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Whatever that is we’re either the best or the worst in the MAC.  Most likely the worst. 

"Unallocated and overhead costs". I'm assuming that means facilities costs and athletics payroll.

Sports facilities is a separate entity at BSU, so I don't know that it's included in this report, but I'm not surprised we're at the bottom of the MAC.

I don't think it means we have the least of amount of money, it means our overhead is the lowest. Our expenses.

It was my understanding there would be no math....

Who wants a long meandering opinion?

Short version. From years of looking at university budgets I agree. Although we do penny pinch and mostly are frugal, the accounting is a little weird.

Unallocated costs and overhead are costs not broken down into and charged to particular departments. So hypothetically a coach salary makes sense to be charged to a sport, and certainly to the athletic budget, an administrative clerk or janitor might work for several programs and not be allocated within athletics. But be on the athletic budget. Medical staff that mostly work on high risk sports might not be allocated to those sports.

But, hypothetically, a university budget might not exactly do that.

Just a made up story but try this one.

Let's suppose cardfan works in the library and sweeps floors. But his boss is the VP of janitors in the ad building, and the library VP can't fire him, doesn't have him on his payroll. Now, if you look at the library budget, it is magically cleaned at no cost to the library. Sort of. Depending on how hard cardfan works that day.

For accounting, any or all of cardfans work could now be University overhead, not library overhead. Unallocated, but unallocated on a different budget...

Since BSU theoretically, mostly, can't spend state money on athletics, if we could just not call walkways, parking lots, big beautiful grassy fields which are used by students, other facilities with student use, not call them athletic facilities, we could classify maintenance and janitorial services as university overhead.

So we could have expensive janitors not appear on the athletic budget. Or more likely poorly paid janitors...but not appearing as allocated or unallocated to that budget.

Or, hypothetically, something like that might happen and the budget at Western be constructed differently.

The joy of government accounting, not that regular accounting makes a lot of sense always.

So compare coaching salaries, game day expenses, lots of things across the different universities, when you can. Mostly the same. But a few million here or there, could not transparently be comparable and overhead is never very easy to analyze to start with.

I think the general is right, we can't make much of that. There is little doubt based on the comparable items we are low budget, item by item. Almost all items.

But this one could conceivably not mean we are more frugal in a hard to account category.

Aren't you the poster boy for University overhead? You are 6 inches over everybody's head.

The more an AD understands finances, the more likely that AD is to attempt to allocate the overlapping costs to the individual sports. It's hard to manage and hard to know where best to cut, the larger % of money that resides in Unallocated Accounts.

As others have said, it's easy to cost out the golf coaching payroll to the Golf program or the repair of a football scoreboard to the Football program. What poses more of a challenge are the materials and ground crews involved with both (a larger) baseball and (smaller) softball fields, the folks who manage the entire Athletics Twitter account or Websites, a billboard marketing campaign aimed at all Fall sports, etc. Even the AD's salary, travel, health insurance, cellphone, use of supplies, etc could/should be allocated in some fashion.

Once the decision is made to allocate one item vs another, then the question becomes what is the methodology to allocate? - The simple-minded might just allocate 1/20th of some of the department-wide dollars to each of the 20 sports, or perhaps a general rule such as 45% allocated between Mens FB & BB, 25% to other Mens Sports and 30% to all Womens Sports. A more detailed way might be to have personnel who overlap sports to prepare a timecard similar to what an attorney keeps so that billable hours are generated to multiple clients based on how many fractions of an hour per day are spent on each sport. More likely there are hybrids of time and materials.

Each school has their own way of handling it, but I think the writer's intent is to highlight how the lack of uniformity between schools can certainly affect how a school can legitimately spin the numbers on how much money is made or lost within a particular sport program, or between Mens/Womens sports, or between FB/BB vs the others. Schools with higher amounts of Unallocated Costs should show as more profitable by sport (since all of the true costs aren't trickling down to the individual sport level) while schools with lower Unallocated amounts could well be spending the same in total but since they do have more $ trickling down so the specific sport level, each sport shows more of a loss.