2013 Financials - Key Spending

Another great breakdown from Acc Football Rx. 

What stood out the most to me was UVA.  Spending huge sums for absolutely nothing.  NC State has some of that as well.

Clearly with UVA, and I would guess much of the ACC....it is clearly a case of ADs that don't understand college football.  Basketball ADs failing in the money sport.

Ga Tech's situation is perhaps the worst of all.  Horrible hire AND being cheap.  I have said over and over.  It seems Ga Tech has just quit the sport of football.  The school in the second most important state in the conference for football has quit.

That is a MAJOR issue for the ACC.  Simply hoping Clemson and FSU compensate will not work long term for the ACC.

2013 Financials - Key Spending

"College football programs spend money on all sorts of things, but some spending is more strategic than others. In particular, there are 2 categories of spending which seem to have a direct correlation to winning: coaches salaries and recruiting expenses. We'll look at those two in this article. As we mentioned in the revenue article, we have limited data from the private schools.

Coaches + Staff Salaries. This is how much money the school pays to the head coach plus all of his assistants. In theory, if a school does a good job of evaluating candidates, the best coaches will demand the highest salaries. Here is a table of ACC spending along with averages of the other P5 conferences:

Team	Coaches
SEC	$16,746,806
Virginia	$16,406,122
B1G	$16,249,454
XII	$15,033,256
NC State	$14,950,202
Florida St	$14,415,931
Maryland	$13,632,973
ACC	$13,603,815
PAC	$13,578,824
Clemson	$13,372,704
UNC	$12,866,568
Va Tech	$12,246,780
Ga Tech	$10,939,242

The best paid coaches don't always win the most games, but a study published on Blogger So Dear (Wake Forest) would seem to indicate that there is a definite correlation there. In fact, I graphed their data and this is what I found:

It looks like FSU is getting a bargain with Jimbo Fisher and his staff; so is Dabo Swinney's group to a lesser extent. Meanwhile NC State is wasting money. Louisville, Ga Tech, and Pittsburgh are all paying just right. Syracuse fans, we'll leave it up to you to decide if Shafer is a bargain or if your athletic department is just being cheap.

Recruiting Expenses. This is the other strategic spending category. How do ACC teams stack up in this area?

Team	Recruiting
SEC	$1,594,217
UNC	$1,494,503
B1G	$1,442,324
XII	$1,392,877
NC State	$1,379,431
Ga Tech	$1,361,426
Clemson	$1,299,872
Va Tech	$1,196,171
Virginia	$1,184,313
PAC	$1,136,950
ACC	$1,129,843
Florida St	$1,092,061
Maryland	$777,678

Another critical spending category is recruiting. You can't visit players if you don't have the budget to travel to their homes, but there's a lot more to modern recruiting than simply talking with a high school player and his parents in their living room. The SEC probably has the most top players in its footprint of all P5 conferences, yet it still spends the most on recruiting. That ought to tell you something about how important this is...

BOTTOM LINE:
For the most part it seems that ACC teams have a good idea of where to spend their money. The program which probably got the least bang for their buck was Maryland, but they are the Big Ten's problem now. I'm also a little concerned with NC State (the AD there has a bad track record)."