Oklahoma State Out-Pacing Budget In Athletic Success

I have been thinking a lot about some of the comments Mike Holder made right after the Mike Boynton press conference last month when the former Mike introduced the latter Mike as his new head basketball coach.

“Most people obviously don’t know me,” Holder said to Guerin Emig of the Tulsa World. “Just look at my history. I’ve been here a long time. I believe that I’ve always been about nothing but excellence and being the best.

“Not only does that apply to basketball, it permeates the entire athletic department. Those 51 championship banners in that arena speak volumes about the commitment to excellence at Oklahoma State University. Our finish in the Learfield Directors Cup last year was 13th. I think that says a lot.”

Ah yes, the prestigious Learfield Drectors Cup. Wait, what in the world is this? Basically it is an award that measures the best schools across all sports.

Here is the definition.

The NACDA Learfield Sports Directors’ Cup is an award given annually by the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics to the colleges and universities in the United States with the most success in collegiate athletics. Points for the NACDA Directors’ Cup are based on order of finish in various National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) sponsored championships or, in the case of Division I Football, media-based polls.

So this is actually a good measuring stick for athletic departments as a whole (although its obvious shortcoming is that it doesn’t weight men’s basketball and football the way those should be weighted). If your men’s basketball and football stink, then it doesn’t do you much good financially.

But Holder isn’t talking about men’s basketball and football. He’s talking about all sports.

“I think everybody has them,” Holder told the TW about financial constraints. “Probably even at the University of Texas, where their budget is at $175 (million) or $180 million. There are probably some things that they can’t do. Obviously at a budget at $76 million in comparison to that, you have some limitations. But that hasn’t stopped us at competing at the very highest levels across the entire spectrum of college athletics.”

First of all, $76 million is a bit misleading. That is the total revenue Oklahoma State made for the 2015-16 school year not including contributions, and it’s not as if contributions are going to stop rolling in. The actual revenue for OSU last year was $93.7 million.

Anyway, I think Holder has a point. I gathered all the data for Power 5 public schools (Baylor, Stanford, TCU and USC were not available) and held up the athletic department budgets against their average finish in this Learfield Cup Holder speaks of.

What I found is that of the 52 schools with available data, only 14 are performing at a higher level than their budgets would indicate they should perform at.

The data measured here is the 2014-15 budget (according to USA Today) and the average finish of the 2014-15 and 2015-16 Learfield Cups. All numbers were rounded up.

As you can see, OSU has the 26th biggest budget but is performing like the 20.5 best athletic department over the last two years. Now obviously budgets change a lot based on donations, but I think between 20-30 is about where OSU has been in the recent past and for the foreseeable future. They are the only Big 12 school outperforming their budget across all sports (*we don’t have data for TCU and Baylor).

Furthermore, it has been pretty solid in the sports you want to be pretty solid at (men’s basketball and football). It was one of only six Power 5 schools that won 20 games in basketball and 10 in football in the 2016-17 school year. The only other one that did it and is also on the list above is Virginia Tech.

So that’s pretty impressive. And it means Holder is kind of right. You can complain that OSU doesn’t generate enough revenue or that it is not a big-time enough program, but you can’t say that it is a school that is under-performing its resources. Because recent data will say otherwise.