MD last in ACC in men's recruiting expenses

There’s really no dollar amount you can put on the job Edsall did with recruiting this season.

I’m not really sure how useful this information is. The Athletic Department is saddled with debt so that could be a factor. It could reflect a more efficient use of resources. There may or may not be a correlation.

MD is near the bottom on the women’s side, too but the FH, LAX & A&T teams are ridculously successful, WBB is very successful, soccer has made dramatic improvement in the last few years and softball, tennis and to a lesser degree track & field have all been moving very much in the right direction.

I’ve looked at data from several sources and have found it nearly impossible to make direct comparisons, because no two schools have the same standards when accounting for revenues and expenses.

One school may have an incentive to inflate a particular expense on the one hand, while holding down a different expense on the other. Expenses and revenues may be reported as department totals by one school and broken out by individual sports at another. Its fairly easy to move money between categories and sports, and I’m certain that it happens regularly.

As for recruiting expenses, that would certainly seem to include travel expenses such as airfare, hotel, per diem, etc. Do they also allocate a portion of each coach’s salary according to the time he spends on recruiting trips, or some percentage of the administrative overhead that might be attributed to recruiting efforts? Who knows.

The private schools (Miami, Duke, WFU and BC) have no public reporting requirements, so they have considerable flexibility in designing financial statements.

It seems a little strange to me that Duke, for example, would significantly outspend Florida State, Clemson and Va Tech, the conference football recruiting leaders year after year.

Anyone can shuffle numbers around anywhere they want. I don’t believe any of these figures at all.
The private universities don’t have to report any figures at all, so I would think their numbers are purely a guess.
I do believe Gary and Ralph may not have spent as much money recruiting as other ACC schools. But this is the era of much smoother talking coaches playing politics in the 21st century. Being so close to DC, maybe this will rub off more on our coaching staff than in the past.