Big 12 Athletic Budgets & Results
Category: Sports (Pro/College/HS)...
Posted Tuesday, October 12, 2004 at 09:56 PM [GMT-6]

I recently received a mailing from my alma mater, Texas A&M, entitled "The Cost of Building Champions." The combination CD/brochure is a slick presentation designed to entice me into giving money to the athletic department via the 12th Man Foundation.

This solicitation presents an unflinching look at how A&M stacks up against its Big 12 competitors in terms of athletic achievement and funding. The picture is not a pretty one, if you're gung ho about such things. Below, for example, is a chart showing the annual athletic department budgets for each school in the conference (amounts are FY2003-04 except for OU, CU & UT, which are 2002-03). The figure in parentheses next to the school name shows the number of regular season conference titles (in all sports) won by that school since the conference was formed in 1996.

A couple of interesting observations can be gleaned from this chart...

• The 12 universities spend almost half a billion dollars on their athletic programs each year.


• UT's championships are the cheapest, costing "only" $1.27M each. Missouri, on the other hand, must surely savor its $34.2M trophy. (It's worse than this, of course. Those budget numbers must be multiplied by some factor to reflect the total costs since the conference was formed. But $200M+ for one championship is too depressing to consider.)


• UT and Nebraska together have won more championships than the rest of the schools combined. However, the combined budgets of those two schools is only 25% of the conference total.

A little research at the Big 12's official website shows that total current enrollment for the Conference is about 361,000 students. Thus, the total athletic department budgets equate to $1,257 per student. From this perspective, A&M is near the bottom of the list, tied with Kansas at $938/student (Oklahoma State is last at $842/student). On the other end of the spectrum, Nebraska spends over $2,100/student on its athletic programs.

The brochure also documents a somewhat ironic situation that adversely affects A&M's athletic revenue stream: its students show up for football games in numbers that dwarf the other schools. Why is this a problem? It's because students get their tickets at half-price. So when A&M has its usual average student attendance of 30,000 at its football games, out of a total of 80,000 fans, well, the math is easy to do. By the way, that 30,000 attendance number is three times as large as the next biggest competitor, UT (at 10,000...surprising in itself).

Up next: A look at how each individual sport at A&M pays for itself, or, more to the point, doesn't.