20 Years of HBCU Athletics Finances, Decoded

“We don’t have to match dollar for dollar. But we can’t be no dollar.”

— Willie A. Deese

Willie Deese has a way of making big ideas easy to hold. The former Merck executive — one of NC A&T’s most visible alumni donors and the chair of the university’s “All Aggies, All In” athletics campaign — joined the Aggie Pridecast to explain why philanthropic investment in Aggie athletics matters. The answer he keeps returning to is structural: NC A&T competes in a conference where the financial expectations keep rising, and the gap between what A&T can spend and what its peers can spend has real consequences for recruiting, scholarships, and long-term competitiveness.

That gap is concrete. NC A&T joined the Coastal Athletic Association in 2022, and the CAA is a well-resourced mid-major conference. According to Deese’s Pridecast interview, the College of Charleston has raised roughly $3 million a year to support men’s basketball through its name, image, and likeness (NIL) collective, and UNC Wilmington’s men’s basketball collective has been reported at $2.2 million.

The “All Aggies, All In” campaign is A&T’s response to that gap. Geoff and Tonya Foster — Aggie alumni and founders of Core Technology Molding Corp. in Greensboro — have made the largest single gift in the history of A&T athletics, a naming commitment for the football field and adjacent fieldhouse. Deese has said the campaign will support up to 20 additional football scholarships. The goal is to build enough philanthropic capacity to help A&T compete within the CAA over the long term.

With the campaign in motion, the broader question is simpler: how did the financial picture of D1 public HBCU athletics come to look the way it does? What are these programs actually working with, and what has changed over the last 20 years?

To answer that, Data Driven HBCU compiled 20 years of financial records across all 20 Division I public HBCU athletic programs — every publicly available fiscal year from the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database (FY2005–FY2024), paired with FY2025 NCAA Membership Financial Reporting System (MFRS) filings from the 11 institutions that had reported as of publication. The result is a dataset drawn entirely from public records spanning two decades.

The story that emerges is less about individual choices and more about a shared structure — one that has been taking shape, quietly and consistently, across the entire cohort for two decades.

The Subsidy Model Is the Model

HBCU athletic departments are not Power Four programs, and they were never built to operate like them. The media rights deals that fund big-conference athletics don’t exist at this level. College Football Playoff distributions don’t either. The conferences these schools compete in — the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC), Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC), Coastal Athletic Association (CAA), and the Ohio Valley Conference — circulate what revenue they have, which is meaningful but modest. By design, the schools themselves help fill the gap.

This is true across Division I. What is distinctive about the public HBCU cohort is the proportion. At every school in this group, institutional support — some combination of student fees, state appropriations, and direct university funding — is a primary source of revenue, not a supplement.

The data helps show how much that proportion varies. In FY2024, Florida A&M generated 51% of its athletics revenue from earned sources: ticket sales, competition guarantees, sponsorships, licensing, and donor contributions. That makes FAMU the most revenue-earning program in the cohort. At the other end, UMD Eastern Shore earned about 13% of its budget independently and relied on institutional support for the rest. Most schools fall between 20% and 40% earned.

Looking across two decades, the share of earned revenue has tended to shrink rather than grow for most of these schools — largely because expenses have outpaced earned revenue. South Carolina State’s institutional subsidy moved from 33% of its athletics budget in FY2005 to 71% in FY2024. Alabama A&M went from 44% to 75%. A handful of programs moved in the other direction — Florida A&M has held near 50%, and Jackson State dropped from 78% to 58% — but those are the outliers. For most of the cohort, the institution is doing more of the work today than it was 20 years ago.

Expenses Are Outpacing Revenue

In the earliest Knight-Newhouse data we have, covering FY2005–FY2008, the 20 schools in this cohort collectively averaged a $2.1 million annual surplus. That was before the Great Recession, before the name, image, and likeness (NIL) era, before the transfer portal, and before the financial arms race that now defines Division I football and basketball.

By FY2013–FY2016, the collective average had shifted to a $4.8 million annual deficit. By FY2022–FY2024, it was $11.1 million. The direction hasn’t reversed in any era we measured. That kind of consistency across 20 years points to structural pressure rather than a series of one-off cycles.

