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Operating Budgets. All of Them.
Giving away every school/team's revenue/expenses for the past seven years
Greg Chick
July 14, 2025
Happy Monday and thank you for spending your Monday morning with me. I appreciate you taking the time to read NILnomics. Today’s issue is covering:
Detailed Team Budgets - I have scraped the annual financial reports for individual team budget data
Social Media - digging further into the social media data I shared a few weeks back
College hockey - everyone is talking about transportation these days. Let me join in.
Pour a drink. Get comfortable. Let’s get into it.
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Operating Budgets, Revenue/Expense Figures… for EVERYONE 🤯
Weeks ago I shared that I had scraped all the annual financial reports from athletic departments to get team specific data points. I don’t think it went as noticed as I expected. Well, let me try to fix that.
I have released a spreadsheet (labeled Operating Budgets.xlsx) that has the operating budgets, aka the revenue/expenses, of each team, at each school, from FY2017 - FY2024. Please use it!
While you may see revenue/expenses published widely about many of these schools, I have yet to see it reported at the individual sport level. Meaning, if you wanted to know specifically how much Michigan’s football team spends on equipment, now you can find out. While the football/basketball data is included, the dataset covers every sport at every school (that I have reports for).
In the spirit of showing the breadth of the dataset, here’s the FY2024 operating budgets for the beach volleyball teams. Because… why not?
Quick Takeaways:
I have no context for this data. I’m just trying to show that I have it.
Though Nebraska is known as a volleyball powerhouse, I’m surprised to see it at the bottom here for beach volleyball.
Three schools from Florida show up, with 2 from both California, Texas, and Louisiana.
Analyst’s Desk
As mentioned, I scraped the MFRS reports and drilled down in the data set to FY2024, beach volleyball, and overall operating budget (aka Expenses).
When I shared the overall team followers across social media three weeks ago, that overall count obfuscates some interesting nuance. It turns out these teams are gaining followers at different levels across individual social media platforms, which I think is fascinating.
To dig into this some more, I took the top school from each FBS conference and disaggregated their followers from across social media platforms. Here’s a look at where each school is gaining the most traction:
Quick Takeaways:
There’s so much interest here. While Facebook is the top platform for the biggest programs (Ohio State, Alabama), Twitter has the top spot for lots of schools (Clemson, Memphis, Liberty, and Ohio).
I love that Coach Prime has pushed Colorado to the top of the Big 12 in social media following and that you can see they’re the only school where Instagram is the top platform. What’s he doing on Instagram that’s generating so much buzz?
Appalachian State sits alone with Tik Tok being their top platform. Wonder what type of content they’re putting out 🤔
Analyst’s Desk
I took the overall count generated three weeks ago and took the top institution in each conference. From there, I just disaggregated their overall followers by social media platform.
🏒 College Hockey Corner 🏒
There was a great article that came out this week about how college ice hockey is getting professionalized at an alarming rate due to the new changes in CHL players retaining their college eligibility. Several parts of the article tickled my fancy. First, the talk about arena sizes (which I’ve talked about before). Then he steered right into my wheelhouse - travel expenses. While he noted North Dakota using chartered flights for several of its away games, he alluded to many top teams mirroring the practice. It got me thinking - just how many teams are spending top dollar on travel for their ice hockey team?
Quick Takeaways:
North Dakota certainly spends alot on travel, but it’s still only #3 and under $1 million.
The MAC fan in me is a bit crushed to see it’s newest member (UMass) higher than the other schools.
Do we think this phenom McKenna looked at this data before he picked Penn State over Michigan State?
Analyst’s Desk
Using team specific data I scraped from school’s annual FRS reports (which you can download for free!) I filtered down to FY 2024, Ice Hockey, and Travel Expenses. Yes, I don’t have every public school’s data. Thank you.
📖 What I’m Reading/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:
News & Brews - absolutely one of the most useful podcasts I’ve heard in awhile. If you want to know the new rules around the data that powered this newsletter, please listen.
Sportswise - another great and timely episode, this time focused on olympic sports in a post-House world.
Final Thoughts
Thanks for reading this week’s issue.
I’m very happy to be using the granular data that I worked really hard to scrape from those MFRS reports. I hope you can make use of the operating budget data.
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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