We need to talk about football. Granted, given everything else going on in the world, football may not seem all that important. But San Diego State University‘s athletics spending is on a collision course with academics.
Created by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database is widely considered a reliable source on how much money colleges and universities spend on athletics because the data comes from public reports filed by NCAA Division I institutions.
San Diego State’s numbers were missing until very recently, but they finally appeared, and they are truly shocking.
- Total revenues –$91.42 million
- Total expenses — $120.53 million
- That leaves a deficit of $29.11 million
There’s more.
Between 2019 and 2024, spending on football rose from $16.82 million to $23.54 million. That’s a 40% increase.
Coaching salaries went up from $3.94 million in 2019 to $6.99 million in 2024 — a 77% rise.
While donor contributions went up significantly in those same years, and while they account for the largest percentage total revenues, that percentage, in 2024, was only 30%.
The rest comes from a variety of sources, including the institution and student fees. Both have gone up nearly every year.
In 2019, institutional support accounted for $17.52 million; in 2024, $18.87 million.
In 2019, student fees accounted for $11.7 million; in 2024, $15.11 million.
But as the amount spent on football spirals upward, ticket sales dropped from $9.7 million in 2023 to $8.84 million in 2024. Even with a new stadium, ticket sales went down. In fact, season-ticket sales have gone down each year since Snapdragon opened, from 15,973 in 2022 to 10,718 in 2023 and 8,755 in 2024.
So it’s fair to say that football is not particularly popular among San Diego residents. The same is true for students. The usual justification for spending so much on football is that the program attracts students. But that’s not what they say.
When students are asked why they chose SDSU, athletics ranks near the bottom, according to data presented in August 2025.
When asked about their level of interest in various aspects of the “SDSU Experience,” athletics does not even make the list.
While athletics spending rises year after year, spending on academics (the main reason SDSU exists in the first place) goes down. Thanks to decreasing allocations from the legislature, SDSU’s budget went down by $10 million two years in a row. So that’s a $20 million reduction. But the cuts are not distributed equally across the divisions: academics accounts for half — $5 million less in 2024/25, followed by another $5 million reduction in 2025/26.
Athletics, by way of contrast, had its budget reduced by a mere $192,494 in 2024/25, and $440, 526 the next year.
And make no mistake, these cuts have significantly affected the teaching mission. Class sizes are larger than ever. The hiring “chill” is still in effect. And the library’s budget is scandalously low. SDSU may proudly crow about its new status as an R1 university, but our library budget is second from the bottom. It’s on par with Wayne State University and Northern Arizona University.
And we are now saddled with debt. Thanks to the Mission Valley project and our new stadium, SDSU went from owing zero in 2019-21 to $30.11 million in 2024. So Mission Valley’s revenue will go toward paying off loans, not increasing the library’s budget, lowering class sizes, or hiring tenure-track professors.
I don’t know how the university can justify spending more and more on football while spending less and less on academics. Evidently, neither the general public nor students are particularly interested in watching the Aztecs, so why continue to pour ever-increasing amounts of money into this program while the academic budget dwindles?
Nor is there any word on how the university intends to address the $29 million shortfall in athletics. When I asked for comment about these numbers, the university said it “cannot speak to the Knight Foundation’s process” and suggested that “athletics is not viewed as a separate entity from academic programs at SDSU, but is considered an integral part of what makes us SDSU.”
This situation is not sustainable. Given the financial and political pressure on universities, SDSU needs to start privileging academics, not athletics. Teaching and research need to come first.
Peter C. Herman is a professor of English literature at San Diego State University. He has published books on Shakespeare, Milton and the literature of terrorism, and essays in Salon, Newsweek, Inside Higher Ed, and Times of San Diego. His latest book is “Early Modern Others: Resisting Bias in Renaissance Literature” (Routledge).
