Who spends the most on recruiting
Transportation, lodging, and meals for prospective student-athletes and for staff on official and unofficial visits.
Georgia
$3.44M · $3,440,309
Oklahoma
$2.31M · $2,306,031
Texas
$2.29M · $2,285,024
Missouri
$1.50M · $1,500,946
Boise State
$746K · $745,947
Buffalo
$606K · $606,328
App State
$590K · $589,564
Coastal Carolina
$565K · $565,120
Arkansas State
$547K · $546,870
Western Michigan
$544K · $543,753
Central Michigan
$520K · $520,073
Georgia State
$452K · $451,977
Texas State
$432K · $432,276
Georgia Southern
$351K · $351,246
Murray State
$214K · $213,807
Northern Kentucky
$191K · $191,144
UMBC
$181K · $180,884
Radford
$165K · $165,117
UT Arlington
$132K · $131,826
Montana State University Billings
$32K · $32,418
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.