Methodology & Data Sources

College Sports Finance compiles NCAA Membership Financial Reporting System (MFRS) data for FBS college athletic departments and makes it publicly explorable through an interactive dashboard. This page explains what the data is, where it comes from, how it was collected, and what its limitations are.

What Is the NCAA MFRS?

The NCAA Membership Financial Reporting System (MFRS) is an annual financial disclosure that all NCAA Division I member institutions are required to submit. Schools report revenues and expenses across approximately 20 standardized categories — including ticket sales, media rights distributions, coaching salaries, student aid, recruiting expenditures, and sport-level breakdowns — for the fiscal year ending June 30.

The MFRS was designed to create consistent, comparable financial data across all Division I programs. Because the reporting categories are standardized by the NCAA, a "coaching salaries" figure at Ohio State and the same figure at Akron mean the same thing and can be directly compared. This is what makes the dataset uniquely valuable for understanding the economics of college athletics.

Important distinction: MFRS reports are not the same as a university's general financial statements. They cover only the athletics department, use NCAA-defined categories, and are audited or agreed-upon-procedures (AUP) reviewed by independent accountants.

How the Data Was Collected

Data in this project was obtained through two methods:

1. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) / Public Records Requests

For public universities in states with open records laws, MFRS reports are public records that can be obtained by request. Beginning in May 2026, we filed public records requests with athletic departments and general counsel offices at schools across all major FBS conferences.

Schools where data was obtained via FOIA/public records request include:

University of Akron (OH)
Bowling Green State University (OH)
University of Cincinnati (OH)
Ohio State University (OH)
University of Toledo (OH)
University of California, Los Angeles (CA)
Western Kentucky University (KY)
Virginia Tech (VA)
University of Washington (WA)

Additional requests are pending at schools across the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, ACC, and other conferences.

2. Public Athletic Department Portals

Many athletic departments voluntarily post MFRS reports on their public websites as part of their financial transparency commitments. We identified and downloaded these reports from official athletics domains. Schools where data was obtained from public portals include:

University of Arkansas
West Virginia University
University of Illinois
University of Tennessee
University of Georgia
Ole Miss (University of Mississippi)
University of Wisconsin
Iowa State University
University of Kansas
University of Utah
Colorado State University
Penn State University
San Jose State University
University of North Carolina
University of Louisville
Oklahoma State University
University of Arizona
University of Nebraska
California State University, Fresno
Several MAC Conference schools (Akron, Ball State, Buffalo, Central Michigan, Eastern Michigan, Kent State, Miami (OH), Northern Illinois, Ohio, Toledo, Western Michigan)

Coverage and Completeness

Coverage varies by school and year. Factors that affect completeness include:

FOIA denials or delays — some states restrict open records access to in-state residents; others have extended response timelines
Portal gaps — schools that post reports publicly often have incomplete archives, particularly for years before 2017
Private universities — private institutions (Notre Dame, Duke, Vanderbilt, etc.) are not subject to public records laws and generally do not disclose MFRS data
Report format changes — early MFRS reports (FY2010–FY2014) used a different format; parsing accuracy for those years may be lower

Limitations

This dataset does not include every FBS school. We are actively expanding coverage through ongoing records requests.
MFRS data reflects what institutions report to the NCAA. Reporting errors or categorization differences between schools are possible and outside our control.
Coaching salary figures represent per-FTE averages across all head coaches in the sport category, not individual contract values.
"Institutional support" — direct transfers from the university to cover athletic department deficits — varies widely in how schools categorize it, which can make cross-school revenue comparisons misleading without accounting for this line item.

About This Project

College Sports Finance was built by Greg Laubenstein, a data journalist interested in the financial dynamics of college athletics. The goal is to make NCAA financial data — which exists in publicly available PDF reports — accessible to fans, journalists, researchers, and policymakers without requiring them to manually read hundreds of pages of PDFs.

The interactive dashboard at college-sports-finance.com allows users to compare revenues, expenses, coaching salaries, and sport-level budgets across schools and over time.

Contact & Data Requests

If you're a journalist, researcher, or policymaker working on college athletics finance and need access to specific data, or if you spot an error in our data, please reach out. We are also happy to share the raw MFRS PDFs we have collected.