A three-year study of Division I athletics budgets shows a continued trend of expenses outpacing revenues.

The NCAA’s latest revenue and expenses report from 2004-06 indicates that revenues were up 16 percent for schools in Division I’s Football Bowl Subdivision, but those same programs incurred a 23 percent increase in spending during the same period.

The findings echo the core message the NCAA Presidential Task Force delivered two years ago when it warned that, on average, Division I’s highest echelon was spending more than it generated (and that athletics spending was increasing at rates higher than those of university spending), thus amplifying the pressure on institutions to subsidize athletics from general funds.

In 2004, the average FBS institution received about 19 percent of total revenue from allocated sources. In 2006, that proportion was up to 25 percent. In the Football Championship Subdivision, about 75 percent of revenue comes from allocated sources, a proportion that has been fairly constant over the three years studied.

“The good news is that athletics still makes up only about 5 percent of an institution’s budget,” said NCAA President Myles Brand, “but the caveat is that the vast majority of schools have larger athletics deficits to subsidize.”

Only 19 FBS programs generated revenue that exceeded expenses in the 2006 fiscal year, and just 16 reported positive net revenue over the three-year aggregate. The median positive net revenue for the 19 institutions in that category in 2006 was $4.3 million. By contrast, the median negative net revenue for the other FBS institutions was about $8.9 million, exposing a gap (about $13.2 million in 2006) that has grown by about $2 million since 2004.

The expense-over-revenue pace for FBS schools also exists in the FCS, where median generated revenue increased 6 percent from 2005 to 2006 and 13 percent for the two years from 2004 to 2006. The median total expenses, meanwhile, increased 10 percent from 2005 to 2006 and 23 percent from 2004 to 2006. The median deficit in 2006 was about $7.1 million, a figure that has increased in each of the last three years (from just under $6 million in 2004).

For Division I schools without football, spending increased by a rate of 24 percent from 2004 to 2006. About 10 percent of the subdivision reported net generated revenue in men’s basketball, but none reported an entire athletics budget in the black.

The 2004-06 report clarifies terminology under which the data are collected, and it includes salary and facility information not captured in previous reports. It also distinguishes between “allocated” and “generated” revenue. As such, the latest report (available at www.NCAA.org) is not comparable to studies the NCAA has conducted since 1969. The latest version, though, will be a benchmark for future studies, which is why the report includes three years of data (so that comparisons can at least be made within the cohort).