Villanova clearly dominated Michigan on the basketball court and has now won the NCAA Men’s basketball tournament two of the last three years. But how has that success translated to other sports and to the athletic costs in general.
The Equity in Athletics data is released annually by the Office of Postsecondary Education. This data is required by the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA) for all co-educational postsecondary institutions that receive Title IV funding and that have an intercollegiate athletics program. The data tracks revenues, expenses, and participation by sport, gender, and team. Today we released the Athletics Interactive which provides ten years of Athletic data by these categories. We compute year-over-year changes and category to total ratios. This updated Interactive is now available to our subscribers.
Villanova clearly is capitalizing on the strength of its basketball teams (men and women) as over 41% of its entire sports expenses comes from basketball. The big increase years for Villanova came in 2014 and 2015 when the sport of basketball doubled in proportion to other sports. Villanova’s budget for football is half what it is for basketball. Michigan, on the other hand, spends four times as much on football as basketball. While the Equity in Athletics data does not require disclosure of average salaries by individual sport, the average head coaching salary for Villanova increased a whopping 58% in 2017 to $618,216. This is over four times the average instructional salary of $136,194.
Finally, it is apparent the excitement of a winning basketball team has trickled to overall sports participation as Villanova sports participation across men’s and women’s sports teams has reached a ten-year high at 761 participants.
