Who spends the most on football recruiting
Transportation, lodging, and meals for prospective student-athletes and for staff on official and unofficial visits. These figures are the amounts each school allocated to football.
Georgia
$3.68M · $3,676,858
Texas
$1.28M · $1,275,368
Virginia
$745K · $745,347
Central Michigan
$296K · $295,919
Buffalo
$272K · $272,385
Georgia State
$237K · $237,176
Northern Illinois
$102K · $102,157
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.