The Protect College Sports Act should ban golf cart rentals

Howdy, and welcome to your Thursday FOIAball.

Wanna know something wild? I haven’t written a story that involved a FOIA request in three weeks! Crazy. I mean, it’s the name of the whole darn site. So it’s time to put the FOIA back in FOIAball.

Of course it’s about something dumb and wasteful. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’ll be honest. Because FOIAball is not a politics blog, I haven’t been following the back-and-forth in the Senate over the Protect College Sports Act. 

Far as I can tell, it passed some sort of practice vote, which means it is now allowed to be put up for a real vote.

But before that happens, everyone gets to step up and suggest ways in which the bill should be totally different. 

A bunch of cadavers playing Calvinball, if you ask me.

None of these amendments, like Cory Booker’s proposed cap on coaching salaries, have any potential of passing. This interregnum is just there for some good ol’ fashioned grandstanding. And I want in! Here’s my proposed amendment. One that will actually save schools money.

The PCSA should ban golf cart rentals. 

In the days leading up to the vote before the vote, Sen. Maria Cantwell shared what seemed like a slam-dunk argument: college sports budgets are utterly out of whack. 

Cantwell found that 94% of Division I schools spend more money than they generate, an entire industry that’s completely underwater. 

It included a string of jarring statistics: "From 2005-2023, schools saw increases of 322% in recruiting costs, nearly 300% in sports equipment, around 250% in both medical and game day expenses … Coaching salaries increased a whopping 370% over the same time period.”

Hot dang! It’s a shame those carefully researched figures didn’t survive more than nine minutes of casual scrutiny. 

As noted by Stewart Mandel in The Athletic, Matt Brown in Extra Points, and Dan Murphy in ESPN, nothing in the bill addresses those runaway expenditures. The only spending control in the entire bill is student-athlete compensation, which didn’t exist during the time frame Cantwell cited. There, the bill lets schools spend more. 

But my proposal actually attacks profligate spending by schools. With a simple fix. I call it walking. 

Last October, I wrote about the absurd costs of recruiting visits. And Cantwell is right: hosting top-tier players has gotten pricey, what with the understandable need to rent out water parks and lakeside honky-tonks. 

But that story didn’t capture every expense.

When football programs host recruits, they rent golf carts. Whether it's to drive players from a banquet at the stadium to a tour of the weight room, or to shuffle staff around so everything goes smoothly, idk. But they need fleets of golf carts. 

From October 2025 to April 2026, UCLA rented golf carts on 20 different occasions, eighteen of which were marked specifically as “recruiting visits.” Ten were rented across football weekends in the fall. Another ten were rented out for a month at a time in the spring. 

The school even included their mileage totals from the rentals in the release to me. They probably shouldn’t have! During the fall, each cart drove an average of 5.5 miles over five days. That is a mile a day! To save staffers, recruits, and/or coaches the horrors of 15 minutes of strolling in the beautiful late fall and early spring Los Angeles weather, UCLA spent $95,000. 

The Bruins weren’t a total outlier. At Clemson, the Tigers spent $74,000 across ten recruiting weekends, plus another $8,500 to purchase a separate cart. 

I should take a second to explain what I requested. I asked for all expenses during the most recent fiscal year that football teams had for golf carts (purchases, rentals, maintenance, etc.). Most of what I got was rentals around recruiting weekends. But not all. Some sent me expenses for game day operations, too. Others just gave me a lump sum.

With that in mind, here are some of our nation’s other biggest spenders on golf carts:

I put the totals for every school I got in a spreadsheet for you. (Reminder: not every school responds to every request).

I want to flag two universities. First, UNC. They spent $25,500 renting ‘cruitin’ carts. They also rented a “2025 Club Car Carryall vehicle for use by football Strength & Conditioning staff during Training Camp.”

The reason? The carts they purchased were on back order. 

So the Tar Heels spent $14,469 to rent golf carts until their real golf carts were ready to go. 

And, I’m sorry, but you are a strength coach. If your golf cart isn’t delivered to your doorstep on time, you don’t demand a backup. That is coddled Gen Z nonsense. How can you tell your boys to hit an extra rep when you can’t take an extra step? I mean, honestly, why are we even trying to save this sport?

The second is Nebraska. Their tab was $15,000. The Huskers spent $9,800 on rentals, and an additional $4,800 on repairs for existing carts. Reasonable. So why am I talking about them? 

Because I want to flag an additional $372. That is not what has bankrupted college football. But in a way, it is.

What I’ve realized in covering this sport’s finances is that there doesn’t appear to be any ability for schools to say “No.” The logic seems to be that if one program is doing something, you are suddenly risking LOSING FOOTBALL GAMES if you don’t spend on the same nonsense. So you get an arms race across a thousand different budget items.  

It’s how you get a video of Matt Rhule explaining that one of the most important elements in recruiting is having your golf carts wrapped with cool, school-specific graphics. 

“If you want to be a great coach, you need great players,” Rhule says. “And recruiting is the name of the game. When you have facilities like this, it’s easy to recruit players.” 

Let’s pause and note that, in the video, Rhule is pointing to Nebraska’s Osborne Legacy Complex, a new football facility that cost $165 million to build. That’s a soaring cost that isn’t addressed by the PCSA. And that, according to Rhule, is not enough to compete. 

“But part of that is showing them on campus. And you need great vehicles like this, that sell the brand everywhere you go. What Revolution Wraps has done to our recruiting fleet, you can see right here; you know who is coming through the house,” Rhule says, pointing to his name emblazoned on the cart. “It’s a game changer.”

No, it’s not. It is another unnecessary expense that schools keep taking on because no one is willing to rein in their spending.

The PCSA isn’t going to fix that. Unless they adopt my amendment.

I’ll see you next week!

Matt Rhule via Revolution Wraps/TikTok