Hello and thanks for opening up the NILnomics newsletter. There’s a lot of talk about Arkansas over the weekend and I wanted to dive in. I was surprised by what I found - how they’ve invested in men’s basketball, still spend significantly on football, and what that says about the rest of the SEC. Let’s dive in.
Arkansas lost to Georgia on Saturday, 45-17: the twelfth consecutive loss to an FBS opponent. That’s a school record and the longest active streak in college football. Ryan Silverfield, hired from Memphis in December and now 1–2 with an average losing margin of 30.5 points, did not hide from it.
Am I pissed? Absolutely. Damn straight I'm pissed off. But guess what? We're going to get this fixed.
Ryan Silverfield, Arkansas head coach, September 19, 2026
Blame quickly routed to the financial state of the Razorback’s football program. The Athletic reported that Arkansas ranks last in the SEC in football roster spending. CBS Sports put the figure at roughly $24 million this season, against elite programs projected to clear $60 million. Athletic Director Hunter Yurachek conceded the obvious: "We're two games in… Is it going the way we want it? Absolutely not." Arkansas’ Board of Trustees has since approved a resolution ordering a review of the department's competitiveness.
So it’s the accountant’s fault, right? A program does not arrive at last place in a sixteen-team conference in a single recruiting cycle. Arkansas has filed a detailed financial report with the NCAA every year, line by line, sport by sport. Those filings — eight years of them, FY2018 through FY2025 — describe a department that spent most of a decade redirecting money from one sport to another. I’ve written about these MFRS reports in the past. I have them all (mostly). So let’s see what they say.
The quiet reallocation
Start with the simplest question: where does the money go? In FY2018, Arkansas devoted 35% of its athletics expenses to football and 7.2% to men's basketball. By FY2025, football's share had fallen to 31.2% and basketball's had risen to 11.5%. Spending on every other sport, and on the department-wide overhead that absorbs roughly a third of the budget, was essentially unchanged.
Percentages understate what actually occurred, because they imply football was cut. It was not. Football spending rose from $44.6 million to $57.4 million over the period, an increase of 28.5%. Men's basketball rose from $9.2 million to $21.3 million — an increase of 131%, and the largest proportional increase of any men's basketball program in the SEC.
The two sports added almost exactly the same number of dollars: $12.7 million to football, $12.1 million to basketball. That is the whole story of the share shift. Arkansas gave its basketball program a football-sized raise on a basketball-sized base.
