Athletics success and program expense in NCAA sports

The issue of finances in intercollegiate athletics has been debated since nearly the inception of the NCAA. Throughout the near century of intercollegiate athletics governed by the NCAA there have been many issues that have contributed to the economic growth of intercollegiate sport. This growth has been greatly accelerated over the past three decades.;The influence of economics in college athletics is growing like never before. Since the creation of all-sports television and radio networks such as ESPN in the early 1980's, the increases in dollars spent each year on college athletics for university athletic budgets, media contracts and marketing has been exponential.;The impact that college athletics has on the economics of a community, a state and especially that of the university they represent, has long been debated. Numerous studies have occurred discussing if the success of the athletic program has contributed to the overall enrollment, fund raising and marketing of the university.;The purpose of this study was to determine if the amount of operating expense a specific Division I-A athletic team expends correlates to the winning percentage within their own conference or final place in the conference championship in that sport. There are 60 universities and 3,143 different athletic teams that compete in twenty sports represented in the data. Correlation coefficients were found for each of the 359 conference sports over the time period of 2000-2001 through 2004-2005.;For conference sports that have a regular season, data was analyzed by finding the Pearson Correlation Coefficient between the winning percentage for conference games within a season and the amount of expense a team records in the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act. For sports that do not have a regular season but has a season ending championship, data was analyzed by finding the Spearman-Rho Correlation Coefficient between the final standing from the championship competition and the amount of expense a team records in the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act.;Six hypotheses were researched using the overall data and various subsets of data. A moderate to strong correlation was found between winning and spending at the conference level and trends in correlations were greater for men's teams than women's teams, BCS than Non-BCS, non-revenue than revenue and event championships rather than season long standings.