Vasha Hunt-USA TODAY Sports
By Chris Marler
The SEC has been known as a football first conference for years. The vice grip they’ve had on the gridiron has started to slip a little after not winning, or even playing for, a national title in the last three years.
That dominance has shifted to other sports in recent years, particularly basketball, where the arms race for relevance on the hardwood has reached an all-time high.
On Monday, Matt Brown of Extrapointsmb.com released the operating budgets for more than 200 men’s basketball programs across America for the 2025 fiscal year. It should be noted that only 14 SEC teams were included in Brown’s report, with Florida and Vanderbilt not listed. The budget figures also do not include any revenue-sharing payments.
Here is a look at the budget for all 14 SEC schools that were in the report, including where each program ranked nationally.
By the Numbers
- Tennessee – $23,183,445
- Texas – $22,403,330
- Arkansas – $21,254,027
- Kentucky – $20,787,671
- Auburn – $20,535,097
- Ole Miss – $18,228,378
- Alabama – $15,230,392
- Missouri – $14,354,000
- Texas A&M – $14,318,327
- Oklahoma – $13,662,135
- Mississippi State – $12,220,602
- LSU – $11,104,405
- South Carolina – $11,074,153
- Georgia – $10,400,030
Note: Florida and Vanderbilt were excluded from the list.
Biggest Takeaways
There are several things that jump off the page from this report, and most notably it’s how far the budget went for some of these schools in comparison to their success. Even more glaring is how little success some schools had despite a massive budget.
LSU and South Carolina were the only two conference teams that failed to make the NCAA Tournament a season ago, so seeing them rank in two of the bottom three spots in the league is no surprise. However, seeing a program like Texas spend more than $22 million before NIL, including signing a lottery pick, makes the results they got even more surprising.
The Longhorns finished last season with just 19 wins and were a bubble team in the tournament. Both Texas and the biggest spender in the country, Indiana ($32,041,364), finished with just 19 wins, meaning they paid more than $1.4 million per win.
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