015: NIL
A look at coaching and admin expenses using Sportico data.
A few weeks ago, Bruce Schoenfeld published a NY Times article questioning if student athletes are now moguls. The article uses North Carolina as a cautionary tale in the world of the NIL (name, image, and likeness).
There is a ton to unpack in the article. There are valid critiques and others that question its accuracy too.
One of the points that Schoenfeld floats out there is how can a university like North Carolina continue to support 28 sports, and suggests it’s a pending disaster:
With less television revenue than schools in other prominent conferences and 28 varsity teams, North Carolina is at the vanguard of a pending disaster, like one of those Indian Ocean atolls that is slowly being subsumed by rising water. Schools like Vanderbilt stand on higher ground. But it seems likely that the tides will reach them soon enough.
It’s obvious change will need to happen. And with conference realignment and unequal TV revenue, it’s a tricky problem for Carolina and other universities.
Only a few days after the NY Times article, Inside Carolina dove into the numbers of Carolina’s most recent financial report. Public institutions report annual financial expenses and revenue through the NCAA’s Membership Financial Report System.
The data is obtained through an open records request1 and Sportico built a tool to view this data across several different schools.
For example, you can find North Carolina’s most recent report from Sportico.
There are several expense categories broken out across football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball, other sports, and non-sports:
Coaching compensation
Admin compensation
Athletic student aid
Team travel
Game expenses
Equipment
Athletic facilities
It’s tough to infer much without the specific line items, however, the coaching and admin compensation categories are curious.
First, it’s obvious, non-sports do not have any compensation towards coaches. And while specific sports have admin compensation, it’s no where near the admin staff necessary to support an entire athletic department.
So what if we combine those two expenses and chart it?
It’s no surprise football is atop these categories in expenses. What is somewhat surprising is the non-sport admin compensation is not far behind football, and that is without any coaching compensation.
The NY Times article didn’t have any mention of admin compensation or show how the market has driven changes to that compensation over the years. It didn’t even suggest if that money also might need to be redistributed. Only compensation towards players.
The NCAA is trying to grasp at an illusion of control with NIL. Other head coaches are claiming schools in their own league are buying teams.
The whole landscape of college athletics is messy.
But isn’t that because the market is already driving college athletics?
Full disclosure, I don’t have any of the specific data because I’m not a journalist. I’m only using the information provided by Sportico here.