Recruiting budgets for college football have a hand in determining a team's success
There is no guarantee that spending the most money and bringing in the biggest recruits will lead a college football team to more wins. It is, however, a strong indicator of the team's commitment to winning. The large recruiting budgets of some schools make it difficult for smaller schools to keep up with them.
Recruiting Budget Importance
The larger the budget a school has to work with, the more recruits it can reach out to and keep up with. Talented players could be located anywhere, and a team has to be able to visit them in person frequently, bring them to the campus and more. Therefore a larger budget allows a school to recruit a wide range of good players and to do so more effectively.
Total Recruiting Budgets
Colleges are not required to divulge the recruiting budget for each individual sport, but do have to tell the NCAA what the total men's sports recruiting budget is. Football scholarships take up the largest part of any school's athletic budget. Therefore, it's safe to conclude the schools with the biggest overall budgets are the ones spending the most on football.
Biggest Spenders
According to a report from the Chronicle of Higher Education, which covered the 2006-2007 season, 21 colleges spent at least $1 million in their recruiting for men's sports. The University of Tennessee was the only school that admitted spending more than $2 million.
Comparison of Conferences
The recruiting budget totals between the major conferences can vary greatly. For example, in the Southeastern Conference where football recruiting is particularly fierce, the recruiting budget for the 12 conference schools totaled more than $13 million. That was the highest of any conference in the country. The Big East, with 16 member universities, had the lowest total recruiting budget expenses with less than half of the SEC's total, just over $6 million.
Smaller Conferences
For schools outside of the major Bowl Championship Series conferences, the biggest spender was UNLV with a $700,000 recruiting budget for all athletics. Only four programs outside of these major conferences had recruiting budgets of more than $600,000. The lowest spender in Division I athletics was Louisiana-Monroe, with a total recruiting budget of just $134,000.
The state of the economy in 2008 and 2009 also forced many smaller schools to reduce their budgets further, widening the gap between them and the major universities they compete against.
Tags: more than, recruiting budget, college football, keep with, larger budget