Date of Graduation

5-2014

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science in Business Administration

Degree Level

Undergraduate

Department

Accounting

Advisor/Mentor

Dittmore, Stephen

Abstract

The arms race in collegiate athletic facilities continues to advance and involves more and more money all the time. Large athletic departments continue to spend money on new, large, state-of-the-art facilities for their programs in order to give them the ability to attract big name coaches, players, and donors. College athletics is a major interest to many people in this country and the fact that these programs have become more and more of a business makes major facility expenditures an interesting and relevant topic to most of the general public. This leads to the question of what factors within the athletic department and within the university community are related to the amount of money that collegiate athletic departments spend on their facilities. This specific study took data from a six year time period for FBS Division I institutions in the areas of finance, athletic performance, facility usage, athletic department size, and institutional factors. The data was gathered from a variety of outside sources and then put through statistical analyses to find correlation and regression information between these variables and facility spending. These tests provided information about the relationships between the variables, how they affected each other, and what they could predict about facility spending. The correlations provided insights into which variables actually affected the amount of facility spending within a collegiate athletic department. It was not surprising that the financial variables were the most related, but it was interesting to note that some of the institutional factors and performance variables were not very related at all. The regressions also proved to be informative because of the variables that contributed to the variance in spending and which ones did not. These results even led to running a second regression with a change in the independent and dependent variable to gain more insights. Although there is much information about facility spending and the rising expenses in college athletics, there is not much correlational data to date. The results from this study can help give collegiate athletic departments more information and a more holistic picture of the relationships between these important variables before they start investing in a new major facility.

Keywords

college athletics; finance; football

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