Going broke on sports

Every college athletic program in Louisiana loses money—except LSU—and state taxpayers are covering the gap.

Why it matters: Louisiana's public universities are asking the legislature for more funding, citing an $850 million shortfall. But embedded in the budgets of every school making that ask is an athletic department running a deficit, subsidized by the same state dollars they say aren't enough. Money going to scoreboards and travel budgets isn't going to professors, research or students.

Higher Education Commissioner Kim Hunter Reed made the connection herself, telling lawmakers recently that bloating athletics costs are among the key drivers of financial distress across the system.

Fiscal audit: The numbers from the Louisiana Legislative Auditor reports tell the story:

• Louisiana Tech: $10.5 million athletics deficit in FY2024
• University of Louisiana: $12.6 million deficit—$10 million of it directly responsible for a university-wide financial crisis that forced faculty layoffs and staff furloughs
• Southern University: chronic annual deficits, $2.7 million in institutional support propping up a program with recurring NCAA compliance violations
• Northwestern State, UL Monroe, McNeese, Nicholls: all in the red

Most of these programs compete at the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) level—a tier below LSU, UL and Louisiana Tech—making the financial math even harder to justify.

Those deficits are covered by institutional support—transfers from university operating budgets, which are substantially funded by state appropriations and tuition revenue. The state is already funding college athletics. It just isn't calling it that.

The legislature also approved athletic facility construction in the FY2026 capital budget: $6.7 million to Grambling State, $500,000 to Nicholls, $475,000 to McNeese—all schools that can't cover their own operating budgets.

Ironic twist: Then came Act 298, commonly known as the SPORT Fund, passed by the legislature last year, making Louisiana the first state in the country to raise a tax specifically to send more money to college athletics. A year later, Reed is telling lawmakers that higher education is $850 million underfunded, in part because those same athletic departments continue to run deficits subsidized by university operating budgets.

• The sports betting tax hike—projected to generate roughly $20 million annually for D-I programs statewide—is split equally among 11 public universities, including the same schools drowning in athletic deficits.
• The stated rationale was helping programs compete in the new NIL era.
• The unstated reality: the state just formalized and expanded a subsidy that was already quietly happening through university operating budgets.

The bottom line: Louisiana is being asked to invest more in higher education while actively subsidizing sports programs its universities cannot afford—and just voted to subsidize further.