photo by: Missy Minear/Kansas Athletics

KU athletic director Travis Goff speaks during the beam ceremony at David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium in Lawrence on Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024.

The Kansas Athletics board of directors on Friday morning approved a budget for the ongoing fiscal year 2025, anticipating that revenues for the year — an expected $122 million — will fall short of expenses by $16 million.

“That’s as expected,” said Pat Kaufman, the athletic department’s chief financial officer. “We knew this would be a year where we would have to dip into some of our liquidity sources to kind of make it through the year, knowing that when the (renovated David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium) comes on next year and the year after that and starts generating some serious revenues, we’d kind of catch up and move ahead in a great way.”

The department more or less broke even in the fiscal year 2024, Kaufman said, with a surplus of just $438,000 on the budget it had approved in June 2023 (approximately $127 million).

The board then did not present or approve its fiscal year 2025 budget at this year’s June meeting, Kaufman said, because it wanted to see how several factors played out: the impact of taking football games off campus (to Children’s Mercy Park and GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium), the new stadium operations partnership with Oak View Group and the recent completion of renovations to Allen Fieldhouse.

The result is a projection of $138 million in expenses for the current fiscal year (which ends on June 30) compared to $122 million in revenues.

“This is a very unique year with the stadium dark and really no revenues to speak of generated out of that facility,” Kaufman said, “and the impact that has.”

So revenues are lower, and meanwhile expenses are higher due to investments in football staffing, deferred maintenance and everything that goes into temporarily relocating to a new stadium: busing, stadium rental costs and so on.

Kaufman said the department will cover the $16 million from a line of credit that it established during the pandemic. It then expects to generate surpluses from the newly renovated David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium that will replenish its resources “over the next two, three, four, five years, and then we’ll start generating unprecedented revenue levels of all kinds.”

Stadium note

KU athletic director Travis Goff reiterated on Friday, as he has on many previous occasions, that the stadium project remains on time and on budget for its opening when the Jayhawks host Fresno State on Aug. 23.

There was some question at the board meeting, though, whether one component of the overall project — the conference center — would be fully completed by August.

Asked about the topic by Chancellor Douglas Girod, university CFO Jeff DeWitt said, “If anything, we may end up doing the final finishes of that a little bit later into the year. So the stadium has to open up — whether the conference center will be completely finished is a variable. The goal is to try to get it all done by August.”

Goff said the plan to begin “activating” the center in earnest is for later in the fall once KU has worked through the significant stadium opening.

“That’s the plan, there hasn’t been a shift in that plan by any stretch,” Goff said.

Girod further asked Deputy Athletics Director for Administration Sean Lester if the “field club” component of the project would be ready to go for the start of the football season.

“If there were to be any sense of what we had to prioritize in completion for August of ’25, yes, we would prioritize getting everything ready for the football game first, conference center second,” Lester said. “But the foot is still on the gas pedal to get it all (done) — expectation’s it’s all done for August.”