Finally, here you will find all operating budgets for men’s hockey for FY25

Good morning to everyone except James Harden, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

So far we have published operating budget data for football, volley-ball, softball, baseball, women’s footballmen’s basketball and women’s basketball. We’ve noticed that fans definitely care about this, but coaches, agents, parents and ADs seem to really care.

We’ve covered just about all the team sports our readers have asked about, except one. Men’s hockey. But first an important announcement from our partner, Silver waves media:

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Men’s hockey is a slightly different calculation for us. Unlike the vast majority of D-I sports, several D-II institutions compete at the D-I level for men’s hockey, sometimes at the elite level. These schools would not normally be part of our typical FOIA process, but without them the data analysis would not be complete.

That’s why we spent some extra time getting that information. That’s not it exhausting (we’ll get to that in a moment), but I think we have enough here to be useful.

But first the usual caveats:

I obtain this data by submitting numerous open records requests to obtain each school’s FY25 MFRS report. This is an itemized budget report sent to the NCAA each year, and while not perfect, it is the closest thing to a standardized budget dataset in college sports. It is, in my professional opinion, more accurate, specific, and standardized than EADA data or other data sets you see floating around the internet.

This data does not include athlete payroll, house settlement payments, NIL, etc. This data comes from the Total Operating Expenses line item in the report. That includes coaches and staff salaries, buyout and severance packages for coaches, recruiting expenses, team travel, food, software costs, purchasing games and everything that goes into running a program IN ADDITION to athlete payments. This is slightly less of an issue in hockey than in football or basketball, but there are plenty of D-1 teams Doing share house money with hockey players. That will not be apparent from this figure.

The MFRS data may be the most accurate data set we have among public schools, but that doesn’t mean it’s error-free. There can be meaningful differences in how different schools decide to allocate specific expenses. Other factors, such as state law, college accounting policies, higher costs of living and more, can skew individual line items. I would encourage coaches, academics, reporters and others to use this data as a starting point for conversations, not as a cudgel or as the sacrosanct Word of God.

TL; DR, I’m sharing what the schools told the NCAA they spent.

This data is also from FY25, which is July 1, 2024 – June 30, 2025. That means this data is from the year Western Michigan won the national title and defeated Boston University. The data of the most recently The hockey season (with Denver as national champion) will be available to us in early 2026.

And speaking of Denver, a quick reminder: We can only obtain data from schools that respond to open records requests. Private schools, such as Denver, Boston College, Harvard, Northeastern, etc. are not required to respond to FOIAs and thus do not publish their MFRS reports. For college hockey, that kind of sucks, because a lot of the schools participating in DI are private schools.

We are currently missing FY25 MFRS data from Alabama State, ETSU, Ferris State, Troy, UNC-Asheville, and Tennessee State. If you happen to have the FY25 MFRS report card from any of these schools, I would be happy to give you free premium extra points in return (and/or give you one of ours). Feel free to send that data, or any other contract/MFRS data missing from the Extra Points Library, to [email protected]. Always happy to trade access to docs/comp.

Okay, enough chatter. Let’s talk about data.

I do not currently have the FY24 data for Northern Michigan, or the FY25 data for Ferris State.

It’s not about coach severance packages (only three schools reported on that, and none spent more than Miami’s $211,104). It’s not about payments for buy games (North Dakota alone has spent more than $100,000 on D-1 schools), or even travel (although it’s pretty wild to see a few Big Ten schools reporting spending more than the $652,862 they Alaska Fairbanks spent in FY25).

While coaches’ salaries were near the top of the list, it appears the biggest reason why Michigan State and Arizona State are so far ahead in spending on “debt service, leases and rentals for athletic facilities.” Both programs reported spending more than $2 million there. North Dakota spent over a million, and no one else made $150,000.

We compared the budget figures with the Pairwise ranking for the 2025 season. This is what we ultimately achieved:

I don’t really feel comfortable saying anything super compelling about the data because we’re missing so many schoolsand this is just one season. There are 64 teams competing in the Men’s D-1, and we have financial data for less than half of them.

Yet high-spending teams like Michigan State, Minnesota, Penn State and Ohio State all made the NCAA tournament. Michigan, Arizona State and North Dakota just missed the field. I would say this was actually the only high-spending program bad in 25 was Wisconsin, which finished 13-21-3.

The state of Minnesota was the only one audience D-II program to make the NCAA tournament field (they won the CCHA tournament), and no one else was equal near. (Edit: Sorry Bentley, that was not the intention

I could be completely wrong, but my educated guess is that most of the private schools at the very bottom of the national pairwise rankings (programs like Canisius, RIT, Stonehill, St. Lawrence, etc.) are closer in budget to the Bemidji states of the world than the states of Michigan. While we have not found a 1:1 relationship between total budget and postseason success in any sport to date, there is usually at least some correlation.

If there’s interest, I might tweet some budget data for sports like lacrosse and wrestling, but for anyone interested in creating their own reports: view the Extra Points Library.

Finally, take a minute and answer the question below. Thank you