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FBS Administrative Size, Visualized

A look at the athletics staff labor market

November 10, 2025

Good morning, and thanks for spending time reading through this week’s issue of NILnomics. This week I’m going to dive into what the administration in FBS institutions looks like when aggregated.

  • We’ve hit 200! - opportunity to have your questions answered live and here in the newsletter

  • Administrative State - examining just how big FBS athletic departments have gotten

Pour a drink. Get comfortable. Let’s get into it.

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Celebrating 200 Subscribers!

I started NILnomics back in April with a simple idea: to dig into the data behind college sports finances using modern analytics and to share what I found through clear visuals and thoughtful analysis.

I had no budget. No connections. No experience. And honestly, no idea what it would take to make this work. But over time, I’ve built a growing community of curious, engaged readers who have supported and shared my work. It’s been a slow build—not an overnight success—and I’ve loved every step of it. My goal has always been the same: to gather, analyze, and share the data that helps make sense of the financial side of college athletics.

So, thank you. To everyone who’s subscribed, emailed, liked, retweeted, or interacted with NILnomics over the past seven months—your support means a lot. I feel that momentum every time I sit down to write, and it’s what keeps me excited to keep going. I hope NILnomics continues to bring you value and insights that help you better understand this space.

As a small thank-you, I’ll be hosting a live stream next Tuesday at 9 PM EST to answer your questions—anything from how I gather data to what my analytics workflow looks like, to which school is the slowest to respond to a public records request. You can email me your questions ahead of time or drop them live in the chat. I’ll post the full transcript here afterward, too.

 

Administrative Size 

I was listening to an interview with Arizona Athletics Director Desireé Reed-Francois when something caught my attention—she mentioned that Arizona had cut 17 positions in its athletic department.

That stood out to me. Amid all the changes happening in college sports, cutting staff is one of the more straightforward ways schools can balance budgets and prepare for a future where they’ll need to pay student-athletes directly. But it’s not something you often hear about publicly. It made me wonder: How big are these athletic department staffs to begin with?

Surprisingly, there’s very little reliable data out there. The NCAA’s MFRS and the Department of Education’s EADA reports include some staffing information, but I haven’t yet tried to scrape or standardize that data—and several readers have told me that what’s reported there can be shaky at best.

So I decided to take a different approach. Instead of relying on reported data, I went straight to the source: athletic department websites. I scraped every FBS school’s online staff directory to build a dataset of administrative positions across the country.

That’s a lot of data—and cleaning it was no small task—but now that it’s ready, we can start to explore what athletic department staffing really looks like at scale.

In this issue, I’m sharing the first round of results: an overview of the administrative size of each FBS athletic department. In future issues, I’ll break the data down further—by sport, and even by sub-units like communications, marketing, accounting, and operations.

To my knowledge, this is the first public, industry-wide look at athletic department staffing. And as always, the underlying dataset is publicly available—though I’ve removed individual names, emails, and phone numbers to respect privacy, keeping only job titles, departments, and institutions.

Without further ado, here’s the analysis:

Quick Takeaways:

  • The obvious inference from this chart is that if you want to be a (potentially back-to-back) CFP Champion you need to balloon your staff count, as Ohio State is the runaway #1 with 185 more staff than the nearest school (Wisconsin?).

  • The inter-conference rankings are fascinating - would anyone have guessed Michigan and Oregon as bottom of the conference in staff count?

  • At least if Louisiana Monroe drops down to FCS (or lower?) they won’t have much staff to cut.

  • Delaware just joined FBS and already they’re #2 in staff size in Conference USA. Impressive.

  • I can’t help but notice the top 5 schools in the SEC are only separated by 34 staff members. That’s the tightest coupling I see among the top of any conference.

  • That the MAC’s newest member, UMass, has the most staff (and considering their current season) is just… interesting.

 

Analyst’s Desk

As mentioned above, this data came from FBS institution’s athletic department staff directory websites. I’ve got the data here for anyone who wants to analyze themselves.

🔉 What I’m Listening To 🔉 

I’m always on the lookout for anyone breaking down college sports and especially the business side of the industry. Here’s this week’s best listens:

  • NIL Clubhouse - the great Syracuse MBB HC Jim Boeheim joins the pod and gives an honest look at what the state of college athletics has become. It’s refreshing to hear a coach (albeit retired) speak so frankly.

  • JohnWallStreet - I’ll call out the episode again that inspired this issue, an interview with Arizona AD Desireé Reed-Francois. Great insights here on what it’s like making a financial transformation in a short amount of time at the FBS level.

Final Thoughts

Thanks for reading this week’s issue.

Scraping all these websites and cleaning the data took alot of work! I can’t wait to dive deeper into the data to get even more insights into just how big some of these athletic departments are. Keep an eye out!

If you enjoyed this week’s issue, let me know by email (click reply!). Thanks again for your time. Now finish your beverage 😀 

Until next time,

Greg Chick, PhD

Data Analyst

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NILnomics is an independent data-driven newsletter uncovering the real numbers behind college sports finances with sharp insights, clear visuals, and exclusive datasets. Please send any thoughts, questions, or feedback to me at [email protected] and please follow me on X @NILnomics. Don’t forget all our data is available on Kaggle, code on GitHub, and FOIA documents on GoogleDrive. See you next week!

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