Who spends the most on men's basketball 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 men's basketball.
Texas
$547K · $547,467
Georgia
$398K · $398,160
Virginia
$313K · $313,346
Buffalo
$167K · $167,229
Georgia State
$98K · $98,436
Central Michigan
$94K · $93,798
UT Arlington
$77K · $76,881
Northern Illinois
$43K · $43,485
Montana State University Billings
$24K · $24,241
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.