A Michigan university spent $88 on a women's basketball team dinner. Men got $397 in snacks.
DETROIT — Eastern Michigan University's women's basketball team got $88 from the school to buy a holiday ham. The men's team received hundreds more — $397, to be exact — just to buy a bunch of pink lemonade-flavored energy chew snacks.
That type of spending gap favoring men isn't unusual.
Universities across the Midwest's two biggest athletic conferences — the Big Ten and the Mid-American Conference — spent more than $40 million in the 2019-20 school year on food for athletes when they were on their home campuses, according to a Free Press review of documents filed by the universities to the NCAA and additional documents provided under freedom of information laws. (The Big Ten took the biggest slice of the pie, with more than $37 million.)
The bulk of the money spent on specific teams — about 80% — was spent on male athletes, with large football teams consuming the most.
"Am I surprised? No. Am I outraged? Yes," said Nancy Hogshead-Makar, the founder of Champion Women, an advocacy group for girls and women in sport. "The adults have left the room for enforcement (of equal opportunity laws)."
Unequal treatment of men’s and women’s teams grabbed the national spotlight in the spring when female athletes and coaches decried the quality of food they were served at a national basketball tournament compared with the men. At the time, experts said the inequality was just the latest example of how female athletes have been mistreated for decades.
The ongoing disparity gives women a clear message, Hogshead-Makar said.
"If you want to train women that they should expect less, this is how you would do it. If you want to train men that they should expect more, this is how you would do it."
Federal law mandates that universities offer equal opportunity for men and women in college athletics. But that Title IX legislation does not require that universities actually spend the same amount on their male and female athletes.
"The traditional assumption is that the male athletes are revenue-producing and should be fed whatever they need," said Karen Weaver, a former college athletics director who studies the college athletics finance and higher education at the University of Pennsylvania. She added that in contrast, female athletes generally cost the university more money than they bring in, inviting greater scrutiny of their teams' spending.
The disparate treatment is perhaps most glaring in basketball where the men's and women's teams are roughly the same size.
The men's basketball team at Eastern, for example, spent just over $9,500 on meals and snacks in 2019-20 school year. But the women's basketball team spent only about $2,300 during the same time.
College athletic officials point to the sheer size of the men's football teams — the 2021 University of Michigan football roster lists 127 players — as one of the reasons for the difference in overall spending. The different physical needs of male and female athletes also contribute to spending disparities, according to some college officials.
"Based on body weight, male student-athletes consume 25 to 100% more food than our female student-athletes, which accounts for much of the disparity," Keith Mann, a University of Nebraska athletic department spokesman, said.
Spending inside the Big Ten
The gender disparity can be found at every school in the Big Ten.
The universities spent $25.1 million on men’s teams, while spending $6.3 million on women’s teams. The percentage gap was largest at Michigan State University where about $9 out of every $10 allocated to specific teams was spent on male teams. The smallest gap was at University of Nebraska where nearly $7 out of every $10 allocated to specific teams still went to men.
According to a review of financial disclosure forms for 2019-20, the men's basketball teams in the Big Ten spent about $165,000 on extra food, compared with an average of $91,000 by their women's teams.
Some universities had larger disparities between their men's and women's basketball programs than others, but it was always there: Indiana University had the largest divide, spending about $247,000 on men's and about $83,000 on women's, while the University of Michigan had the narrowest gap, allocating about $94,000 on men and about $87,000 on women.
Feeding athletes beyond meal plans
A full athletic scholarship covers more than just tuition. It also includes housing and food. Then there are the extras.
Each team has a budget and the coaching staff decides how to spend it.
Schools treated the athletes to dinners at Red Lobster, Outback Steakhouse and Pizza House, records show. Universities also bought smaller items — string cheese, grapes and Cheez-It crackers — for team training rooms.
Universities in the two conferences spent 84% of the total spending on specific male and female teams. The remaining 16% was not spent on specific teams. The spending reviewed by the Free Press is in addition to the money paid for dining plans or meal stipends provided to athletes as part of their scholarships.
For example, after a pre-season practice in August 2019, Michigan State University made sure its football players had a snack —190 pizza pockets and 115 portions of ziti from Pizza House. The cost? $3,785.60.
For decades, athletes often complained about a lack of food. In 2014, the NCAA changed its rules to allow teams to offer unlimited snacks. That quickly became an arms race, with universities offering bountiful spreads to high-profile teams like football.
The nation's top football programs "have custom-prepared meals by position — a linebacker and lineman might get served one kind of meal with X number of calories; a wide receiver or a kicker might receive another," Weaver said. "The focus is on caloric intake and nutritional balance."
For example, in 2018-19, UCLA spent $5.4 million on food for its football team, including one day featuring grass-fed flank steak, sweet potato hash with diced chicken and chocolate-chip pancakes for breakfast; salmon and Cornish game hen for lunch; and grilled flat-iron steak in a balsamic reduction for dinner, according to the Los Angeles Times. University officials said at the time that the additional spending was a result of a commitment to the nutritional well-being of their student-athletes.
Spending inside the MAC
While the MAC schools don't spend on athletics nearly as much as Big Ten schools do, the gender disparity between men's and women's teams remains significant.
Even the smallest gap in the conference was considerable. At Miami University in Ohio, $7 out of every $10 allocated to specific teams was spent on male teams.
The largest gap in the MAC was at Eastern, where it spends almost all of its money devoted to extra food for men's teams, records show.
About four hours before Eastern's men's basketball team tipped off a home game against Ohio University, breakfast was served: eggs, sausage, French toast, bagels with cream cheese, fruit, bottled water and orange juice for 27 players and staff. It cost the team $434.88.
This was hardly a rare event. In all, the men's basketball team at Eastern had a pre-game meal catered to them for 10 of their 15 home games in the 2019-20 season.
For the women's team, it was a much different experience. The squad had only one home pregame meal catered.
Eastern Michigan spent a total of $230,000 on all sports, $190,000 on football alone. It spent only $4,000 on its women's teams. (It spent about $20,000 on food not directly allocated to any one team.)
Some of the disparity is due to size of budgets, Eastern officials said.
“When you look at percentage of budgets, football has a $5 million budget," said Eastern Athletic Director Scott Wetherbee. "A golf program only has $150,000 budget ... 10% of (the football budget) is half a million dollars. But 10% of golf is only $1,500.”
Wetherbee acknowledged there's still a disparity, though: Men's basketball spent about $9,500 while women's spent about $2,300 on meals while they were at home.
Creating a level playing field for woman at Eastern Michigan has been a struggle at times. The school settled a lawsuit and hired a consultant after a judge rule the school violated Title IX, the federal law guaranteeing girls and women equal opportunities in athletics, for cutting women's teams.
"I could see where this is a glaring discrepancy," Wetherbee said of the gap in the food budgets. “We need to make that right. We need to do better. ... It’s something that I'm pretty passionate about. I have a daughter that wants to be college gymnast, my wife played college basketball and is in our Hall of Fame. I mean, that's something kind of near and dear to me. And I think we've made a lot of progress, but we’ve got a long ways to go.”
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