Big Ten Athletics Debt Rankings: The Hidden Cost of the Facilities Arms Race

Every summer, the same headlines make the rounds: which athletic department pulled in the most TV money, which one landed the biggest donor gift, which one topped the revenue charts. It's an easy story to write, and an even easier one to read. But total revenue only tells half the story. The other half, the part that rarely gets a headline, is how much of that money was already spoken for before anyone in the athletic director's office got a say in it.

That's where facilities debt service comes in, and in the new world of athlete revenue sharing, it might be the single most underrated number in college athletics finance.

What Is Facilities Debt Service, and Why Does It Matter Now?

Facilities debt service is the annual payment an athletic department owes on stadium renovations, practice facilities, locker rooms, premium seating, and the rest of the building boom that's defined the last twenty years of college sports. Think of it as a mortgage payment. Two households can earn the same income, but the one with the larger mortgage has much less breathing room every month. Athletic departments work the same way.

For two decades, the arms race was about who could build the shiniest football operations building or the most opulent indoor practice facility. Those projects weren't frivolous; they helped with recruiting, kept donors happy, and in plenty of cases paid for themselves through new revenue streams. But they also locked departments into fixed payments that don't disappear once the ribbon gets cut.

Now add revenue sharing to the mix. Athletic departments are on the hook for a brand-new, massive recurring expense: paying their own athletes. Every dollar tied up in a bond payment from 2014 is a dollar that can't go toward roster retention, coaching salaries, or the athlete payments schools are now required to make. Before an AD can spend tomorrow's TV money, part of it is already gone, committed to construction projects from a decade ago.

Big Ten Facilities Debt Service Rankings (FY2025)

Rank the Big Ten by facilities debt service as a share of total athletic revenue, and the leaderboard looks nothing like the one built on raw revenue numbers alone.

1. Iowa — $180.0 million in revenue; $22.5 million in debt service (12.5% of revenue)

2. Oregon — $185.4 million in revenue; $18.3 million in debt service (9.9%)

3. Purdue — $150.5 million in revenue; $14.5 million in debt service (9.6%)

4. Penn State — $254.9 million in revenue; $24.2 million in debt service (9.5%)

5. Illinois — $194.8 million in revenue; $17.8 million in debt service (9.1%)

6. Michigan State — $179.9 million in revenue; $16.4 million in debt service (9.1%)

7. Ohio State — $336.1 million in revenue; $29.7 million in debt service (8.8%)

8. Indiana — approximately $183.4 million in revenue; $12.4 million in debt service (~6.7%)

9. Michigan — $275.8 million in revenue; $17.5 million in debt service (6.3%)

10. Washington — $178.5 million in revenue; $9.9 million in debt service (5.6%)

11. Wisconsin — $197.9 million in revenue; $10.5 million in debt service (5.3%)

12. Minnesota — $163.6 million in revenue; $7.9 million in debt service (4.9%)

13. Nebraska — $215.1 million in revenue; $1.3 million in debt service (0.6%) currently, but this will rise in association with the planned Memorial Stadium renovation

14. UCLA — $151.8 million in revenue; $0.4 million in debt service (0.3%)

15. Maryland — $124.0 million in revenue; $0.2 million in debt service (0.1%)

Rutgers is excluded from the ranked debt-service percentage list because its FY2025 annual facilities debt-service figure could not be verified from a comparable public NCAA MFRS filing. Rutgers should not be ignored, however. Public reporting on its FY2025 athletics finances shows $146.6 million in revenue, $193.8 million in spending, and a deficit exceeding $70 million for the third time in five years, making Rutgers one of the Big Ten’s most financially constrained athletic departments, even before accounting for facilities debt service.

Northwestern and USC are private institutions and don't publicly release comparable NCAA financial reports, so they're excluded from this comparison.  Note that only a portion of the new Ryan Field renovation was paid by donors, and Northwestern will soon embrace as much as $9 M per year in debt service costs.

The Surprises Hiding in the Numbers

A few things jump out right away.

Ohio State brings in more money than anyone else in the conference, but its debt burden eats up a smaller slice of that revenue than half a dozen other schools. Penn State's number tells a story most fans already know; the ongoing Beaver Stadium renovation is an enormous, and enormously expensive, undertaking. Purdue, Illinois, Michigan State, and Oregon all sit in roughly the same spot: about ten cents of every dollar they earn goes straight to paying off buildings before it ever touches a coaching contract or a roster budget.

But the real head-scratcher is Iowa.

The Hawkeyes haven't announced a splashy new stadium project or gone on a widely covered facilities spending spree recently. And yet Iowa's debt service number is the highest in the entire conference, both in dollars and as a share of revenue.

Why? The honest answer is that nobody outside Iowa's athletic department knows for sure, at least not from the NCAA report alone. The category the NCAA uses, "Athletic Facilities Debt Service, Leases and Rental Fees," bundles bond payments, lease obligations, and rental fees into a single line. It's entirely possible that Iowa's number reflects financing tied to several projects stacked over many years, an internal university financing arrangement, or lease costs that don't show up elsewhere in the report. Figuring out exactly what's driving it would take a closer look at Iowa's bond disclosures, its Board of Regents capital approvals, and its actual repayment schedules, a worthwhile follow-up, but a separate project.

Why Annual Debt Service Beats Total Debt as a Metric

Here's the bigger lesson buried in all this: total debt is the number that grabs attention, but annual debt service is the number that matters.

Total debt tells you how much remains to be paid off. Annual debt service tells you how much flexibility you're giving up this year, every year, no matter what. A school sitting on $300 million in long-term debt might have very manageable annual payments if that debt were financed on favorable terms. Meanwhile, a school with far less total debt could feel more squeezed year to year if its repayment schedule is more aggressive.

That gap will only matter more as revenue sharing settles in. Departments that have already paid down most of their facilities debt are starting each year with more money to spend on athletes, coaches, recruiting infrastructure, sports science, and whatever comes next. Departments still carrying heavy annual payments must clear that bar before a single dollar goes anywhere else.

None of this means debt was a mistake. Most of it was spent on facilities that improved the product, helped with recruiting, and, in many cases, generated the very revenue being discussed here. The question was never whether those buildings were worth building. The question now is whether they left enough room to compete in whatever comes next.

For years, the scoreboard for "best athletic department" was wins, recruiting rankings, and total revenue. Those still count. But there's a quieter number sitting underneath all of it, and it might end up mattering more than any of them: not who has the biggest budget, but who has the most room left in it after paying off yesterday.

Methodology: This analysis draws on publicly available NCAA Membership Financial Reporting System (MFRS) data for public Big Ten universities. The NCAA's "Athletic Facilities Debt Service, Leases and Rental Fees" category covers a range of facility-related financing obligations and shouldn't be read as strictly bond principal and interest. Northwestern and USC are excluded because, as private schools, they don't publicly release comparable NCAA financial reports.