Louisville basketball faces surprising limitations on recruiting trail
The Louisville basketball recruiting budget may surprise you.
A little over a year ago, the Louisville Courier-Journal published an article about the recruiting expenditures of the three big area universities. Most who read probably remember the article presented financials showing that Louisville basketball was well behind Kentucky and falling further behind. I’ve likewise tracked athletics budgets for the last few years and noticed a disturbing trend for the Louisville basketball program- And not just in recruiting.
Basketball has historically been the bell cow for the Louisville athletics department. Not to mention, and with no disrespect to the Big East of a decade ago, we now compete in what may be the best college basketball conference that ever existed.
So how does that square with a budget that had been cut by almost thirty percent prior to COVID-19? The unfortunate reality is most U of L basketball fans probably didn’t know that was happening.
The men’s basketball budget peaked in fiscal year 2018 at $9.53 million and is budgeted to be $6.56 million in 2021, a decline of 31.1 percent in that time span. More than ninety percent of the reduction came in the two years before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Approximately one million- or one-third of the difference- is accounted for by the head coach’s salary. This means a majority of the cuts have been in expenses like assistants’ and staff salaries, scholarships, travel, and, yes, recruiting.
In fact, the basketball budget excluding the head coach’s salary has now been cut by a whopping 42% percent in just three years ($4.43 vs. $2.56 million). Remember that the next time you criticize Chris Mack for something you think we’re missing or not doing anymore.
U of L Men’s Basketball Budget (millions)
2018 2021 Change
Head Coach Salary $5.1 $4.0 -22%
Remaining Expenses 4.4 2.6 -42%
TOTAL $9.5 $6.6 -31%
Speaking of the head coach, he was quoted in the Courier-Journal article saying “I don’t feel like we’ve been hamstrung in any way, shape or form” as far as recruiting. And what’s Mack going to say publicly when answering that question? For one thing, he was undoubtedly hired into the job knowing the direction that U of L basketball finances were headed. And Mack’s not going to vent any frustrations he has in a newspaper article anyway.
It would be more palatable if we were competing against other programs that were also being squeezed financially. Consider the situation with that school down the road. Over the same three years, the UK men’s basketball budget has actually risen slightly from $18.2 to $18.4 million. Right away, it’s obvious that UK significantly overspends in basketball compared to Louisville. Even during Pitino’s last year, they were spending almost twice what we spend. I’ll have more to say on the respective basketball budgets for Louisville and UK in an upcoming article.
Obviously, any comparison to an outsized program like UK basketball is probably distorted. Although we’re spending just 36 percent of what they’re spending on men’s basketball in 2021–$6.6 vs. $18.4 million–that same ratio is 87 percent on football.
But everyday fans don’t recognize these comparative statistics while red is fighting blue. All fans see is that we don’t win often enough in basketball or that we can’t get better recruits.
Next. Louisville basketball recruiting big board 3.0. dark
There’s no free lunch, and you get back what you put in. Instead of asking why we didn’t switch defenses at a critical point of a rivalry game, maybe the question should be why U of L isn’t investing more in a sport that’s supposed to be pretty important.
Or considering that the men’s basketball budget in 2012 was $6.64 million, why are we budgeting less today for this sport than we were almost a decade ago?