The largest single driver is coaching compensation, and that is not unique to HBCU programs. Across Division I, the cost of Division I coaching staffs has risen sharply over the last two decades — salaries for head coaches, full coaching staffs, support staff, and analysts have all grown faster than overall athletics revenue at most schools. In this cohort, coaching compensation has grown somewhere between 200% and 400% over 20 years, depending on the school. Texas Southern’s coaching expenses grew 389%. NC A&T’s grew 272%. These aren’t outliers; they are the middle of the distribution.

That growth has changed the internal composition of a typical athletics budget. In FY2005, nearly every school in this cohort spent more on student-athlete scholarships than on coaching. By FY2024, that relationship had reversed at a handful of schools: NC A&T, for example, spent $1.58 on coaching for every $1.00 of student aid. Tennessee State and Texas Southern crossed the same threshold. Total scholarship spending continued to rise in these programs, but coaching costs rose even faster — a pattern that mirrors what has happened, at different scales, throughout Division I.

Not All Deficits Are Created Equal

A headline deficit number tells you the size of a gap. It does not tell you what produced it, and that distinction shapes how athletic departments and their university partners think about a path forward. Two programs in this cohort help illustrate the point.

Prairie View A&M reported an $8.15 million shortfall in FY2025. Within that figure, $6.6 million is allocated to facilities and debt service — the bond payments and capital amortization tied to infrastructure the school has built or is building. That line item rose from $1.9 million in FY2016 to $5.1 million in FY2017 and has stayed at that level since, a pattern consistent with a multi-year capital project coming online. Setting aside debt service, the operational portion of the budget — the day-to-day costs of running the department — is closer to $1.5 million. A large share of the reported deficit, in other words, represents a capital investment being paid down over time. That is a familiar structure at schools that finance athletic facilities through bond issuance, and it is generally treated on campus as a planned obligation rather than an annual operating gap.

Grambling State reported $4.97 million and a different mix of drivers. The school reported $0 in facilities and debt service in FY2025, so the full gap sits on the operational side: coaching, travel, aid, meals, and recruiting. There is no bond amortization schedule in the background that will gradually retire the number.

Neither situation is inherently better or worse than the other. They simply respond to different tools. Investment-driven gaps tend to ease as bonds are refinanced or retired and are typically part of a long-range facilities plan. Operational gaps are usually addressed through steady work on the revenue or expense side of the ledger — scheduling, fundraising, ticketing, guarantees, roster management, staffing models — and they look different from school to school depending on conference, market, and institutional strategy.

The broader cohort picture reinforces the same idea. Southern University’s facilities line grew from roughly $110,000 a year to $5.6 million a year over the window in which Prairie View’s climbed, another program in a capital-investment phase. Coppin State has reported deficits in 18 of the last 20 years, with almost no facilities debt at all, a pattern shaped by the size of its program, its sports sponsorship, and the market it operates in. In an aggregated chart, those deficits can look similar. On the ground, they reflect very different circumstances and call for very different responses.

Scholarship Allotments and What They Tell Us

If the revenue side of these budgets is shaped by institutional context, the expense side reveals how each program chooses to compete within the resources available to it.

Among the FY2025 schools, total scholarship equivalencies range from 90.97 at UMD Eastern Shore to 184.59 at Southern University. Mississippi Valley State distributes 92.13 equivalencies across 174 student-athletes in 15 sports. That ratio — fewer equivalencies than athletes — is common in this cohort and across much of Division I outside football and basketball. It generally means athletes are on partial scholarships, and some non-revenue sports are funded below the NCAA maximum allotment. This is a recruiting reality, not a criticism.

The competitive implications, though, are real. When a prospective student-athlete compares aid packages across schools, differences in funding levels affect enrollment decisions. That’s true at every level of college sports.

