Over the recent years, Big Ten schools have dominated the college football landscape enough to establish that they are the better programs. That’s where all the limelight is at the moment. However, despite all its successes, one particular school is breaking its back to match up to these elite standards.

Rutgers spent a total of $193.8 million for the 2024-25 fiscal year. Of that amount, $76 million (around 40%) was spent on football – a program record. However, the income required to offset the outgoing funds has been minimal. Rutgers hit a low point in football once again under head coach Greg Schiano, finishing 5-7 in 2025. The lack of an impressive performance forced ticket sales to generate only 9.2 million this year. That brings the ROI gap for the past year to $66.8 million.

Naturally, new athletics director Keli Zinn warned athletes that there will be an uncomfortable crunch in the near future.

“I think what you’ll see a year from now is that’s going to be our worst year looking at a profit and loss scenario,” she told NJ.com.

“The reason it jumped out to me surrounded the performance to the team. When you look at it, coming off of two winning seasons, to not see an uptick in that category indicated that we needed to take a closer look at it.”

The Knights started with good momentum this season, winning all three non-conference games. But as soon as conference play began, the team slipped, winning only 2 game during this run. Ohio State handed Rutgers a blistering 9-42 loss. Penn State ended the Knights’ hopes of becoming bowl eligible, even after the latter put up a strong fight. Fans clearly had more expectations for the 2025 season, after Greg Schiano recorded 7-6 in the 2023 and 2024 seasons.

Despite Zinn’s admission of the department being in financial difficulty, this has become a regular phenomenon for Rutgers. It incurred a deficit of $78 million this past year, creating another program record. This is the third time in the last five years that the Knights incurred losses more than $70 million. In 2021, the program hauled in a $73.3 million. Rutgers is now short by a total of $516.9 million since joining the Big Ten in 2014. That is despite department expenditures ballooning by almost 175% over the first 11 years of being in the conference.

Keli Zinn replaced Pat Hobbes in July, 11 months after the latter resigned due to health issues. She knew what she was getting into by accepting the position, and has a long way to go in making the program financially strong.

Rutgers football has begun work on fixing these gaping holes

Rutgers was tabbed as the least valuable program in the Big Ten during this past season, according to findings from CNBC. At 506 million,  the school was ranked No. 56 on the list, only three places higher than last year. Despite the disappointing statistics, there are some things to look forward to.

Rutgers was among the 20 schools whose athletics valuation increased more than 20% in 2025. It shows that the department is putting in the work to cut down the alarming gap between income and expenditure. For example, Zinn has been working hard to attract more NIL opportunities for athletes, which is easily one of the biggest revenue generators in college football. For instance, she has brought on Dann Kabala, aka. the NIL man, from PSU to look after the NIL program at Rutgers. Zinn herself comes from the big leagues, having been the deputy AD at LSU.

“You’ll see some level of improvement that’s expected in that ‘26-‘27 year and then by ’27-’28, based upon the current projections we have, in some growth categories and opportunities with revenue, I’m hopeful you’ll actually see (the deficit) start to decline,” she told NJ.com.

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Rutgers top brass is putting the right people in place to break free of the financial burden that’s accumulated over all these years. But fans won’t be getting to see any uplifting changes for a good few years down the line.