Do Golden Eagles Mean Gold for Marquette?

Site of the upcoming Uncorked: Milwaukee Wine Fest. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

The NCAA will bring in nearly $1 billion in revenue from the national basketball tournament this year. That is a lot of money that can be spread around to Division I schools. It sounds like good news for Marquette University, which is struggling with a financial shortfall and has plans to cut the annual budget by $31 million over the next seven years. But basketball is not a cash cow for most universities, not even for Marquette.

Most division I schools lose money on basketball. Marquette is a notable exception. In 2023, it was ranked as the 7th highest money-making program in the country. Its basketball revenue comes from NCAA funding, ticket sales, and regional media. Its revenues for the women’s basketball team was over $4 million; for the men, over $23 million. But every dime made by the women’s program went right back into basketball. For the men, it poured most of the money back into basketball and the rest into other athletic programs. As reported by College Factual, “The sports teams at Marquette brought home $39,362,305 in revenue while shelling out $39,362,305 in expenses. Although the school didn’t make any money, it didn’t lose any either!” Nothing from athletics went into supporting the general academics of Marquette.

Marquette does not generate significant income from the NCAA tournament even if it wins big. All the money first goes to the NCAA which takes money off the top for its operations. Conferences receive allocations under a system of “units” which this year will be approximately $2 million per unit. Each conference gets its conference winner into the tournament, which is one unit. Other teams selected to the tournament add additional units. This year, the Big East, which Marquette is a member, has three teams in the tournament adding $6 million to the conference. Each time a team wins and moves up the next level, another unit is added.

But when the final payout comes from the tournament, the money goes to the conference, not to a winning team like Marquette. The conference takes money off the top for its operating expenditures and then distributes the money equally to all members in the conference. Marquette gets about the same amount of money as the worst teams in the conference. While this might seem unfair to Marquette and other top ranked teams, they have a vested interest is seeing that their competitors can field quality teams that fill arenas when they play the conference heavyweights. Everybody makes more money that way.

Research is mixed as to whether winning teams boost enrollment or generate more contributions from alumni. Marquette saw a slight increase in enrollment this year. Colleges sports teams do generate alumni giving to the sports program, but whether a winning basketball team generates money to the college’s academic programs is questionable.

And investing big in a coach is never a guaranteed win. Take former MU coach Steve Wojciechowski, who came to the university with a golden resume from his days at perennial basketball power Duke University. He coached Marquette for seven years with just two NCAA bids and no tournament victories to show for it. When the university finally fired him, it had to pay a settlement of nearly $5.5 million to him in 2022, while also paying new coach Shaka Smart $2.1 million that year, its federal 990 tax form shows.

Marquette may feel that having premier basketball teams boast morale and general good feelings for students and alumni, but they probably add little to the university’s bottom line.

Correction: an early version of this story wrongly referred to the university’s $31 million debt; in fact it is reducing its annual budgets by $31 million over the next seven years.