Good morning and thank you for spending your time with this week’s issue of NILnomics. A few weeks ago, after weeks in the laboratory, I came out with a visualization of both FBS administration sizes but then the football staff size at FBS schools. This week, after more time in the lab, I’m back with a look at FCS football staff sizes.

Pour a drink. Get comfortable. Let’s get into it.

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Just wanted to mention we’ve hit 300 subscribers - thank you to everyone reading who has subscribed (if you haven’t yet, it’s free - hit the green button above!). I’ve been told getting your first 1,000 subscribers is the hardest, but I feel a lot of momentum with NILnomics. For context, it took 4 months to hit 100, 3 months to get to 200, and now just over a month to hit 300. That’s genuine momentum. So again - thank you to anyone reading who has subscribed, sent me an email, retweeted, commented, or engaged with the newsletter. Your support is very much appreciated!

To say thanks, I’m going to do another live Q&A with reader submitted questions. If you want to know how I scraped athletic department websites, what I think Division II/Division III football staffs look like, or any other questions, send them my way. I’ll answer them on a live YouTube stream (scheduled for December 12/23 @ 9pm) and you can watch the recording at your leisure afterwards.

Last time I did one of these, someone asked me to calculate the average ticket price at a few schools for football. That was fun! If anyone reading has a quick task, project, or idea - send it along. I may be willing to complete the project, soup to nuts, live on stream for you.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from scraping every Division I athletic department staff directory, it’s this: there is no such thing as “normal” in college athletics.

There’s no standard way to staff an athletic department. No shared blueprint for supporting dozens of teams with coaches, trainers, communications staff, marketers, accountants, and an entire ecosystem of roles I didn’t even know existed. And nowhere is that chaos more obvious than in football.

Consider this: Rutgers lists 101 football staffers. Sam Houston lists 13. That gap isn’t a rounding error—it’s a philosophy. Some schools clearly have money and are throwing it at the problem, hoping scale alone leads to success. Sometimes it works. Often, it doesn’t.

Which raises an obvious question: does it actually have to be this way?

Can programs win games, support student-athletes, and remain functional without letting staff sizes (and costs) spiral out of control?

To get at that question, NILnomics is heading somewhere new this week: the FCS.

This is our first deep dive into FCS football, and it’s long overdue. These programs operate under real constraints. Limited budgets. Smaller departments. Fewer safety nets. They’re forced to be creative, gritty, and efficient—and yet they still field competitive football teams with a fraction of the staffing seen at the FBS level.

Every college football fan knows the best moments of the season often come from this tier. The FCS upset. The so-called “cupcake” game that turns into a disaster for the bigger program that wrote the check. Those moments are thrilling precisely because they expose the illusion that more money and more staff automatically equal better results.

FCS programs deliver those moments—and do it with dramatically leaner operations.

That’s why this week’s focus is simple: football staff sizes, stripped down to their core. What’s necessary, what’s excess, and what the rest of college athletics might learn from the programs doing more with less.

Quick Takeaways:

Analyst’s Desk

This data comes from scraping the athletic department staff directory of every Division I school’s website. Not every Division I school has a football program. Don’t see your school? I tried my best, but may have missed some - email me and I’ll update it! Otherwise, I did count every staff member under the ‘football’ section. Note that many schools can put football related staff in other sections of their staff directory. For example, a staff trainer for just the football team may still be listed under their ‘Athletic Trainer’ section. Again, if you think the count is wrong - let me know.

I’m always on the lookout for anyone breaking down college sports and especially the business side of the industry. Here’s this week’s best listens:

Thanks for reading this week’s issue.

Given how much time I’ve spent scraping these websites, you can expect to see further analysis in this space. I could dive into other sports’ staff sizes, what job titles occur the most, etc. If you have thoughts - let me know!

Thanks again for your time. Now finish your beverage 😀

Until next time,

Greg Chick, PhD

Data Analyst

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