The Huskies are in the playoff race

Many of these buyouts are coming from private commitments erasing them from the Athletic Depts … without that money flowing in you're likely not getting the turnover. In many of these instances the changes are coming not because the institution or athletic department has decided its time to move on but because the most influential of boosters are making those decisions.

As for the NIL money, the fundamental issue with that is the mix between NIL providing some kind of return to the parties "investing" in the players and those deals actually passing the sniff test with the Deloitte clearing process … of course I think we all know that there's a lot of stuff that is still happening under the table.

For any public institution, you can reference the Knight Commission (https://www.knightcommission.org/finances-college-sports/) to dig into the revenues of each Athletic Department.

Since there is this idea around here that UW didn't do enough to keep DeBoer and that they should have fought harder against whatever offer that Alabama put on the table, it probably makes sense to look at the Athletic Department revenues for each school over the last 3 reported years (2022 to 2024) …

Alabama Athletic Department Revenue:

Washington Athletic Department Revenue:

What are the key takeaways:

• Prior to moving to the Big10, Alabama had annual Athletic Department revenues of $50-60M more annually than UW (2022-2023)

• UW was able to narrow that gap to around $45M in 2024 helped by an almost $20M increase in "Other Revenue" that I believe was tied to pulling forward some future revenue from the Big10 (will be able to be more visible the 1-time nature of this when the 2025 numbers become available)
  • Excluding the 1-time pull-forward of revenue UW would be $65M behind Alabama's Athletic Department revenue

• UW trails Alabama from a revenue perspective in 2 critical areas:
  • Conference/NCAA Distributions trailing by $25-30M annually - this will gradually be mitigated by moving to the Big10
  • Donor contributions ranging from $10-30M annually - this is a material gap that UW may not be able to materially close against traditional blue bloods without significant changes to the overall donor pool at UW

• UW is still receiving material institutional support post-COVID to the tune of $10M+ … this revenue is only because of the overall deficit that the Athletic Department is in post-COVID and I believe that a lot of this is to cover the debt burden of Husky Stadium

• The combination of Ticket Sales & Corporate Sponsorships is relatively consistent for UW and Alabama

It's not complete doom and gloom for the UW Athletic Department. These numbers should be fairly illustrative as to why the move to the Big10 was important for UW and how as UW moves into receiving a full share of Big10 revenue that that closes one of the major gaps vs a blue blood like Alabama. But the area that we lack compared to larger athletic departments is with respect to our donors and how much money we bring in (this in theory would also have implications to NIL as well).

As it pertains to DeBoer, this provides some actual data as to the relative resources of the schools involved and why just saying "UW should have paid more" is probably not as accurate of a response as you'd like it to be.