Is your team practicing hotel?

Howdy, folks. Welcome to your second FOIAball of the week. As always, our Thursday newsletters are free for everyone to read.

So, please, enjoy! This one’s on the house! 

I think we can all agree that kids today are SOFT, what with their water bottles and their sunscreen. They lack grit.

Back in my day, things were different. It was barely seventy years ago that Bear Bryant set the gold standard for instilling toughness in our youth, subjecting his players to ten absolutely brutal days of training camp during an oppressive heat wave. 

It became the stuff of college football lore. The Junction Boys didn’t worry about BPAs in their drinking water. Mostly because they weren’t allowed to have any.

But that’s not the case in 2026. During training camps now, teams put football players up in three-star hotels with air conditioning and fresh sheets. 

Coddled.

I like to imagine Bryant glowering down from on high, cursing as a player nestles his head into a memory foam pillow after his coach moved practice indoors because of the threat of lightning.

“Bear,” I’d say, tossing my arm around his astral projection, a spectral houndstooth fedora shimmering in the late summer haze, “didn’t your Junction Boys go 1-9? Didn’t they give up 44 points to Texas Tech? Did scoreboards go that high in 1954?”

Look, it is much better to treat your players well. They deserve it. But at a time when pretty much every university is concerned about the spiraling costs of athletics, a ten-day, six-figure staycation at a local hotel is on the books at plenty of programs. 

And that’s not even the truly excessive budget item I found when I started looking into all this.  

A couple months ago, I stumbled across an expense that caught my eye. So much so that I’ve already mentioned it in two stories. I’m sorry about that. This will be the last time it comes up. It was the $170,000 LSU spent on a hotel for players and staff for training camp last season. 

I just always assumed that players stayed in dorms for training camp. Like, that’s why those things exist. And it wasn’t like LSU went somewhere exotic to escape the harsh spotlight of Baton Rouge. They stayed a mile from their football complex. I’d be willing to bet they spent another ten grand on buses going back and forth.  

It just feels unnecessary. But one thing I’ve learned is that if one school is doing something, others are, too. So I requested invoices for hotel stays from programs specifically tied to training camp last year. 

I found some high costs. Even better, I found a new, extreme control-freak coach behavior that cost one school so much. 

At the University of Iowa last year, the Hawkeyes spent $136,000 on hotel rooms and another $95,000 on food for their training camp stay. That adds up to almost a quarter-million dollars. 

I didn’t get invoices from the school, just those sum totals. But two hours down the road, Iowa State also sprang for training camp accommodations. And they gave me way more details. 

The Cyclones stayed in the on-campus hotel from July 22 to Aug. 2. Rooms were about $120 a night. It ran them $111,000, plus like another ten grand in snacks.  

Why was their total so much less? 

It wasn’t. 

Five days later, on Aug. 7, the entire team went back to the same hotel for one night. To practice. To practice staying at the hotel. 

The invoices are all tagged “Mock Pre-Game 2025.” 

They practiced eating dinner the night before. They practiced sleeping in their beds. They practiced waking up and eating breakfast. They practiced pre-game lunch. They even did a practice snack. 

I’m not making this up; they did a whole dry run. It cost $116,000. I’m not making that number up, either. That’s six gd figures. Six figures a school will sign off on so a coach doesn’t have to worry if his players know how the shower works the night before a game. So they’ll understand how to get ketchup out of those miniature bottles. 

At, might I remind you, a hotel they just spent 12 days at! But, hey, they beat Iowa in Week Three. You can’t argue with results. 

I don’t know for certain, but I’ll be willing to bet Matt Campbell didn’t invent this concept. It surely happens at a lot of places.

In the Mock Pre-Game expenses I got, there was one invoice that I’m a touch unsure about. I hope you don’t mind if I speculate a tad.

The team checked into the hotel and did their practice dinner. But that next night, they had another dinner at the hotel. That could have been practicing a post-game meal. Or practicing dinner for an 8 p.m. kickoff. 

But I very much choose to believe that, instead of sleeping that night, Campbell watched the tape of his players in the buffet line and was furious. Saw them lollygagging around the potatoes. Saw them going through the motions with the meatloaf. Not taking hotel practice serious. 

I like to think he made them run it back. 

Time for a speed run: Texas spent $91,000 on training camp hotels. They lost to Ohio State to start. Illinois spent $98,000. They won their first three games. ECU spent $40,500. They lost their opener to NC State.

Every year, Cincinnati travel to a rural retreat, which costs $45,000. The team even has a webpage to explain why. “Preseason football practice is held … in rural West Harrison, Ind., which allows the Bearcats players and coaches to better focus on their preparations and facilitates bonding.” 

They opened with a loss to Nebraska. But then they reeled off seven straight wins, including one over, you won’t believe this, the hotel practice GOAT Iowa State. It’s almost like all this stuff doesn’t make a difference.

In other news, a number of states are starting to fork over taxpayer money directly to college athletic programs. 

Probably unrelated.

Monopoly via duckycards / Getty Images; Cy via Icon Sportswire / Contributor / Getty Images