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This is ostensibly a newsletter about college football, but it’s much more than that. I like to think this site (cringe alert) uses sports to shine a light on society. I report on billionaires, the surveillance state, big data, and labor rights. I also write a lot of extremely stupid things. Whatever I’m covering, though, I try to have as much fun as possible. Because I’ve realized that all the people and companies making our lives miserable these days really hate it when you’re having a blast.
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As for today’s newsletter, we’re comparing the monthly expenses for two college football programs, one super rich, one not so much.
Sure, it’s about how much they spend on football. But it’s also about our current schism between haves and have-nots, as society’s richest use their vast resources to try and insulate themselves from any deleterious outcomes (building bunkers in Hawaii, forming super leagues, etc.).
Onward to the blog.
Rich school, poor school
College football is beset by a million problems right now. But the contours of every issue are shaped by one overarching concern. Money. Schools want it, need it, and they aren’t keen on letting anyone else have it. Money is why the sport is so stratified, split between those who can spend as much as possible and those who cannot.
It’s why the biggest conferences might break away, leaving the other half behind. Like a lot of super-wealthy people, those who’ve made it to the top are only concerned with kicking the ladder out from under them. Not just so no one else can climb up, but so they can convince themselves there isn’t a way they’ll ever go back down.
Awful, ain’t it?
You probably know about the giant disparities in college athletics budgets. At the top of the spectrum, schools like Ohio State and Texas spend nearly a quarter-billion a year. Those at the bottom are lucky to spend ten times less than that.
But I find big numbers are really terrible at highlighting the vast chasms between these two kinds of schools. I think specific, tangible comparisons are much more illuminating. To get those, I’ve been collecting monthly expenses from lots of different programs. I can’t wait to share them all.
But today, we’re gonna look at a big P4 school and a small G6 school, teams that just so happened to play each other last season.
This March, our P4 school’s biggest expense was a block of hotel rooms during training camp last season. Whether they put up players or staff or both there, I can’t say. But for a two-week stay, the school spent $172,000.
The total March monthly expenses for our G6 team? $219,000.
That’s the difference.
I’m not naming these schools because I think these examples work better if they aren’t pegged to actual programs. It could be yours I’m talking about!
As a reminder, every school uses its own unique accounting system. Bills are spread out, filed elsewhere, and I’m not a CPA. So the amounts I’m flagging aren’t necessarily definitive. But they are instructive.
Our P4 team is a powerhouse. It will likely be ranked in the Top Ten to start the season. It won’t be a lock to make the playoff, but it will be some folks’ national champion pick. Our G6 school isn’t a total scrub. They have an impressive stretch of consecutive bowl appearances, winning most of them. But they haven’t cracked the AP Top 25 in over a decade.
Perhaps because of some financial constraints. Like spending on travel. In the offseason, coaches are expected to circumnavigate the continent, identifying and wooing recruits.
In March, our G6 team dropped $12,000 on travel, a total that encompasses flights, gas, hotels, rental cars, parking, and food on the road.
Our P4 school spent almost the same amount on travel in March, too. A form of travel, that is: $11,000 on golf carts. One school’s budget for crisscrossing the country was another’s cost to traverse its parking lot.
To help sway recruits, our G6 school had another big expense: $3,200 on a lunch. Meanwhile, our P4 school bought $3,100 worth of apparel, just for student employees to wear in front of recruits.
Like … lol.
Other comparisons, when you see them side by side, are equally laughable. Over the course of a month, our G6 school spent $56,000 on athlete dining and other meals and snacks.
Our P4 school was still reconciling bills from its bowl game, but it spent nearly as much, $44,000, on meals there. Not for the football team, though. That was just three days of feeding its marching band.
The student-athlete housing tab for our G6 school in March was $9,500. Which is $1,000 less than our P4 school’s cost to house its players. For the nine-day gap between dorms closing and its bowl game.
Nearly everything is on that aforementioned 10x scale. Or more. For rental cars, it was $4,300 to $419. Shopping on Amazon, $6,500 to $160.
All told, the monthly spend for our P4 school was $1.3 million, compared to $219,000 for our G6 program. Except that… it’s bigger than that. The G6 expenses flagged $90,000 in financial aid, which wasn’t on the big program’s ledger. Remove that and the bigger school spends … ten times as much.
Neither of these reports included staff salaries, but you can assume it’s the same. Actually, you don’t have to. I have that from elsewhere. At another P4 school, also a prominent national title contender, their monthly football payroll was $1.5 million.
A decent G6 team in their state spent $326,000.
It’s pretty jarring. But then again, the rich are learning that all that money can’t insulate them entirely. When our G6 team came to town, they almost eked out a victory, down by a score in the game’s waning seconds.
They lost, but those millions didn’t guarantee our big school the kind of security they wished it did.
Guess what? You may not have realized, but you got two free newsletters this week! There wasn’t a paywall on either.
Next week, we’ll go back to our usual one free, one paid routine. So upgrade now. I am, sadly, no different than these schools. I need money to survive.
Country Mouse, City Mouse via AbeBooks
