Arkansas Business

This story is from the archives of ArkansasSports360.com.

Arkansas and Ohio State meet Jan. 4 in a matchup of Top 10 BCS programs. The Razorbacks are No. 8 nationally and the Buckeyes No. 6 in the BCS standings.

That’s not far off from where they rank in football spending, either.

Ohio State, according to an Associated Press report, is the top spender among NCAA football programs at $31 million. ESPN extends the list — culled from Department of Education figures — to show the Top 10, and the Razorbacks are No. 9 on the list after spending $22 million.

Here’s more on the study:

The statistics come from the Department of Education, which has required universities to submit the amount they spend on sports since 2000 as part of the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act. With that information, the Equity in Athletics Data Analysis Cutting Tool was created. And while the database comes with disclaimers and caveats stating that there are no hard-and-fast guidelines as to what schools count under the term "expenses" and "revenue," these are the numbers they report to the federal government.

Arkansas, as we noted last month, still ranks sixth among SEC teams in spending. ESPN reports Arkansas spends approximately $1,625 per undergraduate on football, according to EADA figures. (It is worth noting that the Razorbacks do not charge a student athletic activity fee to all enrollees at the UA.)

Recently, the school invested additional money in coach Bobby Petrino, bumping his annual compensation from 2011-2017 to a yearly average of $3.56 million, up from $2.85 million during his first three years. There are raises coming for assistants — “You really can’t say enough about our staff. I don’t know if we gave them as much of raises as we’d like to," Petrino said earlier today.

Plus, the school is breaking ground in 2011 on an 80,000 square foot football operations center. That project could cost between $24 million-$35 million before it's completed in 2013.

Will the additional spending help the Razorbacks gain ground on their peers? Certainly, the program seems to be headed in a positive direction.

Arkansas is in a better bowl than four of the schools that rank ahead of it. Only Auburn, which plays in the Jan. 10 BCS title game, fared better.

Petrino said Thursday the program is on the right track for establishing a winning program.

“This is what we want from our program to be a Top 20 team every year, get in the Top 10 and find a way to win a national championship. I think all of our players now believe that. When you first start talking to them, I think they hear you, but they don’t really believe it. What’s fun about our football team now is they really believe it. They know how close we were."

Surely, the UA has to like the return on its substantial investment.