I was listening to an FCS football podcast and they were talking about JMU potentially moving into the vacant AAC spot left by UCONN. They made a comment about JMU's athletic budget being something like $50 million. Seems pretty big for an FCS school. I was wondering if anyone knew what our budget looked like and specifically what the football budget looks like. It'd be interesting to see if when they brought coach Hawkins in, they raised the budget as well. It seems like the University has begun to spend more on athletics, especially football, than when I first arrived on campus (fall 2015). Anyone know if this is in fact the case?
Looks like our annual athletics budget is around $33 million and it was around $24 million back in 2013. Here are a couple links to reports. I didn't see a summary of the total budget by sport and wasn't able to find the same athletics budget report for each year. Anyway, here are a few links.
Picking easily available numbers, 2018 athletics expenditures are approximately $33 million, up from $28.5 million in 2016. In that time, scholarships and non-academic staff each rose about $1M, operating expense by about $2.5M. Less dramatic changes to benefits, travel, academic staff (includes some physical education faculty) — whatever operating expense includes
Just google uc davis athletics budget and play with that for awhile. It’s all there online. But its not that current. Newest info is 2016-17. A lot of numbers here and you can parse what you want from them. Extreme bottom line is this revenue was: in 2016- 33M and change. In 2017 34M and change. A mere .63 percent increase in revenue. Interesting that there was a +29% increase in ticket sales in a very poor football season. 88Aggie does good job with these numbers. I would think that 2018-19 numbers would be significantly higher because of the FB and WBB success. Bottom line. No FCS athletics programs make money or can support themselves without student or institutional funding. Sad but true. But. Then there’s cal with an enormous athletic deficit of millions. Do we want to go there?
The current Cal ICA numbers are: $439M in debt. Mostly due to the football stadium renovation and low revenue sports. Cal admin (very questionably) took on 1/2 of that debt for the stadium “seismic issues involved.” Very many TIX issues remain at Berkeley to be dealt with and which are not now. Still Cal’s ICA is still running an $18M deficit. And I might add: UC students no longer get free tics to UC football games. Do we want this model?
Re: "UC students no longer get free tics to UC football games."
Is this a 2019 change? I recall Davis students getting in free for the Aggie playoff game and perhaps homecoming game last fall. Or is this limited to Cal/UCLA?
I don't recall any playoff games free for UC Students. This because the playoffs were NCAA games and not supported by the conference. I remember paying to get in D2 Playoff games, but at a discount.
This just per the recent cal athletic website post. I think UCD students get into all games free. I am not sure how putting 1/2 of the debt into the “seismic repair” column helped them out, but I suspect it just put those repairs in line with all system-wide deferred seismic repairs. It certainly is not in the 2019-20 UC budget for seismic repairs which is only $213.3M and shows Berkeley getting money only to repair university hall, not memorial stadium. In other words, a bit of a case of “cooking the books” to reduce a very, very bad debt situation which is still growing at the rate of $18M annually.
Students at Davis are still free. They got in free to the playoff game last season due to a donation from ICA ( if memory serves); else NCAA rules prohibit freebies for ‘their’ games
Not sure about Cal but UCLA was not free when I was briefly there. Students had to buy a pass that basically functioned as a combo FB/MBB season ticket. I forget if bus rides to the rose bowl were included or not in that.
Davis is free but it seems like ICA has been gradually moving to a distributed ticket model rather than students just showing ID cards for big games. Makes sense as the spectator sport teams are on the rise and Aggie stadium is starting to approach capacity
I think you are right about the donation to get the students in for the UNI game. Place was rocking all night, same for the Idaho State thriller. Zander, I too have heard Cal students have to purchase discounted tickets. I know other big time programs (Oregon) even have some sort of lottery process to get students tix.
Would like to discuss how to get more current students in the door at future games (changes the atmosphere at Aggie Stadium a ton), but that is for another thread sometime.
you can still just show your ID at the gate and be let in. I think they have gone out and started trying to give out tickets as a way to get the students engaged in the middle of the week to keep the team on the minds of students. I think by doing this students are like "hey let's go to the game!" And make plans for it ahead of time. I think I showed my ID for every game except the playoff. Again that was because of the NCAA rules that prevent free students tickets at their games.