CBS Sports recently conducted a survey of college football GMs, staffers, agents, and others to get an idea of what each power-conference school is spending on its football team this season and found the average roster cost to be well over $20 million.
Here’s what they found for the ACC:
Over 40 Million
Miami
Over 30 Million
N/A
Over 20 Million
Clemson
Florida State
Georgia Tech
Louisville
North Carolina
SMU
Virginia
Virginia Tech
Under 20 million
Boston College
Cal
Duke
NC State
Pitt
Stanford
Syracuse
Wake Forest
Miami is one of six schools spending more than $40 million on its roster and at this point is heavily outspending everybody else in the league—not that this comes as a shocker, especially considering what they had to to do to land Darian Mensah.
In the under-$20 category there are eight schools, NC State included (also not a shocker). Across the power conferences, the survey finds 21 total teams coming in under $20 million, but only three are in the Big Ten, and the SEC has none.
This breakdown from a Big 12 GM is a good general explainer for the country’s lighter spenders:
“The models I put together, if you want a $25 million roster in our league, I don’t know anybody in our league that would put more than $16 in the rev, then you can’t take care of the other sports,” a Big 12 GM said. “Most everyone — outside of Texas Tech — is around 14-16 in the rev and $3-5 million outside money.”
When the official revenue share pool was established, most schools decided to allocate about 70-75% to football, which is what that $14-16 million range refers to. The excesses from there basically represent the spending by boosters via NIL collectives.