With the Big House, comes a big price tag.
Thanks to some nifty open records requests from the Detroit Free Press, we know the final bill for Michigan’s non-conference slate in 2018 and let’s just say that skyrocketing costs in college athletics are rapidly apparent when you look at the Wolverine’s final bill.
The team isn’t paying anything to Notre Dame as part of their series renewal to fill one of the team’s non-conference slots (they open in South Bend this year on Sept. 1st) but that doesn’t mean the game is free for the athletic department. That’s because the school had to pay $2 million to Arkansas to get rid of a home-and-home series with the Razorbacks that was axed in order to play the Irish.
The team’s other two non-conference games don’t come cheap either. Per the Free Press, SMU is picking up a $1.4 million check for their game in Ann Arbor on Sept. 15 and in-state program Western Michigan is taking home $1.2 million for their matchup the week prior on Sept. 8. Factor in the payment to Arkansas and you come up with a grand total of $4.6 million for the 2018 slate.
To give you an idea of how those costs keep going up, the Wolverines will be paying out some $1.8 million to Arkansas State in 2020. Good work when you can get it though.
Of course all these payouts are a drop in the bucket for Big Blue as the school spent $175 million on athletics in 2017 and will see their payouts from the Big Ten shoot up from $36 million to a projected $52 million this year.