Cost per equivalency helps illustrate the same point from a different angle. Across the FY2025 cohort, the figure ranges from $17,178 at NC A&T to $36,985 at Norfolk State. The variance is driven by state tuition laws, residency rules, the mix of in-state and out-of-state athletes, and cost-of-attendance levels at each institution. When the comparison extends to conference peers outside the cohort, the ranges widen further. In the CAA, NC A&T distributes more football equivalencies than any public member — 69.21 — at an average cost per equivalency of roughly $10,780. The CAA average for public schools is closer to $44,000 per equivalency. The table below summarizes the CAA’s public members.

CAA Football Peer Comparison — FY2025 MFRS

Source: FY2025 NCAA MFRS sport-level filings. FB Exp is calculated from direct football expense categories: student aid, coaching compensation, recruiting, team travel, and equipment/supplies. Sorted by FB Exp. W&M excluded (football departing for the Patriot League). NC A&T highlighted.

Part of that gap has a clear structural explanation. North Carolina’s in-state tuition law extends in-state rates to every student-athlete on scholarship at a UNC System school, regardless of the athlete’s home state. Each A&T equivalency is therefore priced lower than equivalencies at most of its CAA peers. The same law applies to UNC Wilmington, which funds its scholarships at roughly 80% of the in-state cost of attendance; NC A&T funds its scholarships at roughly 49%. Part of that gap is cost-of-attendance methodology, part is institutional funding capacity, and part is what the “All Aggies, All In” campaign is designed to help close.

The Data Has Nuance — And That’s the Point

Financial reporting at this level rewards careful reading. Two examples help illustrate why.

NC A&T’s FY2025 filing reports $0 in donor contributions. Taken at face value, that would suggest the program is fundraising for nothing, which would be difficult to square with an eight-figure, multi-year athletics campaign. The explanation is that the Aggie Athletic Foundation, the primary vehicle for A&T athletic giving, directs most of its dollars directly to scholarships. Those gifts land under different MFRS categories than the “Donor Contributions” line. The money is there; it’s just recorded on a different line of the form.

UAPB’s FY2025 filing illustrates a similar point. On paper, UAPB appears to have jumped from 28% self-generated revenue in FY2024 to 80% in FY2025 — a swing larger than any plausible single-year change. The more likely explanation is a reclassification of institutional support within the filing rather than an actual shift in how the program is funded. Dollars that were reported one way in FY2024 appear to have been reported another way in FY2025.

These kinds of reclassifications and reporting conventions are not footnotes; they are central to reading MFRS data accurately. A quick comparison between two schools’ filings can be misleading if the categories don’t align. A careful read — one that knows which filings are internally consistent across years and which have been restructured — produces a clearer picture. The Data Driven HBCU dashboards are built to make those distinctions easier to see.

Closing the Gap

This is the landscape facing NC A&T and its peers. A subsidy-supported financial model shared across the entire D1 public HBCU cohort. An expense line that has grown faster than earned revenue at most schools, mirroring national trends in Division I. Conference peers whose NIL collectives have expanded rapidly. Scholarship structures vary widely from school to school, based on state law, university funding, and program priorities.

The “All Aggies, All In” campaign isn’t trying to solve all of that. No single campaign could; the pressures are industry-wide. What it is trying to do is build enough philanthropic capacity to help A&T compete within the CAA — to fund more football scholarships, strengthen support staff, and keep pace with conference peers while the broader financial picture of HBCU athletics continues to evolve.

“We said we wanted to be at a run rate of a million dollars a year by 2030. Well, we’re going to be at a million dollars a year at the end of the first year.”

— Willie A. Deese

The data in this article is meant to help readers understand why that pace matters — and to offer a common vocabulary for the conversations happening inside athletic departments, boardrooms, and booster clubs across the cohort. The dashboards at datadrivenhbcu.com show the full picture, school by school and year by year. The question behind every trend line is the one Deese keeps asking in his own way: what does it cost to compete at this level, and how do programs at this level build the resources to do it sustainably?

That question isn’t unique to NC A&T. It is the question facing every athletic director, every university president, and every donor community in the D1 public HBCU cohort. The 20-year record tells us how the answers have trended so far. The next chapter is being written now.