Source: Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database, https://knightnewhousedata.org/reports/5d058011

A few items of interest:?

• In 2023, $2.7 BILLION was spent on football in FBS public institutions; with $826 million (30.4%) to all the paid football coaches.?
• The University of Cincinnati (#50) and the University of Central Florida (#53) are the only two non-Power 5 public institutions to spend more money than at least one of the 54 Power 5 institutions in this database.?
• For most athletics conferences, paying football coaches made up between 1/4 and 1/3 of the entire amount of football spending.
• You can se the impact of the Pacific-12 demise (particularly with respect to its impact on the College Football Playoff) through how much it paid its coaches: (all data are for public institutions only) a median of $8.9 million compared to the median of $13.9 million for the SEC and $13.2 million for the Big Ten. It’s tough to be competitive in football when the spending on coaches is $3.5 to $4 million less than the top of the heap: that’s 45% less in the Pac-12 than the SEC, and 39% less than the Big Ten.

Bottom line, the spending continues to increase — and the big-time spending is not going back to the labor, a.k.a. the college football player (other than in the form of a scholarship).? Since athletics departments are non-profit, and the marketplace for college football is uber-competitive, the money raised ($10.6 billion in FBS in 2023) has to go somewhere, and it is spent primarily back into the football enterprise with a good chunk to coaches. ?

To see where your institution fits, and to make comparisons by athletics conference, see below. (Note: several institutions did not have data available, listed at the bottom, as well as military academies and some Pennsylvania schools).