You will never get a true apples-to-apples comparison because the on-campus finances from school to school vary dramatically as far as what is athletics revenue and what isn’t.
I will use Ohio State as an example here, since they are the top school on this list. Ohio State began using the athletics logo as its university logo. So the school, medical center, and a whole bunch of other departments end up paying the athletics department a licensing fee to use the logo. When Tennessee adopted the power T as the Knoxville campus logo, there was no such agreement, it just became the one standard mark.
Annual giving is another area where things are accounted for differently at different schools. Ohio State still allows donors to give to academic programs but receive athletic credit for it. So their donations end up being $48 million more than Tennessee when not all of that is necessarily athletics. Ohio State also controls its on-campus arena and revenue from concerts and other events go to the athletic department, rather than the university. The athletic department there does assume some risk and they are responsible for debt service, maintenance and upkeep, insurance, etc. But in years like this, it paid off for them. Here, the university owns and operates Thompson Boling, so revenue from major events does not go to the athletics department.
Parking is another huge area. At most schools, athletics controls the parking and revenue for athletic events. At UT, they do not. The athletics department actually rents out the lots from parking services and much of the parking fee that you pay goes to parking services, rather than athletics. Every penny of those $10 a car single-game parking fees in the garages for basketball games, concerts, all of that goes to parking services and not athletics.
But ultimately, this disparity in donations is what Danny White has spent the last two years talking about. Tennessee was way behind in donations because they still allowed so many grandfathered seats to generate zero revenue. We had people making one donation and getting tickets to football, men’s and women’s basketball and baseball off of it, where our peer schools are getting a donation for each, then tickets on top of it. When Danny changed it, people complained, but they had to close the gap. These numbers reflect the last year before the donation system fully changed.
