🏅Does Football Spending = Playoff Success?

Hey there,

Is there a correlation between how much money a school spends on their football program and their odds of winning the national championship? Today we’re testing that hypothesis with all twelve of the CFP contenders – evaluating each one’s spending ability in relation to their odds of being crowned champions. It’ll be a little bit of off-field discussion, a little bit of on-field analysis, and a whole lot of fun. 

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— Cole, Justin and Collin

The College Football Playoff is finally here, and to celebrate it’s arrival, we thought we’d do a little breakdown of each team. But, because we’re doing our own thing over here at NIL Wire, we thought we’d mix it up a bit by testing a hypothesis.

Everyone says that spending = winning in today’s college football landscape, but is that actually true? We just got the numbers on how much each school is spending via their football budget, and it’s led us to ask some uncomfortable questions, namely: What is the relationship between football spending and CFP success? Is there even a correlation between spending and odds of winning the CFP? Can you just spend money on your football program and eventually end up with a national championship?

In order to test out what I’m calling the “correlation hypothesis” – that football funding = CFP success – we’re going to attack the problem systematically.

First, we’re going to break down each team in the CFP’s football budget numbers (from 2023). Then, we’re going to go through the 12 selected teams’ odds of winning the CFP and see if their football allocation money lines up with their odds of winning. That should give us at least a clearer picture of the relationship between football spending and on-field success. 

A quick note, before we get started: The numbers we’re looking at here aren’t about NIL spending. These numbers are about how much money the school itself is spending on their football program. The two are related, but not the same thing. That’s important for two reasons. 

One, if we see any discrepancies between the team’s budget and success, we know there’s another part to the equation we could look at – their NIL success.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly in my opinion, these numbers can tell us a lot about who’s set up well for the future of college sports. Once the House Settlement is implemented next year, NIL resources will only be part of the equation. If there’s schools that are working with massive amounts of money in their football budget, they’ll be able to easily transition into the next phase of the sport. Meanwhile, schools who are toward the bottom of spending will struggle to keep up.

Alright, now that that’s out of the way, are you ready? Let’s get into the numbers.  

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