Doing More With Less

(St. Louis, MO) – How do mid-major and low major teams compete with the ‘money conferences’ in college basketball? When we compare coaches’ salaries and money spent on the programs, with attendance and wins on the floor, the results are interesting.

In this article we’ll quote the best numbers we are able to secure from all kinds of websites and databases. USA Today and a great site, www.bbstate.com. are two places that proved invaluable.

Money Conferences draw more fans, win more games, spend more money and pay their coaches way more money than do conferences like the Missouri Valley and Ohio Valley. That is a given. More of their players go on to play professionally. That is expected, but I believe the MVC and OVC are achieving great things with comparatively limited resources.

I dug into the numbers related to the teams that fit the same ‘footprint’ of the OVC and MVC. So we looked at 12 teams from Big 10, Big 12 and SEC that reside in Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, Kentucky and Kansas. So we compared teams in the same states with the same geographical issues.

Many of those ‘money conference’ teams pay their coaches more money that many of the OVC and MVC teams spend on their entire programs! So these teams have significant disadvantages before the ball is rolled out for the first practice.

Only two Valley programs (Bradley and Wichita State) spend more than $3 million on their programs. Every one of the ‘money conference’ teams in our study spends more than $5.5 million. Only one OVC team (Belmont) spends close to that $3 million mark.

For example: Steve Prohm at Murray State (Kentucky) receives less than 10% of the salary that John Calipari receives at the University of Kentucky. Unofficially, those numbers are $490,000 to $6,356,000. In Prohm’s first four years at the Racer helm his teams have won 104 games and Calipari has 126 victories in that same period. Calipari earns over $50,000 per win, while Prohm’s victories cost less than $5,000.

In the state of Kansas, Bill Self receives just under $5 million per season compared to Wichita State’s Gregg Marshall, who just received a raise to $3 million annually. He was earning roughly $1.75 million. Those two great programs are upper echelon performers. For roughly $3 million the Jayhawks earned 186 wins compared to the Shockers’ 176 over the past six seasons. Oh, by-the-way, Wichita State defeated Kansas head-to-head during March Madness this season.

Marshall is the only coach in either the MVC or OVC that makes more than $1 million. Northern Iowa’s Ben Jacobson recently was given a raise to roughly $900,000, but that is almost double what he was making last year.

Six of the 12 OVC teams pay their coaches less than $200,000, while only six of the coaches of the 12 ‘money conference’ teams we studied, receive less than $2 million. There is no secret why coaches move on to the bigger schools. Bruce Weber (K-State), Kevin Stallings (Vanderbilt), and Matt Painter (Purdue) are former MVC coaches.

That being said, the student athletes in either situation are acquiring a college education, playing in front of thousands of fans every night and are getting an opportunity to explore high-level basketball.

Both Fran McCaffery ($1.8 million at Iowa) and Fred Hoiberg ($2.2 million at Iowa State) dwarf Jacobson’s salary and those schools both draw nearly three times the fans (roughly 14,000 at each institution compared to 5,170 at UNI), so maybe it is worth it to those schools.

Every team from the ‘money conferences’ that we studied, with the exception of Northwestern, averaged at least 11,000 fans to their games. In “The O”, just Murray State averaged more than 2,800 (4,644 for the Racers). While the Valley had only one team under 2,000 (Loyola), and only Wichita State averaged over 10,000 at 10,806.

Four other MVC teams joined WSU averaging more that 5,000 fans.

However, of the 12 teams from ‘money conferences’ only Kentucky went further than Wichita State in this year’s national tournament. The MVC put five teams into post-season play and won both the College Basketball Invitational (Loyola) and College Insider.com (Evansville) tournaments. The OVC had post-season success too, with UT-Martin rolling to the CIT semi-finals.

“The O” and the Valley have built in disadvantages. They have less money to spend, fewer fans to draw from, and they can’t get the ‘money schools’ to play them, but like that proverbial little brother, they get their licks in. UNI defeated Iowa this season. WSU defeated Kansas and went to the Sweet Sixteen.

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