How Wisconsin Badgers’ football budget compares to rest of Big Ten

• The University of Wisconsin athletic director announced an increased financial investment into the football program.
• Wisconsin has ranked below many of its Big Ten peers in total football spending, but the NCAA data comes with several caveats.
• The Badgers spent the third-least on football recruiting in 2023-24 among public schools that are now in the Big Ten.

MADISON – Wisconsin football fans have been craving a solution to the Badgers’ unfortunate state of affairs.

UW athletic director Chris McIntosh made national headlines Oct. 20 as he shared what is at least part of the solution. He penned a letter to fans saying that the university and athletic department are committed to increasing its investment in the football program to “position us to compete at the highest level.”

McIntosh’s letter specifically mentioned infrastructure, staffing and recruiting and retention as areas of investment.

The letter leaves many unanswered questions, though, including how much money will be infused to the budget and how the university plans to foot the bill. The letter does not answer the question of whether coach Luke Fickell will be back in 2026.

It also prompts another question: How competitive has Wisconsin football been financially with its Big Ten peers before this announcement? It is not an easy question to definitively answer.

Each public Big Ten school’s NCAA financial filing – which USA Today Sports collects annually in conjunction with the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database at Syracuse University via open records requests – offers perhaps the best publicly available comparison tool for football budgets.

When simply looking at total operating expenses for the 16 public schools that are now in the Big Ten from 2023-24, the most recent fiscal year with available reports, Wisconsin ranked 11th at $49.7 million. The five programs behind the Badgers were Minnesota, UCLA, Illinois, Maryland and Purdue.

However, any comparison of schools’ finances comes with several caveats that make it difficult to draw any major conclusions about the competitiveness of a team’s football budget. Severance payments and debt service on facility projects also can heavily skew a football team’s annual operating expenses.

Three of the 16 public universities were in the Pac-12 instead of the Big Ten during the 2023-24 fiscal year. (The 2024-25 NCAA financial filings will likely be available in January.) A different conference has an obvious impact on revenue, which dictates how much money a program can spend.

Schools also have latitude with how they report various expenses between different categories (including “other operating expenses”) and which expenses are team-specific or not tied to an individual team.

For example, Purdue reported $112,856 in football-associated “direct overhead and administrative expenses” in 2023-24 while Minnesota reports about $4.6 million in that same category despite likely not having 40 times as much overhead spending. Wisconsin reported $715,724 in that category for football while more than 90% of the athletic department’s spending is not tied to a particular team.

If excluding severance payments, facility debt service and direct overhead/administrative expenses, Wisconsin would have ranked 12th out of 16 public schools in 2023-24 that are now in the Big Ten in football expenses with about $40.5 million. (UW would be less than $100,000 behind Minnesota for 11th-highest.) The four behind the Badgers would be Indiana, Illinois, Maryland and Purdue.

A school’s investment in football can change quickly, too, as evident at Indiana. Since the end of the 2023-24 fiscal year, the Hoosiers have made an obvious financial commitment to their football program and highly touted head coach Curt Cignetti, who recently signed a contract extension raising his average annual compensation to $11.6 million.

When specifically looking at NCAA-measured football recruiting expenses, the Badgers spent the third-least among the 16 public schools in 2023-24 that are now in the Big Ten. Wisconsin’s $1.4 million in recruiting expenses only outpaced Indiana’s $1.3 million and Iowa’s $683,051. The top seven schools spent between $2 million and $3 million.

Roster recruiting and retention – one of the areas McIntosh specifically mentioned in his letter – happened in the NIL ecosystem that preceded the House settlement and relied heavily on collectives. Given that the collectives were third-party entities, their financial activity has not been measured in NCAA filings.

Wisconsin’s Varsity Collective reported about $4.3 million in contributions in its publicly available IRS tax form 990 for the 2023-24 fiscal year. Comparing collectives is hardly apples-to-apples given varying organizational structures, a lack of details required in the 990 form, different reporting schedules and other factors.

That being said, Iowa’s Swarm Collective reported $2.4 million in contributions and $3.4 million in total expenses in its tax form 990 for the 2023 calendar year. Purdue’s Boilermaker Alliance reported just under $5 million in contributions in the 2023 calendar year.

Now in the post-House settlement era, Wisconsin can directly pay athletes across campus a combined $20.5 million in revenue sharing. Its NIL strategy hinges around third-party endorsement and sponsorship deals that are compliant with the College Sports Commission’s scrutiny of deals that most notably require a valid business purpose.

Brian Mason, UW’s director of NIL strategy, previously told the Journal Sentinel that the department has the opportunity to “really build from a position of strength” with third-party NIL deals.

As murky as the budget comparisons can be, it also is unclear how quickly the McIntosh-announced fix to UW’s financial challenges will resolve the Badgers’ on-field challenges.

“The results of this elevated support may not be immediate, but we are confident that the impact will be positive and long-term,” McIntosh said in the letter.