Gentry Estes of the Mobile Press-Register has done some digging for dollars work to rank just how the 11 SEC public schools rank in money spent on recruiting in football, basketball and baseball.
(Vandy doesn’t count since as a private school, VU doesn’t have to make its documents public.)
Kentucky ranked 8th of 11 in average football recruiting budget from 2005-08. UK was fifth of 11 in money spent on basketball recruiting for the same time period. And UK was second of 11 over the same period for money spent on baseball recruiting.
Here’s a chart to make comparisons:
Interesting that despite all the complaining about how much UK spends on the basketball program, the biggest recruiting budget belonged to Auburn, who couldn’t beat the Washington Generals for the majority of that time period.
Are we to understand that UK spent an average of a mere $181,958 on basketball recruiting for those years? That seems a pittance. What kinds of expenses are included? All airfare, travel, lodging, cell phones for recruiting players around the country for an entire year? For the entire staff? I would have not been surprised by a 7 figure sum. Kudos to their travel agent.
Click below to read Gentry’s main story on recruiting costs.
http://blog.al.com/press-register-sports/2009/07/recruiting_costs_tennessee_top.html
Or, you can look at this way. UK spends $36,000 a year on each of the five basketball signees. Compare that to the $12,000 per person they spend on the twenty five football signees. It doesn\’t seem to be weighted to fairly, does it? If you were to spend equally, our football budget would be around $900,000.