FBS Football Staff Size - Visualized

Hello there and thank you for taking time out of your day to read NILnomics. I’m going to give you some data you won’t see anywhere else and I think you’ll find it interesting.

Last week I dove into the results of me scraping the staff directory for each FBS institution’s athletic department. That gave a broad overview of just how inflated some administrations have become (looking at you, Ohio State). But several readers reached out to me that given schools offer differing sports, it’s not an exact apples-to-apples comparison. I think that’s fair! So this week, I’m going to start diving deeper into the data that I scraped to help understand the size and scope of the college athletics administrative state by focusing just on football. This issue will feature:

• 200 Subscribers Q&A - celebrating another milestone

• Football staff - just how many people are employed in FBS football?

• Podcast roundup - the latest podcasts in the college athletics business space

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

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200 Subscriber Q&A

I had my 200 Subscriber Q&A last week, celebrating the milestone by answering reader submitted questions. I actually ended up working on a quick project submitted by a reader - how much does UCLA make per seat in football? It was fun. The link is below if you want to watch the recording. Thanks again for all the subscribers of this newsletter - you keep me going!

Football Departments

It turns out that scraping all FBS athletic department staff directory webpages and amassing a list of 68k people, their job titles, and their department gives you even more work than you would think. I’ve been spending all my time the last two weeks cleaning the data. Last week I detailed a raw headcount of staff across FBS institutions, which drew some great feedback from readers. Specifically, people were asking me for sport-specific disaggregations or some type of adjustment to the raw headcount that accounted for the number of sports offered at each school.

To dive deeper into the data this week, I’m focusing solely on who each school lists as their football specific staff. Given we all understand what football is and that it’s the common denominator amongst FBS schools, it’s a fair way to compare across institutions. There are just two concerns with the data - accuracy and organization.

In regard to accuracy, it’s hard to tell just how accurate the data is on these staff directory websites. You can imagine these are webpages updated annually by some grad assistant or worse. However, I noticed when looking at UCLA and Penn State that their head coach was vacant and all had an Interim listed while Virginia Tech already has James Franklin listed as Head Coach. That tells me that someone is at least maintaining these websites during the season. It’s hard to ensure the accuracy of every individual staff member, but these and the many other head coaching vacancies shows there’s some effort by schools to maintain the accuracy of these webpages.

The second issue is organization. Take a look at Virginia Tech’s staff directory. They have someone with the job title of “Director, Equipment Services” which then lists out several sports that this person must work for. They are listed under a sub-section of the directory for Equipment. Should this and other individuals be moved out of the ‘Equipment’ section and instead moved into the section on the sport they are most responsible for? I only ask because my analysis focuses on the sub-section that staff member is listed under. Schools that break out staff from individual (and in particular, football) sports into different sub-sections would show up with less staff in this analysis. It can make sense to do it this way when one staff member is listed as responsible for many teams, but sometimes you get one person dedicated to one sport but still not listed under that specific sport’s sub-section. It’s a bit messy!

Anyways, onto the chart!

Quick Takeaways:

• No one, and I mean no one, had Rutgers as #1 on this chart. I had to go back to the website and count it up manually myself. Yes - 101 staff are listed as working for Rutgers’ current 5-5 team. Do with that as you will.

• Ohio State, with the largest athletics department in the country, only has the 11th largest football staff. Hmmm.

• I did check Sam Houston State and Arizona State - those numbers are correct. Arizona State made the CFP last year. With 14 football designated staff members. While Ohio State had 66. That’s incredible.

• Alot of chatter this week about G6 teams not deserving a spot in the CFB. It should be acknowledged that some of those G6 schools have bigger football staffs than P4 schools. Noteworthy.

• I was surprised to see Clemson at #1 in the ACC and not having Florida State/Miami in the #2/#3 spots. Interesting.

• The # of schools with 70+ staff: SEC (5), B1G (3), ACC (1). It just means more.

• The # of schools with under 30 staff: MAC (8), SBC (7), Conference USA (7), Mountain West (6), Big 12 (1)

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:

• Higher Ed Athletics - this discussion with Kent State’s VP & University Secretary Dr. Char Reed gives an interesting peak into the behind the scenes machinations of modern athletic departments. If you’re in the field, worth hearing how the highest levels operate.

• Highway to NIL - the attorneys at Troutman Pepper Locke breakdown the economics of college football in the post-House settlement world and how media rights deals, at the institutional and conference level, will need to change.

• NIL Clubhouse - the hosts speak with attorney Daniel Greene who gives an overview of the legal challenges that exist in the current college athletics landscape as well as other updates on the NIL space.

• JohnWallStreet - an interesting interview with the American Commissioner Tim Pernetti. He gives great insight into just how these FBS conference commissioners think and where they see the future going.

• Sportswise - Gabe gets a chance to talk with Cody Campbell, Texas Tech Board Member/former football, billionaire, and advocate for the SAFE Act. Arguably the most influential person in college athletics. This was a great talk - Gabe really pushed Cody on some of his talking points. Very interesting chat.

• Trustees and Presidents - this timely episode speaks with the Armand Alacbay, VP at the American COuncil for Trustees and Alumni. They chat about the B1G Ten’s revolt by Michigan/USC and the role the Board of Trustees plays in higher education. If you don’t know anything about the topic, worth listening to.

Final Thoughts

Thanks for reading this week’s issue.

It took a lot of time to scrape all the webpages of these schools, but I believe it’s created one of the most valuable datasets in college athletics. I’m going to be spending many of the next few issues diving deeper into the data. I’ve gotten some great feedback already - if you have anything you want me to look into, let me know. There is plenty of territory to cover with this data, so stay tuned for more analysis next week.

Thanks again for your time. Now finish your beverage 😀 

Until next time,

Greg Chick, PhD

Data Analyst

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