Kicking this off
In the post NIL world, College Football programs will need to learn to operate as professional teams or die. The reward systems that schools used to rely on to recruit the best is gone. Money trumps all.
The prestige of getting admitted to some top tier academic program is meaningless when a Power 4 Quarterback is looking at 500k a year to play 12 games. Nick Saban’s pitch about how he’s going to mold a high school star into a man doesn’t really hold water when a running back is looking at earning 200k as an 18 year old. Oh you’re going to be shady and “gift” a hot recruit a new car? Carson Beck recently had his Lambo and Mercedes stolen from his house (he also owns a house), he’s 22 years old.
The game changed. SMU gets it, their billionaire oil money donors put together a 100M package to keep themselves competitive. They went 11-3, got to a ACC championship game and into the CFP playoffs, losing to a very good Penn State.
Auburn decided to take the high road and it cost them, with Hugh Freeze vocally not wanting to leverage the transfer portal in 2024 to get a new quarterback. Auburn finished bottom 3 in the SEC, going 2-6 in conference. 2025 Auburn is a different beast, they have the 6th highest ranked recruiting class, above LSU, Michigan and below Texas, Georgia, Ohio State, Alabama and Oregon.
Operating like a professional sports team also means embracing data. The stakes are too big. Boise State made 50.6M revenue in 2024 after going on a Jeanty led run to the CFP, up from 28.5M just a year earlier in 2023. There are 134 programs fighting over a finite player pool concentrated in a few geographic regions of the country, with program budgets ranging from 3M to 25M+.
Wrapping up my soapbox, money is part of the game. And with money comes the inevitable scrutiny on whether or not a team is maximizing value per dollar spent. This is where my dataset comes in. I want to make a base set of statistics that can be built upon by anyone doing data analysis. I have a google sheets, for now, publicly available data set for 134 programs in the 2024 season. Statistics collected are not advanced, they’re not meant to be. This is meant to be the starting point for a data scientists/analysts/whatever’s to perform an analysis. The value I am adding here is not novelty, you can find any of this online. What I am adding is a centralized source of everything, so you don’t need to spend months hunting and building out something yourself.