You Think Your Grocery Bills Are High? Look at What College Football Teams Spend!

Hey there and thank you for spending time out of your day reading the NILnomics newsletter. I’m happy to have you here.

I decided this week to dive a bit into the money schools are spending on food for their athletes. We all know football players are getting NIL deals, revenue sharing, scholarships, health insurance, and plenty of support staff to help them with anything they need. But has anyone ever thought of how much food these guys eat in the dining hall? I dive in head first in a way only NILnomics can. So today will be:

• Food - exploring how much schools are paying for food. It’s a lot!

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

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FEED ME THE ROCK

I was scrolling Twitter the other day and saw Tony Altimore’s latest post:

Also - if you’re not following Tony at this time - you should! He’s got some great charts.

Anyways, I saw this chart and besides laughing at it (the idea that the Buckeyes spend $4 million more on feeding their football team than Penn State shows how pretend college athletics accounting is) but then thought I could add another angle to it. Specifically, I could show the longitudinal trends in food expenses.

First, let’s take a look at a definition of what we’re talking about. Here’s how Line Item 39 - Student-Athlete Meals (non-travel), is defined (from Alabama’s FY2024 report):

Besides what these meals are, there’s also the benefit of having longitudinal data from 8 years of NCAA financial reports. The data behind this chart comes from all the reports I’ve scraped and which I share publicly. 

Quick Takeaways:

• Spending across FBS on food is growing well above the rate of inflation. A lot. For every conference.

• I only have Clemson and Cal for ACC schools, so it’s not really fair comparing that to the Big 10 where I have 11 or SEC where I have 4 (see notes below).

• Like all charts that we’ve made around college football, even here there’s a P4/G6 disparity. Although the American (which I have as Florida Atlantic and USF) are leading the way. They’re the only G6 school over $1 million/year. Maybe this is why USF is on a tear lately.

• I have both Pac-12 schools so that is a representative sample. There they are, at the bottom, with the MAC. Hopefully when other schools are officially joined they’ll climb back up.

Analyst’s Desk

Using the finance data scraped from all the annual financial reports, I looked for institutions I had data for all available 8 years in FBS. From there, I took an average across schools. To be clear - there were only 39 schools that met that criteria. I don’t consider this a perfect representation of what’s happening at each conference, but I do think the trendline and pattern the data shows indicates the reality of food expenses.

I also added an inflation adjustment line to show how these costs are expanding well beyond any inflation concerns that could be raised. I’ll note that this is using forward designed conference alignment.

 🔉 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:

• News & Brews - new episode dropped, covering the use of AI in college sports finance. I’m a bit offended they mentioned applying Python in the athletics space and not R, but otherwise some great ideas here.

Final Thoughts

Thanks again for reading this week’s NILnomics.

What’s great about this week’s analysis is how replicable it is for a million different possibilities. Maybe I look at how much travel expenses have gone up in men’s ice hockey. Or the biggest percentage increase in spending in equestrian. Heck, maybe I should do this food analysis not by conference but by state! There are plenty of options. If you’re reading this and have a specific interest, please drop me a line. I’d be glad to dive in and share it with the community.

Also, this week’s newsletter was a bit shorter to give me more time to finish up my first explainer article, which you’ll see in your inbox on Wednesday. I hope you’ll like this one.

Until next time,

Greg Chick, PhD

Data Analyst

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⌨️ R code is available at my GitHub here.