To start our review of inequities in Duke college sports, we decided to look at the big picture, seeing the expenses allocated to different teams. For this, we decided to utilize publicly available data found in Duke’s 2020 Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA). Figure 1 in the appendix breaks down the total amount Duke Athletics spent on each college team in 2020. These include operating and recruiting expenses, among other things. Duke spent a total of $57,114,331 on men’s sports teams and a total of $25,472,405 on women’s sports teams. Out of all teams, men’s basketball and football received the largest share of the money. These teams receive $19.9 million and $25.2 million, respectively. Figure 2 presents this data as a treemap instead of a bar graph. This graphic clearly shows how much Duke spends on these two teams, with the sum of men’s basketball and football expenses being over half of Duke’s total spending on athletics.
Figure 3 then tries to break down these numbers by looking at total expenses by player. We thought it would be interesting to look at these numbers to account for some teams’ relative sizes, and found that, once again, men’s basketball and football were the best-funded teams. Duke Men’s Basketball is spending $1,329,949 per player. The second best-funded team is Duke Football, spending $217,047 per player, a significant drop from the previous number. We found that the worst-funded team was the Track & Field/Cross Country team, spending $14,335 per player on the men’s side of the team and $21,556 per player on the women’s side of the team. This might be influenced by the size of the TF/XC teams, which Duke reports to have a total of 218 participants (some of which might overlap between Track & Field and Cross Country).
We also wanted to analyze these expenses in light of revenues. Duke Football is the team with the highest total revenues, earning $39,669,829 in 2020. Much of this is likely to come from TV licensing rights. Unsurprisingly, basketball was the second-highest team in terms of revenue, making $33,382,946. Duke Women’s Basketball makes the third-highest revenue out of all teams, making $3,861,246, and the most out of any women’s team. Overall, 17 Duke athletic teams make over 1 million dollars in annual revenue. With this lens in mind, we decided to home in on certain teams to further analyze these inequalities.