Field House, NIL Money Riddle me this.

At $104.8 million, SDSU had the second-largest athletic budget in 2024-25 among non-power conferences behind UConn, according to the most recently available figures in the College Athletic Database operated by Syracuse University. James Madison is seventh at $78.8 million, ahead of Boise State, Colorado State, UNLV and Memphis. James Madison? The difference is the Dukes belong to the Sun Belt Conference, which typically distributes only about $2 million per year to each of its members. And JMU is a public university in Virginia, where state law severely limits institutional support for intercollegiate athletics. And it has far lower ticket sales, sponsorships and donor contributions than power conference schools with decades of sports tradition baked into its alumni base. So where does it get its money? The students are paying for the student-athletes. Tuition at JMU is just under $9,000 per year, but students pay a mandatory annual auxiliary fee of $6,222. Of that, $2,581 goes to athletics. That computes to just under $60 million. You must pay the fee whether or not you are interested in intercollegiate sports. You get free admission to games, but all of JMU’s games are free anyway except for football, men's basketball and women's basketball, and you could buy a season ticket to watch those teams for less than $500 combined. The $58.1 million the students contributed in 2024-25 ranks first among 350-odd Division I schools by a wide margin.

Read more at: https://www.fresnobee.com/sports/article317286837.html#storylink=cpy

James Madison is wildly higher than all other other schools on student fees to athletics.

Old Dominion is a distant #2.

University of Virginia is only power conference school ahead of Rutgers. VIrginia Tech will be higher than Rutgers this fiscal year because they need high student fees to pay for Franklin.

Good news for Rutgers students is fees to athletics are up only modestly in fiscal 2027 after double digit % increases.