Alabama football financial report 2023

As somebody who looks at a bunch of these for a living (or has at various points in his career), let me just say that these sorts of reports are not reported on general accounting principles, can and are easily manipulated by that "Direct Institutional Support" number and are in total ("surplus"/"deficit") not a very good way to look at anything.

Where you can get something from them are details of tangible financial line items and compare them to prior years.

- Ticket sales and direct contributions falling by a combined $5.75M is a pretty big red flag (even if a lot of those contributions are being redirected to NIL stuff). I don't look at these anymore (not my area anymore), but I'd be very curious how this compares to other big schools and whether it's been a trend the last 3 years.

- The endowment income is entirely due to general investment conditions - everybody's endowments fell during fiscal year 2023. That in and of itself is a drop of $3.1M and has nothing to do with anything but unrealized gains/losses that are going to rise and fall every year.

- Direct institutional support is generally scholarships, but in a lot of cases at huge places in the SEC/B1G/BXII those figures go up and down based on how athletic departments want their released financials to look. They do not want those numbers to be high - even if it's entirely reasonable - because the public gets these documents, sees "institutional support" and immediately starts writing hit pieces about how much the school spends on sports.

- I don't know what the $14.3M in gifts being collected but not reported is for. All I can think of, unless its just purposely being held back from some reason, is that those gifts were for a future purpose and therefore aren't technically revenue (accounting treatment thing).


Finally, a big thing to remember with educational units (and non-profits in general) is that their goal is NOT to make a huge profit. If an athletic department or regular non-profit runs a gigantic surplus every year, that means they aren't being very good fiduciary stewards of their donors funds. The purpose of these organizations is to raise funds from donors and spend them accordingly. Now they don't want to run huge deficits, but the preferred place for Organizations like this to land every year is with a small profit that shows that they are wisely taking care of the funds AND they are spending the money donors are giving them.

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Do you think now that you can't claim this stuff on your taxes is the reason why this has fallen?

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I think the combination of losing the deduction + the NIL game has had a very large effect on that across the board.

People still give to targeted campaigns (a new stadium), but way less just give large general amounts year over year in the same way they used to.

"Student-athlete meals (non-travel) saw a jump from $918,301 to $5.89 million"

Did they switch from USDA choice to organic grass-fed prime beef or something?

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"Student-athlete meals (non-travel) saw a jump from $918,301 to $5.89 million"

Did they switch from USDA choice to organic grass-fed prime beef or something?

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How else do you think we fattened up that OL?

Thank you SOG for the detailed explanation, very helpful. Makes better sense now.
The gift part might be money donated for infra projects for various sports. At least that’s my understanding of it.

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Spending some time looking at the Alabama and Auburn financial filings with the NCAA, looking for differences. Here's one: athletics-dedicated endowment.

Alabama: $103.9 million
Auburn: $13.6 million

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Casagrande Tweet

Also, it should be noted that the FY 2023 means 7/1/2022 to 6/30/2023, which is the 2022 CFB season where we didn't make the CFP and so lost some potential revenue there.

Not sure it explains the whole $5.75M drop in that category but likely makes it less eye-popping.