Above shows scatter plot of 2024-25 NCAA budgets (for the 205 schools from the original link) plotted against their 2024-25 TRank per Torvik (so last year).  Light green is the trendline.  Green dot is OU. Red dots are rest of the MAC teams.  Obviously it's better to be on the bottom/left of the trendline as it means you're ranking is lower for less money spent.

Observations.

1) The more you spend, the better you can expect to be on average (positive correlation - not shocking).

2) Given the equation of the trendline (I'd be interested in re-running this with multiple years of data to see how variable it is) - we can predict on average how much you "should" spend to end up with a given ranking.  Some of those are listed below. I included every 25, plus 40 since that's roughly around the ranking for NCAA bubble teams:
 

Based on this, last year Ohio spent $4.057M, which should have given them an expected TRank of 162.9.  Our actual TRank last year was 178 so we underperformed by -15.1 (and is why we are just above/to the right the trendline).  That's not great, but it's not terrible either.  I ranked all 205 schools as a function of their expected TRank based on their budgets versus their actual TRank - and sorted by the delta.  This is essentially an efficiency ranking showing how good your team was for an amount of money spent (the $ per win concept but normalized for opponents/tempo etc).

Ohio ranked #110 out of 205 schools listed.

Here's how the other MAC schools compared:

MAC Averages: Budget $3.396M, xTRank = 180.6, Actual TRank = 231.7

If you were curious about how all the schools ranked based on ranking efficiency (the difference between actual and expected TRank) here's the top 30:

Last Edited: 3/17/2026 1:30:33 AM by GraffZ06

Last Edited: 3/17/2026 9:45:59 PM by Bobcat Tattoo