COLUMBIA, Mo. — Count college sports among the sagging economy’s latest victims.
A newly released NCAA report shows that just 14 of the 120 Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly Division I-A) schools made money from campus athletics in the 2009 fiscal year, down from 25 the previous year. Researchers blame the sagging economy and suggested the 2010 numbers could be worse.
The research was done by accounting professor Dan Fulks of Transylvania University, a Division III school in Lexington, Ky. It shows the median amount paid by the 120 FBS schools to support campus athletics grew in one year from about $8 million to more than $10 million.
The NCAA doesn’t release individual schools’ revenues and expenses. But Fulks confirmed Alabama and Texas are among the select group that made money from athletics.
NCAA interim president Jim Isch, who spent 11 years as the association’s chief financial officer, called the latest numbers less a reflection of “runaway spending” in college athletics than a reality of the country’s larger economic crisis.
The largest reported amount of revenue generated by an athletics program was $138.5 million, nearly three times the median of $45.9 million. The top-spending program reported $127.6 million in annual expenses, with a similarly sized gap from the median. Sixty-eight FBS schools reported turning a profit on football, with a median value of $8.8 million. The 52 FBS schools that lost money on football reported median losses of $2.7 million.
The breakdown for basketball programs at those 120 schools was nearly identical, though the median values for profitable programs ($2.9 million) and money-losing ones ($873,000) were smaller.
This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to an Associated Press error, Florida, Ohio State and Tennessee were listed
among the 14 Football Bowl Subdivision schools that made money from
campus athletics in the 2009 fiscal year. Athletic expenses exceeded revenue at these schools.
