March Madness Daily: UConn is UNique
UConn has achieved something financially that might be fully unique in big-time college sports. How long can it last?
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Today, we do some budgeting:
Eben: Last year two schools sent both their men’s and women’s teams to the Final Four. UConn 🐶 and… can you name the other?? (Answer here 👉 1 )
In the history of the two tournaments, that’s only happened 15 times, and five of them were UConn. Two of those UConn runs resulted in NCAA titles for both programs. No other school has done that once.
But the UConn stat that always stands out to me is this: Among the ~120 public schools that compete in FBS, college football’s top tier, UConn is the only one that spends more on basketball than football. Here’s a classic Lev chart 👇
I’ve mentioned this to many people. Some are surprised that there’s even one; others are surprised there aren’t many more. While we can’t make a full apples-to-apples comparison for private schools, we do have the data they submit to U.S. Department of Education. Duke 🔵 👿, if you’re curious, isn’t particularly close. The Blue Devils recently reported a football budget of $39.4 million and combined basketball budgets of about $29.6 million.
We’ve written at Sportico before about how UConn manages this financially, and the simple truth is it doesn’t. In fiscal 2024, the Huskies balanced their budget with nearly $43 million in subsidies from central campus. That’s on a total athletics budget of about $100 million.
UConn is the only Big East basketball school with an FBS football program. The conference has been pushing this narrative that the upcoming NCAA revenue-sharing changes will be good for them, because they don’t have big-time football teams to hoover up the bulk of that money. I’m skeptical of that claim, but if it’s true, where does that leave UConn?
The Huskies have straddled both sides for more than a decade. It hasn’t hurt the basketball programs—at least not yet. But at some point soon, harder choices will have to be made. And if those choices negatively impact basketball, man, imagine how angry Dan Hurley will be!
Programming note: We’ll be sending daily business nuggets throughout the NCAA tournaments. If that’s not your thing, you can opt out of daily March Madness posts by updating your settings here or with the button below. We’ll return to normal programming in April.
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.
NC State 🐺