Junjie Guo and Ananth Seshadri
Executive Summary:
- Wisconsin Badgers football historically outperformed its spending level. In 2017–2019, the team averaged the second-most conference wins in the Big Ten (7.0, trailing only Ohio State’s 8.3) despite ranking just 9th of 14 teams in football expenditure.
- Beginning in 2021, Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) payments and free transfer eligibility opened college football to competitive labor markets. Programs that adapted quickest gained an early edge; Wisconsin did not.
- Badger football’s performance eroded by 2021–2023, and the 2024–2025 seasons produced consecutive losing records (5–7 and 4–8) for the first time since 1991–92. Scanned attendance fell from 66,530 fans per game (2006–2019 average) to 56,343 (2021–2025), implying annual game-day losses of about $10 million—or roughly $50 million over five post-NIL seasons.
- Associated with the attendance decline, Dane County underperformed Big Ten peers in traveler accommodation by 228 jobs (6.4 percent of the 2019 workforce) between 2021 and 2024. This suggests that the economic cost of Badger football’s decline has already begun to materialize in visitor-dependent sectors of the local economy.
- AB 1034, signed by Governor Evers on April 8, 2026, appropriates $14.6 million per year in general-fund dollars to service UW-Madison athletic facilities debt, indirectly freeing resources to reach the new $20.5 million revenue-sharing cap.