While Ohio University ranks No. 2 among Mid-American Conference schools in overall institutional expenses, its athletic department budget falls in the bottom of the stack.
Ohio's athletics expenditures place it at No. 10 in the conference for the 2003 fiscal year, according to a comparative data report, which was purchased by the athletic department and produced by Collegiate Financial Services, LLC. The data, based on numbers from the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA) reports, show that 2.7 percent of Ohio's institutional expenditures are allocated to athletics. The MAC average is 3.6 percent.
It just appears that we
over the past several years have not put in the same level of institutional support that some of our counterparts have Director of Athletics Thomas Boeh said. Our revenues are similar
if not exceeding
most schools in the Mid-American Conference.
However, the EADA reports did not always reflect that the revenues compared to other MAC schools. A June 10, 2003, article in USA Today listed OU as one of the 10 institutions in the nation that lost the most money on football during the 2002 season. Statistics like that waved red flags among administrators in the Ohio Athletics Department.
When administrators like Amy Dean, associate director of athletics for business administration, saw the difference in how much Ohio was supposedly losing in sports like football, compared to other MAC schools, they began to raise questions.
We noticed in the past few years that some institutions said they made as much in football as they spent
and we are looking at each other scratching our heads
thinking 'That can't be right; we had larger crowds than them
' Dean said. So we started talking to the business managers of those institutions.
What they found out was that most other schools were reporting institutional support differently.
With the EADA
it's up to interpretation how schools report that
Brian Davis, director of business operations, said. For example
the money the institution gives our department
