During the first fiscal year under athletic director Jeramiah Dickey, Boise State’s Athletic Department posted a profit, according to BSU’s annual audit report obtained by The Idaho Press.
In the 2022 fiscal year, which ran from June 30, 2021, to July 1, 2022, Boise State finished with earnings of just $475.
Yes, that is a small number. It is also very close to a balanced budget.
Consider this: The Boise State Foundation (the overarching entity that controls private support across the entirety of BSU), holds all the contributions given to the BSU’s Athletic Department and the department asks for the funds as needed. So, in other words, all donations are not counted for in the fiscal year statement. It simply includes donated money that was used in the fiscal year.
Yet, still, the news of a surplus comes after the Broncos’ athletic department reported a deficit of just over $1 million in 2021 fiscal year, which was drastically impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Compare that to the three years before COVID. In the 2020 fiscal year, Boise State had a deficit of $373,000. In 2019, it reported a profit of over $136,000. And in 2018, the department was in the green by nearly $12,000.
Though there were still some COVID precautions in place for part of the 2022 fiscal year (which included the 2021 football season), the restrictions were lessened.
That was particularly evident when it came to ticket sales. In the 2021 fiscal year, Boise State made a little more than $66,000 from ticket sales, including only $1,000 from football sales. For 2022, that number jumped to $7.23 million, including $5.86 million in ticket sales from football alone.
As expected, football led the way in both expenditures and revenue. The BSU football team spent over $4.25 million on coaching salaries, over $1 million on team travel, over $400,000 on equipment, over $600,000 on meals and over $770,000 on recruiting.
You may remember that, because of COVID concerns inside BSU’s locker room, the Broncos did not play in the 2021 Arizona Bowl. Regardless, the Broncos’ still lost $230,000 from the bowl experience.
The football team had over $18.4 million in operating expenses, but brought in more than $25.5 million in revenue.
In all, the Boise State football team brought in more than $7.1 million and its men’s basketball team was profitable by almost $900,000. As expected, those were the only two programs that didn’t operate at a deficit.
Also interesting: the 2022 fiscal year includes the 2021-2022 men’s basketball season, arguably the best in program history. Because the first part of the season included COVID restrictions, the ticket sales numbers aren’t much different than in previous years.
But the Broncos did spend more than a quarter of a million dollars more on team travel (often charter flights) than they did during the 2018-2019 season, the last without any COVID impact. Basketball coach Leon Rice has talked about the added investment he’s received from Dickey. That’s what he’s talking about.
