UGA’s football, basketball and other teams that compete in the NCAA aren’t managed by the university, but by a nonprofit corporation—the 501(c)3 University of Georgia Athletic Association, with its own board of trustees. Although it’s a separate legal entity, it’s a rubber-stamp board ultimately controlled by the UGA president, who is also the UGAA board president. NCAA rules require intercollegiate sports programs to be under “institutional control,” not some outside entity.
The UGA Athletic Association consistently ranks as one of the most “profitable” in the nation, though as a nonprofit the UGAA can’t really have a profit. But the UGAA’s revenues are invariably more than its operating expenses, often by a lot. In 2023, UGA’s revenue of about $210 million ranked fifth behind only Michigan, Texas, Texas A&M and No.1 Ohio State ($279.2 million) according to a Sports Illustrated tally. Georgia Tech, by the way, reported about $94 million in revenue versus $109 million in expense in the 2022 fiscal year, according to ProPublica.
Football pays the freight. According to UGA’s most recent financial report to the NCAA, football ticket sales brought in $36.7 million; the closest was men’s basketball at $1.2 million. Football “contributions”—you get better seats for giving more—added another $62 million. Media rights ($20.2 million for football, $4.9 million basketball) were also a big source. Football-related licensing fees and sponsorships brought in $17.4 million ($2.3 million for men’s basketball). All told, football revenue added up to $153 million, with men’s basketball a distant second at $13 million.
Most of the expenses are also related to football—$69 million. The athletic association spent about $91 million on men’s sports overall, $28 million on women’s sports and $67 million not allocated to specific teams, such as administrative costs. Total operating expenses in 2023 were $186.6 million.
Other than football and men’s basketball ($10.3 million in operating expense; $13 million in revenue), all of UGA’s other NCAA sports teams cost more to operate than they generate, though women’s track and field nearly broke even in 2023, with about $3.2 million in revenue and $3.3 million in expense, according to UGA’s 2023 financial report. The sport that lost the most money was baseball, at $1.3 million in revenue and $4.8 million in expense—a big chunk of it nearly $1.3 million in severance pay. UGA fired its baseball coach after the 2023 season.
Broken down another way, here’s where most of the money went: $39 million in coaching compensation, including $12.5 million to head football coach Kirby Smart; $33 million for support staff; $12 million for athletic student aid, roughly evenly divided between men and women; $9 million for team travel; $9.6 million for game expenses, the cost of staging games; $7.5 million for recruiting; $20.4 million for overhead and administration costs; and $10.5 million for debt service, rentals and leases, mainly debt service. Athletic-related debt added up to $136 million in 2023, according to the UGAA’s NCAA financial report. Capital expenditures in 2023 were $55.3 million. Over the years, the athletic association has also used its operating surpluses to build up an endowment of about $129 million.
UGA sponsors 19 NCAA teams. They include eight for men (basketball, football, baseball, tennis, golf, swimming and diving, and track and field plus cross-county) and 11 for women (basketball, gymnastics, equestrian, swimming and diving, tennis, track and field plus cross-country, volleyball, softball, soccer and golf). Though the numbers of teams aren’t the same, the numbers of scholarships are about the same—the football team carries far more scholarships than any other sport. The NCAA limit for football scholarships was 85 until last month; now the maximum allowable is 105.
Although women’s teams don’t generate a lot of money, they’ve generated more than twice as many national championships than the men’s side since the federal Title IX law forced schools to provide equal opportunities for women, including the opportunity to play intercollegiate sports, beginning in the 1980s. Those include 10 NCAA national championships in gymnastics, seven NCAA titles in women’s swimming and diving, seven in equestrian, two in tennis, one in golf and one in indoor track and field. The late Vince Dooley said he was skeptical of women’s sports at first, but when he saw them compete and strive, he changed his mind. With much longer histories, UGA men’s team national championships include six in tennis, four in football, two in golf, one in baseball and one in indoor track and field.
The financial landscape is changing, in part because of the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of players who’d sued for the right to earn money for the use of their names, images and likenesses (so-called NIL), which has created a kind of shadow economy funded by donors. A separate legal question that could further transform college athletics is also likely to end up before the Supreme Court—whether college athletes can be classified as employees.
But the money will keep pouring in. On the heels of two national football championships in the past three years, it’s a lock that the 92,746 seats in Sanford Stadium (the nation’s ninth-largest college stadium) will continue to be filled, and lucrative new media rights deals will add millions of dollars more to SEC schools’ bottom lines beginning this year.
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