Georgia’s national champion football team takes the field Saturday in Athens for its annual G-Day scrimmage, hoping to successfully answer questions about its future prospects. Meanwhile, the school’s athletic department has been failing to provide information about its past profits.
To date, Georgia is the only public, Power Five school that has not publicly released its 2021 NCAA Financial Reporting System data, either of its own volition or in response to open records requests. The annual revenue and expense reports, which inform Sportico’s intercollegiate finances database, were due to the NCAA on or before Jan. 15. (Pittsburgh, which is designated a “state-related” institution within Pennsylvania’s higher education system, and therefore exempt from the commonwealth’s open record laws, has also not provided their latest FRS report.)
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In previous years, Georgia has been among the most proactive schools in making this information public, voluntarily posting its FRS reports on the athletic department’s website by no later than mid-February.
Why the hold-up this time? Georgia isn’t saying.
The university has declined to respond to numerous email and phone inquiries made by Sportico over the last three months about when the latest report would be made available.
On Jan. 21, the university’s open records manager, Bob Taylor, informed Sportico that it was slated to be published online between the end of that month and beginning of February, explaining that its dissemination had been “a little delayed” on account of Georgia’s participation in the College Football Playoff National Championship.
On Jan. 29, the school’s athletics spokesperson Claude Felton said he would “check on it,” when asked of the report’s status, but hasn’t responded to repeated follow-ups in the 11…
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