On Wednesday, Houston men’s basketball coach Kelvin Sampson used his postgame press conference after the No. 8 Cougars’ win over UCF to air concerns about the financial condition of his school’s athletic department.
“We’re poor,” Sampson said. “We’re poor when I got here, and we’re still poor. We probably have the lowest budget of anybody in Power Four.”
That group—of the SEC, Big Ten, ACC and Big 12—unofficially defines the top tier of the NCAA’s Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) following the plunder of the Pac-12.
From a department-wide spending perspective, Sampson’s assessment is close to the mark. In its most recent NCAA financial disclosures, UH reported $98.9 million in total athletics operating expenses for fiscal year 2025. That figure, according to Sportico’s college sports finances database, would rank below every Power Four school’s FY24 spending total—except, notably, UCF. The Knights, meanwhile, reported $94.5 million in athletics spending for FY25.
Sampson’s gripe begins to fray, however, when the focus narrows to men’s basketball.
Despite broader budget constraints, Houston reported spending $14.6 million on its men’s basketball program in FY25, a $2 million increase from the $12.6 million it spent the previous year. That FY24 figure alone exceeded the men’s basketball budgets of at least 26 current Power Four programs.
In other words, while Houston may lag its peers in overall athletic resources, Sampson’s program is a clear outlier within the department. Then again it has become the school’s athletic crown jewel, advancing to the NCAA national championship game last season and being well-positioned to make a deep run this year.
Formerly a member of the American Athletic Conference, Houston joined the Big 12 in July 2023, along with UCF, BYU and Cincinnati.
Since then, the Bearcats’ overall athletics spending has outpaced that of their public American-to-Big 12 peers, with Cincinnati’s FY25 operating expenses rising to $119.3 million, a 13.4% jump from the prior year.
During Wednesday’s postgame presser, Sampson prefaced his remarks by stressing that his players are competitively compensated through NIL and revenue-sharing. He has been proactive—at times, ahead of the curve—in finding ways of directing money toward athletes. As Sportico previously detailed, Houston was the first school to commit to participating in the NIL-paying Players Era Festival back in 2024.