RALEIGH —- Calling the growth in spending on college sports “unsustainable,” as evidenced by top college football rosters that cost $50 million annually, North Carolina public higher education leaders Wednesday promised a deep examination of spending for the state’s 15 NCAA athletics departments.
“There's a key paradox here because most people would agree that college athletics model has never been more broken, and yet, it has never been more popular. Thus the considerable attention going forward on spending,” UNC System President Peter Hans told members of the board of governors budget committee.
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“You don’t have to be an economist to figure out that those who spend the most will generally win the most games. That’s why I’m hoping this will be the start of a conversation amongst the board members of how we can remain competitive in athletics, but not, in the long run, at the expense of the academic mission.”
Public college sports deliver about $1.5 billion in annual economic impact across the state with more than 1,400 athletes competing for teams across the system. While the programs generated more than $412 million in athletics-related revenue, they had more than $640 million in expenses — with student fees, campus support and state government funding making up the difference or roughly 36% of athletics spending.
Student athletic fees range from $232 annually at NC State to $906 at UNC-Pembroke.
Those figures, from the 2024-25 academic year, encompass all 15 of the state’s public universities, from UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State with budgets north of $130 million in the Atlantic Coast Conference to Division II Elizabeth City State University with its $4.1-million athletics budget.
And those costs keep rising, fueled, in part, by direct revenue sharing with athletes of up to $21.3 million this year. What was billed as a cap has, instead, become a spending floor for top programs, pushing departments to find additional funding sources.
Earlier in the day, The New York Times published an accounting of the budgets for the nation’s top football programs, finding that they are spending around $50 million on their roster for this season.
NC State’s roster cost between $22 million and $26 million, and North Carolina’s roster cost is estimated to be between $20 million and $25 million. The lowest-cost rosters among programs in the four highest revenue-generating leagues are Boston College (between $8 million and $13 million) and Duke, with a roster cost of between $12 and $15 million.
“I certainly want our universities to remain competitive and continue to demonstrate excellence,” Hans said. “At the same time, we should check in on costs, which, with the changing national landscape, are growing at an unsustainable rate. This is occurring everywhere across the country. Every chancellor and president, across the nation, that I talk to feels the same set of pressures.”
The committee didn’t offer any policy changes or vote on anything Wednesday. Instead, the presentation is seen as the starting point in what could be a lengthy process. But in its presentation UNC System staff outlined potential guardrails the board could implement: limits on subsidies, approval requirements and reporting standards.
“The governance question: Which funding sources absorb it — reserves, campus funds, debt – and with what board oversight,” the presentation asked.
Committee members stressed the importance of athletics at campuses across the state — for enrollment, as a front porch to the university, as an economic driver in the community.
"Athletics matter to who we are,” said Kirk Bradley, the chairman of the board’s budget committee. “The question this board will wrestle with is never whether athletics matter, it's how we sustain what matters on a sound financial footing."
