Who spends the most on recruiting
Transportation, lodging, and meals for prospective student-athletes and for staff on official and unofficial visits.
Georgia
$3.51M · $3,507,743
Texas
$1.59M · $1,590,187
Boise State
$720K · $719,556
Central Michigan
$640K · $639,925
App State
$497K · $496,723
Texas State
$486K · $486,250
Akron
$465K · $464,521
Marshall
$456K · $455,893
Georgia State
$384K · $384,399
Georgia Southern
$352K · $352,403
Southeast Missouri State University
$275K · $275,434
UMBC
$186K · $186,116
Bowling Green
$169K · $169,359
How to read these rankings
These figures come from filed NCAA financial reports collected in our document corpus and parsed from the report text. 831 reports parsed cleanly; 56 could not be read and are absent from these rankings, so a school missing from a year has not necessarily reported nothing.
Football and basketball views come from the report's per-sport allocation tables. They cover recruiting and team travel, not aviation alone: commercial airfare, buses, hotels, meals, and other eligible costs share the same lines. A school can also leave some expenses unallocated.
Private universities have no public-disclosure obligation and generally do not appear. Fiscal years are not uniform — most close June 30, but some schools close on a different date, so a single “FY” column compares slightly different periods. Schools also categorize inconsistently between reports, so treat cross-school gaps of a few percent as noise rather than signal.