The 2023-24 College Football Playoff championship game between the Michigan Wolverines and the Washington Huskies is a fitting end to the season in multiple ways. Both teams finished the regular season undefeated and were No. 1 and No. 2 in the rankings, respectively. The game is also a matchup between a Big Ten powerhouse in Michigan and a team joining the conference next season in Washington.
A quick peek at Sportico’s College Sports Finances Database is all you need to figure out why Washington is making the move. In the 2021-22 school year, the Huskies spent more on their football team than Michigan in several categories, and thanks to a one-time severance payment Washington totaled $70.5 million in football expenses to Michigan’s $52.4 million. Despite the hefty budget, the Huskies pulled in only $91 million in football revenues, which was dwarfed by the $131.4 million generated by the Wolverines.
Let’s dig into the individual categories that make up those totals to see how the two schools stack up:
Media Rights
Michigan’s football program brought in $37.6 million in media rights revenue in the 2021-22 season, primarily through the Big Ten’s TV deals, whereas the Pac-12’s contracts netted Washington just $23.8 million.
The Big Ten’s even bigger seven-year, $7 billion Big Ten media rights deal with Fox, CBS and NBC that runs through the 2029-30 season began this past fall. Washington decided it would rather get a cut of that lucrative revenue machine than remain in a struggling conference that couldn’t agree on its own next media rights contract.
Donations
Michigan’s $30.7 million received in football-specific donations led the Big Ten and was good for seventh among FBS public schools. Washington’s $19.2 million ranked 14th, just behind Utah’s Pac-12 leading total.
Ticket Sales
Michigan has ranked second in the country in football ticketing revenue in each of the past four non-COVID seasons, and 2021-22 was no different, as the school raked in $47.5 million. Washington led the Pac-12 with a total that was barely more than half of the Wolverines’ at $26.2 million.
Coaching Compensation
Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh is the 12th-highest paid coach in college football, making $8.3 million a year. That’s nearly equal to the $8.4 million that the entire Huskies’ staff earned in the most recent year in our dataset. Michigan’s coaching staff, by comparison, was collectively paid $16.4 million.
Recruiting
The Wolverines spent the eighth-most money on recruiting of any team in the nation, at $2.2 million, while the Huskies were 13th with $1.5 million. That was an abnormally large amount for Washington, which spent just $628,000 in the year prior to the pandemic.
The investment didn’t necessarily pay off right away, as Washington assembled just the 89th ranked recruiting class in the country in 2022, according to Rivals.com. The program rebounded last year, however, with a class that ranked 24th—not far behind Michigan’s, which was 18th.
Team Travel
Michigan slightly outspent Washington on travel, $2.2 million to $1.9 million. The Huskies’ travel costs may go up significantly as a Big Ten member next year, with the majority of the conference’s teams located east of the Mississippi River.
Equipment, Uniforms and Supplies
Minutiae of different athletic departments’ accounting practices can differ, so some of the smaller categories in our database must be taken with a grain of salt, but Washington’s $3 million in expenses on football “equipment, uniforms and supplies” led all FBS public schools. Another category in which the program ranked unusually high was game expenses, with a $7.1 million total that ranked third.
Student-Athlete Meals
There were two financial categories in which Big Ten rivals Michigan and Ohio State outpaced the rest of college football in the 2021-22 season: ticket sales and spending on food. In both categories, Ohio State led with Michigan second. But with a $3.5 million football meals budget, the Wolverines ate well.
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