At Oklahoma State, Money Really Does Buy Greatness

There was a great longer article in the Tulsa World at the end of last week about Mike Holder’s first 10 years on the job. That culminated on Wednesday which was his 10th anniversary.

Did you know that only two men have been there longer as the AD?

Ed Gallagher (1915-31) and Henry P. Iba (1935-69). “Pretty fast company right there,” Holder says. “I like that.”

What I found to be interesting is how much money OSU has raised (and lost!), mostly during Holder’s tenure. Here is Holder’s estimate.

From 1970 through 1999, Holder says, OSU spent a total of $10 million on athletic facilities. In 2000-10, he reports, OSU spent $400 million on facilities.

Now not all of that was for football, but we all know the king of American sports is what drives economics at an athletic department. Because of that, I wanted to look at the correlation between money spent and winning percentage. How much is each win worth if we presume that all that money was spent on football (and it wasn’t).[1. We’re also not taking into account inflation etc. This is not an economics blog.]

Here’s a look. You want to be on the bottom right of this graph where you don’t have to spend a ton of money but you still win a ton of games. OSU has been on the bottom left (good for the pocketbook!) and the upper right (good for morale!)

The answer to the latter is easy. OSU won 171.5 games between 1970 and 1999 (for the college kids, there used to be ties … crazy, I know). At $10 million spent on facilities, that’s $58,000 a W. OSU has won 117 games since 2000. That’s $3.4 million. Success is pricey.

“We’ve won in every sport here, except in football,” Holder told the Tulsa World. “We wanted to try to do something to change that, so when you went to the football stadium on Saturday, you actually had a chance to win the football game. I wanted to see what that was like.”

It feels pretty good, doesn’t it?