The No. 1 seeds in this year’s men’s March Madness tournament exemplify a wide range of spending habits for their programs. The Duke Blue Devils had a men’s basketball budget of $21.4 million in 2022-23, the third largest in the country, while the Florida Gators had a budget of $8.4 million that ranked 77th in the nation. The other two No. 1 seeds fell in between—Auburn’s expenses totaled $15 million and Houston’s equaled $11.1 million.
Interestingly, financial prowess is not correlated with seed in the 2025 bracket, at least among single-digit seeds. The average men’s basketball budget of the four No. 1 seeds ($14 million) is barely higher than that of the No. 7 seeds ($13.2 million) or the No. 8 seeds ($13.5 million), for instance.
(To include private institutions, these figures have been pulled from EADA data, which schools submit annually to the U.S. Department of Education. The 2022-23 season is the most recent data available).
Here’s how all 68 tournament teams stack up:
Almost all the higher-seeded programs operate in a different financial stratosphere from the champions of smaller conferences seeded between No. 13 through No. 16. Just one of those teams had expenses totaling more than $3.4 million.
That exception is Grand Canyon University, which is an outlier among lower-seeded teams with its $7.7 million budget. The Antelopes moved up to Division I just over a decade ago and have quickly invested in men’s basketball, now reaching the NCAA Tournament in four of their first five years under head coach Bryce Drew.
Grand Canyon, which is currently a member of the Western Athletic Conference, announced in November that it intended to join the Mountain West Conference. The West Coast Conference (WCC) then sued Grand Canyon for breach of contract, claiming that Grand Canyon’s prior agreement to join the WCC had been binding. Conference realignment has been frequent and at times tumultuous over the past several years, but the decisions are usually motivated by money, and Grand Canyon is an example of a program with financial ambitions that have outgrown its current conference.
Speaking of financial gaps, the most lopsided first round matchup is between the No. 3 seeded Kentucky Wildcats, whose budget of $24.2 million leads the field, and the No. 14 seeded Troy Trojans, who spent just $1.8 million. That’s roughly half of what Kentucky racked up in travel costs alone for its team in 2022-23 ($3.8 million), according to Sportico’s College Sports Finances Database.
The first round of the men’s tournament tips off Thursday following Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s First Four play-in games.