The University of Kansas has a $20.5 million secret.
That is how much KU is paying its student-athletes, and the university is going to great lengths to hide the details from taxpayers.
For everyone else in the university, from the chancellor to the custodians, KU salaries are public.
Except for the student-athletes.
“I think it's just an effort to avoid scrutiny and criticism,” Lyndon Vix, a Wichita lawyer who specializes in the First Amendment, told KCUR.
For almost a year, KCUR has been pressing KU Athletics for the student-athlete payroll.
That’s because the finances around major college sports have changed drastically in the past five years. Indeed, it continues to evolve as Congress and the courts become deeply involved in a pastime that’s turned into a billion-dollar industry.
There are two income streams for student-athletes, a term the NCAA coined in 1957 to avoid paying death benefits for a football player who died during a game.
The first is name, image and likeness, often shortened to just NIL, which is a private contract between the athlete and, say, a shoe company.
In 2021, the NCAA agreed that student-athletes should be paid for their name, image or likeness after a federal judge ruled NCAA restrictions violated antitrust laws.
NIL deals can be huge.
The top earner is University of Texas quarterback Arch Manning, who is estimated to make $6.8 million this school year, according to Sports Illustrated.
University of Miami quarterback Carson Beck is second with an estimated $4.3 million in NIL earnings.
The other stream is what the NCAA calls revenue sharing. This is a paycheck from colleges to student-athletes and is the result of something called the House settlement, a federal antitrust lawsuit resolved last June.
And it’s this $20.5 million pot of money KU won’t make public.
KU Athletics did not respond to three emails from KCUR asking why keeping this payroll closed to the public is crucial.
Seeking information
KCUR first filed a Kansas Open Records Act request for the information on Nov. 26, 2025.
KU Athletics denied it three weeks later.
“Your request for ‘all contracts between KU Athletics and student-athletes’ and ‘all payroll information for student-athletes employed by KU Athletics’ is hereby declined by the University and we will consider this request closed,” the university said.
KCUR then filed a complaint with the Kansas attorney general’s office on June 4, arguing that $20.5 million is “a significant amount of public money lost to the University’s general fund, a fund made up of state appropriations and tuition payments.”
Vix, the Wichita lawyer who does not represent either KCUR or KU in this situation, said he believes KU and other universities want to hide these multimillion-dollar payrolls.
“They don't want to have people know that their taxpayer money may be going to something like a quarterback when other areas of the university are being shorted,” he said.
The most recent Kansas Speaks survey bears that out. Almost 39% of Kansans support paying college athletes. That support drops to 30% when people were asked if tax money should be used.
This is a critical time for the budgets of KU Athletics and the University of Kansas.
For the second year in a row, the university is diverting money from academics to subsidize athletics with $16 million.
KU is also drawing down a $50 million line of credit the athletic board approved in April.
The athletic department budget problems are compounded by the extra $20.5 million KU and other NCAA Division I schools can spend paying their athletes.
The KU faculty senate weighed in earlier this year. In a memo to the Kansas Board of Regents and the chancellor, the senate directly addressed using the general fund to support athletics.
“We simply do not believe that funds from a general fund or any academic pool of funds should be expended to cover these costs,” the memo said. The faculty senate said it supports student-athletes being paid, but the money “should come as a piece of the revenue generating pie of the athletic structure, not from academics,” the memo said.
All of this comes at a time when KU has been cutting academic programs to balance its budget.
Request denied
KU denied KCUR’s request for information citing two laws, one federal and one state.
The federal law is FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, passed in 1974. It says payroll records are private if the student is “employed as a result of his or her status as a student.”
In response to KCUR’s complaint, the attorney general sided with that argument.
“The general public interest or curiosity that may be served by releasing private student-athlete contracts and payroll information does not outweigh personal privacy rights,” the AG’s office wrote.
But Vix noted that in 1974, when FERPA became law, no one could have predicted that a student might make a seven-figure salary playing college football.
“It was written at a time when this current situation that we have was not even in anyone's imagination,” Vix said.
The attorney general’s opinion also carves out a privacy exception that no other state employee enjoys, as their salaries are public information.
“I timed myself on how long it would take me to find my own salary on open records, and it took me eight seconds through Google,” said Eric Thomas, a lecturer in the KU School of Journalism.
Thomas has written extensively about student-athletes and is clear he supports payment for their work. But he believes being on the public payroll comes with obligations.
“I have other constraints on me as a public university employee, whether those are the fact that people know my salary or whether that's the fact that my email is an open book for someone who wants to ask for that through a records request,” Thomas said.
'Competitive edge'
KU’s second argument for denying the information relies on the Kansas Uniform Trades Secrets Act.
The athletics department argued, and the attorney general agreed, that telling the world what Jayhawk athletes make puts KU at a competitive disadvantage.
“The risk of poaching makes the sustained secrecy of this information valuable” for KU Athletics, the attorney general said.
However, every coach and administrator contract is an open record:
- Athletic Director Travis Goff makes $1.3 million and gets two cars and a country club membership.
- Assistant basketball coach Jacque Vaughn, a Jayhawk legend, makes $360,000 a year and is eligible for $175,000 in performance incentives.
- Head football coach Lance Leipold will make $5.8 million this season, gets a $500,000 retention bonus each year he stays at KU and receives $20,000 a month to fly on private planes.
Vix called the attorney general’s analysis weak and baffling.
“Any other pay information at the university, including coaches, including professors who also could be subject to poaching based upon their salary, is public information under KORA,” he said.
Nationwide effort
There are efforts across the country to pry open these multimillion-dollar payrolls that continue to grow.
This year, the cap jumps from $20.5 million to $21.58 million.
The New Mexico Foundation for Open Government last year sued the University of New Mexico and New Mexico State.
“In addition to the universities’ total secrecy on how they will spend millions of dollars,” the foundation said in a statement, the schools also are “hiding the contractual terms they require students to abide by, meaning there is no way to know whether students are being treated fairly.”
Last year, CBS Sports filed open-records requests with a dozen Division I schools seeking revenue sharing information.
All were denied.
