College Football Spending

I'm doing a research paper for my sports management class about how monetary investments affect a team's performance. Therefore, I need to know which college football team spends the most money. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Certainly! There isn't a public database that provides the exact budget for each college football team, however, the U.S. Department of Education has mandatory reporting for all collegiate athletic departments via the Equity in Athletics Data Analysis (EADA). This data includes recruiting expenses, scholarships, salaries, equipment, and other operational costs.

One caveat here is that this data may not perfectly represent the operational budget of the football team itself because colleges have some discretion in how they classify and report these expenses. So, many costs that benefit the football team may not be included in these figures.

To give some context, though, as of the most recent data available in 2019 (things may have changed since then), the University of Alabama, University of Texas, and Ohio State University were in the top tier of spending.

Remember, however, there's a considerable debate about the relationship between spending and team performance in college football. There are programs that achieve a lot of success with moderate budgets, and there are others that spend a lot but do not achieve commensurate success on the field. Your research will likely be quite interesting in exploring this complex dynamic!