Conference Recruitment Expense Series: ACC

The following post is a BusinessofCollegeSports.com series investigating how much schools spend to recruit athletes.

Today, recruitment expense data from the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12 and Conference USA will be posted.  Tomorrow, data for the MAC, Pac-12, SEC, Sun Belt, Mountain West and WAC will be posted.  On Monday, a spreadsheet listing the top-50 spenders in terms of recruiting will be listed, sorted by total recruitment expense budget, amount spent per team on average and amount spent per player on average.

The data was obtained from the Department of Education.  Although this data is not perfect, it is the only data available for both public and private institutions.  Furthermore, the data provided is for the 2010-11 school year.

In 2010-11, Georgia Tech’s men’s sports programs spent the greatest amount on recruiting in the ACC with $1,173,904.00.  Subsequently, Georgia Tech also spent on average, the most amount on recruiting per men’s team, with $167,700.57 per team.  This amounted to $4,658.35 spent per male athlete at Georgia Tech.  Arguably, the amount spent to actually recruit individual athletes would be higher, as the average calculated took into consideration every male athlete at Georgia Tech and not solely incoming student-athletes (thus, it took into consideration juniors and seniors in men’s sports programs).  The Department of Education does not report how many student-athletes a school recruited in a given year, but rather, provides a lump-sum number of the amount of student-athletes on campus.

The men’s sports program which spent the least amount on recruiting was Maryland.  It reported recruitment expenses of $538,497.00 in 2010-11.

However, Maryland’s expenses greatly outnumbered those of women’s sports programs in the ACC.  In 2010-11, Florida State spent the most recruiting student-athletes for its women’s sports programs with $407,483.00.  However, the highest average per women’s sports team was spent by Georgia Tech, with $52,615.83.  Georgia Tech also spent the most per women’s sports student-athlete, with $2,923.10 per student-athlete.