Yesterday The Athletic published an extensive report on college football roster budgets and includes some handy graphics to give you an idea of how schools stack up within each league. There are lots of disclaimers that come with these numbers (same with the ones 247Sports published last month), and The Athletic only goes so far as providing a budget range for schools. I recommend reading through all of that in the article (which isn’t paywalled).
The ACC:
Overall, these findings put NC State basically smack dab in the middle of the P4 in terms of football budget. And as you can see, that’s in the top half of the ACC. I would be surprised, though, if NC State were actually spending more than Louisville, UNC, or UVA.
It’s interesting to compare these figures to what 247Sports found in its survey—that one put NC State’s spending at under $20 million, while The Athletic reports that it is between $22-26 million. Goes to show how much these numbers are based on guesswork by the industry people who were surveyed.
Boston College was found to have the lowest budget among all of the power conferences—possibly as low as $8 million, which might actually be less than what BC is spending on men’s basketball these days. If Boston College is fully funding its NIL pool, it’s hard to understand how it could allocate less than half of that money to football. I knew Bill O’Brien had a tough job, but I didn’t realize it was this tough.
It doesn’t take an enormous investment to get yourself into the middle class of the ACC—somewhere in the low $20s—so there is opportunity for a lot of programs to be competitive within the conference. Or be competitive for second place, anyway. Miami is going to be in the stratosphere above everybody else and I don’t know if anyone really has the ability to match the Canes there, no matter how much a new coach might invigorate donations at a given place.