Football spending gap: spending on football players versus non-student athletes

Bowl-eligible Division I universities have annual per-student academic spending of $15,615. But Auburn spends $511,745 a year per scholarship football player, according to the Knight Commission’s database. Nineteen schools spend more than $250,000 per football player, including all of the eight top-ranked programs.

In the college-football fanatic South, Auburn, LSU, Florida State, Georgia, Oklahoma, Central Florida, Arkansas, South Carolina and Virginia Tech spend 19 to 32 times more on football players than on regular students. Midwestern and Western powers were not as crazed, but the spending at Ohio State, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Penn State, Washington and Iowa was still nine to 17.5 times higher than for the average student.

http://theundefeated.com/features/spending-gap-for-football-players-vs-nonathletes-by-bowl-eligible-schools-is-enormous/

Obviously there are some built in costs to hosting athletes, especially football players, that are not associated with hosting non-student athletes on campus. The latest data shows the the average Big 10 institution spends $146.5k per student athlete - $273k per football player - and $20.5k per non-student athlete. MSU is right at the conference average per student athlete, and jumped from $245k per football player in 2013 to $383k in 2014. MSU spends $19.1k per non-student athlete. Now here is the important part: on average, Big 10 institutions only subsidize per athlete spending on the basis of $1k
per athlete. At MSU that number is $1.5k.

Based on the raw numbers, per player spending for football seems insane. Using the same data, the average SEC institution spends $187.5k per athlete - $302k per football player - with $6k in institutional subsidies. Per non-student athlete spending in the SEC is $15.5k. Auburn leads the way in spending per football at $512k. I assume after you build in equipment costs and travel and bowl game expenses it all begins to add up. But these numbers are still insane. The only saving grace is that a large majority of the funds do not come from institutional sources and are generated elsewhere. Most likely by the football team, and in some cases the football and men's basketball teams. So the most important question is obvious. What is MSU not spending on that it should be spending on? MSU only won three games this year so clearly it needs to spend more per player. There is a 129k gap between MSU and Auburn. That is the gap that should concern us the most.