What Do You Think About Georgia Tech Outspending The ACC In Recruiting Costs?

I got sent a link by a few folks over the period of last week regarding the money spent for recruiting in the ACC. While they don't provide a link to the original information AND the fact-checking is questionable, for Monday's conversation let's jump into the subject of the cost of recruiting at Georgia Tech.

In 2010-2011, Georgia Tech was (supposedly) the only ACC school that spent over $1 million towards Men's athletics recruiting. Only two schools are in the $900,000 range (North Carolina and Duke). The lowest spending school is Maryland at $538,000.

From the article:

In 2010-11, Georgia Tech’s men’s sports programs spent the greatest amount on recruiting in the ACC with $1,173,904.00. Subsequently, Georgia Tech also spent on average, the most amount on recruiting per men’s team, with $167,700.57 per team. This amounted to $4,658.35 spent per male athlete at Georgia Tech. Arguably, the amount spent to actually recruit individual athletes would be higher, as the average calculated took into consideration every male athlete at Georgia Tech and not solely incoming student-athletes (thus, it took into consideration juniors and seniors in men’s sports programs). The Department of Education does not report how many student-athletes a school recruited in a given year, but rather, provides a lump-sum number of the amount of student-athletes on campus.

First, her math is wrong. Georgia Tech has 8 men's sports, not 7. $1,173,904 divided by 8 programs gives you $146,738. Ignoring the problems in facts and math, the subject is an interesting one to discuss.

Do you think Georgia Tech still has a higher recruiting cost than other ACC schools?

A program-by-program breakdown is not available so all the money put into basketball, baseball, and tennis gets lumped in with football. But based on our football recruiting, I would bet that we would see basketball and baseball playing larger roles in the recruiting costs than we might initially think. One argument for this cost would be that Georgia Tech must perform a national recruiting search in all of its male sports in order to find the right individual that meets both academic and athletic expectations.

From the June 30 2011 and 2010 Georgia Tech Athletic Association Financial Report (pg. 14)

Recruiting expenses include the costs of staff traveling for recruiting purposes as well as the cost of

bringing in recruits, student athletes for official visits to Georgia Tech’s campus. Costs include all

reasonable modes of transportation, meals, and accommodations. These costs are driven by the number

of available scholarships typically for the next two fiscal years. Due to the cyclical nature of these

expenses, there was a significant increase $478,578 (46.7%) in this category in FY 11. In the previous

year, football recruiting expenses were $327,591 below FY 09 totals due to the fact that the current

coaching staff had fewer roster spots to fill in FY 10. In FY 11, the number of available scholarships

increased (as evidenced by the savings in football scholarship expenses noted above) causing football

recruiting expenses to increase $371,937 versus FY 10. The remainder of the FY 11 increase resulted

from increased recruiting travel expenses incurred by men’s and women’s basketball.

Does the cost of our student-athlete recruitment worry you?