The CUAD Football Budget 2007-2009, and a comparison with UGA and Alabama

As part of a housekeeping project for future articles, I decided to just layout the budget and expense reports for FY2007 and FY 2008 to refer back to later. We have covered the FY 2009 report with IPTAY's budget report here. You should read the IPTAY article as it talks about some of the description of terms not explained below.


A database of FY2005 information for most teams is available here, and it does include Clemson.

Definition of Terms for Revenue

Expense Description.

Full FY2007 budget, Full FY2008 Budget - Baseball is submitted to the NCAA EADA separately but it is grouped in non-revenue/other sports in any report. Since Clemson loses 500K per year on baseball, its definitely non-revenue.

Just to point out for those that haven't thought about it, things like broadcast rights are applied to the AD as a whole and not just to football, even though its mostly football/basketball rights. The NCAA/ACC distributions are from bowl games/alliances with the conference and the basketball tournaments.

Direct Institutional support is the amount of tuition "forgiven" by the CU Administration to out-of-state players, and contributions is the money transferred from IPTAY, so it fluctuates with the IPTAY membership. I would imagine this is the same for the other two schools. As you can see, away game ticket sales were really up last year for us, but I don't think you can count on this every year.

Before going further, I should point out a discrepancy between the data given to me by Katie Hill, which is more detailed, and the site I'm using that reports data from the schools tends to lump things together instead of line-item. There is a roughly $167,000 difference in the total revenue for 2008 between her data sent to me, and that which is presented here. It is also available from the Government here, though again it is grouped differently. Below in the expense reports, I have put in parentheses the number for Clemson to compare to UGA/Bama, using these resources, to make it a valid comparison for 2008. The other number is the one reported to the NCAA before they crunch the numbers and group them in their own way. The differences are made up of other expenses like capital projects, transfers to the University, mandatory and non-mandatory transfers, etc. It turns out to be quite a chunk of money that gets moved around.

A note for comparison, it appears from my untrained eye that UGA and Bammer lump in all of their support from their Booster club arms into the revenue, whereas Clemson only seems to be adding in the figure that is transferred over from IPTAY for scholarship funding. If you lump in the total IPTAY budget ($30 mil), it compares to Georgia's and we're not that far behind them.

UGA and Alabama did not report the Away game sales separately, so it is lumped in with ticket sales. They may add in student ticketing as it does vary in the SEC.

I would like to know what "other" is for Alabama, as its paying them a pretty penny. Where Clemson really lost to these teams in 2008 is in Broadcasting rights and royalties/advertising, notice the large difference. The SEC's new ESPN contract will only kick up for FY2010, which isn't over yet, and it'll give them another 10-12 million per year.

I wonder what "other" is for Alabama? Lakehouses for players? It appears that Bammer spend just about every dime they take in and then some. UGA operates at a considerable profit (at least in 08) and Clemson doesnt do badly for itself in terms of profits....I just wonder where that excess money ends up.

I've laid out the entire budget in the IPTAY post linked above, for 2009, by item. As you can see the NCAA is moving things like "nonmandatory/mandatory funding transfers" and the like around to specific areas, so the figure that is quoted in the reports to me is different from the one in parentheses. For example, Clemson spent roughly $2.4 million on construction in FY2008, and this would probably be lumped in for NCAA purposes on facilities maintenance row.

Additionally, the 1.5-3 million dollar transfers to Sikes Hall are partially hidden within these figures, and not a line-item. Some of it is still taken out after these figures, which pushes Clemson into the red financially.

Without a detailed rundown of the CUAD budget, there is no way for me to investigate the true nature of the discrepancies above. I am able to give the reported net profit or loss each year by the CUAD however, after all the numbers are included.

FY2007: + $1,778,971, final operational balance: $10,307,491

FY2008: -$870,000, final operating fund balance: $9,150,098

FY2009: -$556,233, final operational balance: $8,593,865

So coming into the 2009 football season, Clemson should have roughly $8.5 million to spend.....this I assume is their rainy day money, which helps to pay severance packages or cover budget holes like the $2.8 million that Sikes took away in FY09.