Hello and welcome to Thursday, or—as it’s now known—FOIAball day.
As I said yesterday, today’s newsletter is for paid subscribers. What’s in it? How about a list of every single donation a university that bought its way into the playoff got this year? Or the agreements for endowed head coaching positions that we fought to get.
We’re talking money and influence today. Which is a good hook to remind you all that I need your money. So I can have influence.
The good kind, that is.
How to get your name on a head coaching position
What I really love about FOIA just so happens to be what is also making the world feel so bleak right now.
This country’s richest and most powerful people have corrupted our public institutions for their own personal gain. They act with utter impunity, knowing we have little recourse.
(I have not been spending most of my waking time reading the Epstein files, by the way. Why would you even think that?)
It’s a good time to remember that these places are only imbued with the power we grant them. They are answerable to you, regardless of how much money they rake in or how powerful their donor class is.
I firmly believe in the power of public records to ensure the people are able to exercise oversight. It doesn’t have to be unearthing some giant conspiracy; it's pulling back the layers, bit by bit, to show what’s really behind the facade.
Schools don’t love handing out who their donors are. They believe that data should be secret. Sadly, state legislatures have agreed.
A recent change to North Carolina law allows public universities to redact information surrounding even potential donors, a clause that—depending on how schools want to enforce it—could constitute the entire world.
That lack of transparency is what allows these places to run amok.
This week, on Bluesky, a user asked Extra Points’ Matt Brown about what recourse schools had for megadonors whose names were plastered across buildings and who appeared in the Epstein files.
“Wonder if @mattbrown.bsky.social would know what moral clauses these types of contracts have, if any. Ex: questionable ethics aside, could UCLA remove Wass's name from the football complex, but still keep the money or does it get clawed back somehow?”
The answer is not really. Schools don’t love to share agreements with big donors. But FOIAball obtained the deals for endowed coaching positions at Cal-Berkeley, Michigan State, UVA, Illinois, and Bowling Green.
None of those agreements contains any outs in them.
Which makes sense. If someone is about to fork over a ton of money, a school isn’t going to insert a clause that says they reserve the right to strip away the honorific. But by knowing they don’t exist, we can start demanding them.
Because if I know one thing, it’s that any time a name goes up on something, there’s often a reason lurking somewhere for why it should be taken down.
I’m gonna share those agreements below, but first I want to talk a little bit more about the secrecy of college donations and what I’ve uncovered.
You can’t just ask for a list that people gave to a school. So I’ve been trying to backdoor my way in.
One method I’ve used to assess the scope of donations is priority points. A 2018 change to the tax code removed schools' ability to provide free tickets. They invented a loophole. Donations could be assigned points, and those points could then be used to distribute tickets.
I have some schools’ entire legal analysis about how to make this work. That is for a later post, because the methods used to convert dollars to points are Byzantine, and I die every time I start to do the math.
But a fun thing happened while compiling those. Texas Tech said those figures could be used to ID potential donors, so they wouldn’t share it.
Instead, they asked if I wanted an anonymized list of every donation the school got from Jan. 1, 2025 to Aug. 31, 2025. You bet!
The big numbers we see thrown around can be hard to contextualize. I think this video really shows the full scope of how much money schools bring in.
That is $35 million spread out over 27,000 individual donations. The average gift is $1,300. But that is skewed by bigger donations at the top. The median is a more pedestrian $250.
There are 212 days in that seven-month stretch. Meaning Texas Tech took in 129 donations every single day, clearing almost $170,000 every 24 hours.
Insane.
Now let’s talk about the big boys. People with enough money to put their name somewhere.
As you know, Les Wexner paid $5 million in 2007 to get his name on Ohio State’s football building. It seems the gift contract was never released, not until the school conducted an independent review of its ties to Jeffrey Epstein twelve years later.
This summer, FOIAball went looking to see where else rich folks put their names and found a topic way more fun than buildings. People
For a sum, in press releases and on YouTube, a school will append an honorific in front of their head coach’s name, letting the world know you paid for the person steering your 7-6 season.
The Golden Bears just hired Tosh Lupoi to be their Travers Family Football Coach. Attaching your name to Jeff Tedford’s old chair does not come cheap. The naming rights cost $7.5 million, part of a larger $10 million donation by the Travers family.
That money, the deal says, “will form a bedrock for excellence in Cal Football … used to provide unrestricted support for the highest priorities for Cal Football to ensure a world class program.”
If unrestricted support sounds a bit like a slush fund, these endowed positions kind of are. From Berkeley, we got the numbers on what the endowment returned, and a spreadsheet of where some of the money went.
Last season, the donation paid $81,000 of then-offensive coordinator Nick Rolovich’s salary. Another $33,000 went to offset the cost of a recruiting director. Because it is invested as part of the school’s overall endowment, it still made $50,000 on top of disbursements.
To have Michigan State’s defensive coordinator named after you costs a lot less, just a million bucks for a deal that appears to extend into perpetuity.
The Peter Secchia Family Defensive Coordinator was established in December 2014, back when the school had the fourth-highest-paid defensive coordinator in the land. Can you name him?
That would be Pat Narduzzi. He left weeks later for Pitt. Since then, the money paid for the likes of Mike Tressel and Scottie Hazelton.
In 1998, Douglas and Linda Mills contributed $1.5 million to Illinois to have their names on a head coach endowment.
The school initially refused to give this agreement to FOIAball, calling it a “clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” We appealed to the state attorney general and won. Illinois still redacted parts of it, so we can’t officially say if there’s a morality clause. But probably not.
Last year, though, the Illini used $53,000 from the endowment to buy a cryo chamber.
At UVA, the Fralin Family Head Football Coach came after a gift of $5 million, with the school kicking in an additional $2.5 million into the endowment.
Which gives us the tongue-twister Fralin Family Head Football Coach Tony Franklin.
Just last year, Bowling Green alumnus Mike Wilcox paid $1.5 million to get his and his wife’s name in front of Eddie George’s title.
That donation includes a clause about the nebulous ways the money can be used, which… sounds pretty slushy.
“Permissible expenditures include, but are not limited to, salary enhancement, as well as elements that benefit the football team.”
These honorifics aren’t just some exercise in vanity. Well, they are that. But they are new ways schools can find to bring in bigger and bigger donors. And for these donors, it’s a way to exert more influence over a public institution, one that exists for the good of the people.
Are these deals shocking? No, some of the figures were made public. But do these wealthy boosters want to see their names in a press release and then keep the mechanics and details hidden? Yes.
And it is on us to remember they have no right to.
Thank you for subscribing to FOIAball. And if you signed up today to read this, thank you doubly. It’s your support that lets us do all this good work.
We’ll see you next week.
