Who spends the most on recruiting
Transportation, lodging, and meals for prospective student-athletes and for staff on official and unofficial visits.
Georgia
$3.83M · $3,829,326
Oklahoma
$2.26M · $2,256,268
Missouri
$1.46M · $1,463,003
Oregon State
$1.14M · $1,137,217
Central Michigan
$568K · $567,605
Boise State
$558K · $558,104
Southern Miss
$558K · $558,102
Florida Atlantic
$471K · $470,765
Marshall
$459K · $459,321
Texas State
$396K · $396,122
App State
$376K · $376,196
New Mexico State
$376K · $375,795
Buffalo
$375K · $375,137
California Polytechnic State University
$325K · $324,575
Western Michigan
$321K · $320,791
Georgia Southern
$297K · $297,453
Georgia State
$248K · $247,863
North Carolina A&T State University
$237K · $236,896
Kennesaw State
$220K · $219,900
Florida Gulf Coast University
$219K · $219,258
Northern Illinois
$218K · $218,400
UMBC
$195K · $195,405
Idaho State
$163K · $163,240
Murray State University
$161K · $161,267
Eastern Illinois
$123K · $123,477
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.