With the NCAA men’s basketball tournament kicking off this week, it’s time for the annual K Street College Classic. Rather than sitting back and waiting to see which team dominates on the court, OpenSecrets measures the teams on the strength of their lobbying budgets.
Last year, the 68 schools that received bids to the tournament spent a collective $16.5 million lobbying the federal government. While a number of the high seeds advanced far in the College Classic, our champion — the University of Texas – emerged from the “First Four” play-in round. Let’s see March Madness match that kind of upset.
After reaching the College Classic’s Final Four last year, the Texas Longhorns take home the championship in 2025 as the only school to spend seven figures on lobbying in 2024 ($1,428,000). That was more than enough to carry the school all the way from the play-in game (topping Xavier University, which hasn’t lobbied since 2008) to the finals, where it defeated the University of Florida — doubling the Gators’ total of $736,000.
Texas used a number of outside firms, primarily Cornerstone Government Affairs, and 22 lobbyists who primarily focused on lobbying for government funding, defense and scientific research. Among those lobbyists were a number of “revolvers” — elected officials, staffers and regulators who leave government service to work on K Street.
Leading the way was Kate Raetz, who runs federal relations for the state after spending eight years serving in the Texas House of Representatives and two more working for the governor. Cody Willming was the school’s other top lobbyist. Willming is the UT system’s federal budget and policy director; he worked on Capitol Hill for eight years.
While Texas deployed nearly two dozen lobbyists, the Florida Gators got by with just four. Two of the lobbyists worked for the university’s engineering school, while the others were hired through the firm Strategic Marketing Innovations. They focused on many of the same issues as the University of Texas lobbyists.
Florida was the only top seed to reach the Final Four this year. Duke University ($784,000) made it to the Elite Eight, but Auburn lost in the second round and the University of Houston, with only $40,000 in lobbying spending, got knocked out in the first round by Southern Illinois University/Edwardsville, which spent just $5,000 more.
The Purdue Boilermakers spent the second most amount on lobbying in 2024 ($820,000) but ran into Texas in the Midwest bracket’s semifinals. Texas A&M and the University of Wisconsin joined Texas and Florida in the Final Four.
When it comes to schools that are part of large systems, the rules for the K Street College Classic can make or break their chances of winning. For example:
- Any school that does its own lobbying gets credit for that spending.
- If individual schools within a system do not lobby, and only one of the schools makes the tournament, it gets credit for the entire system’s lobbying.
- If individual schools within a system do not lobby, and multiple make the tournament, none of them get any credit for lobbying.
Here’s how that played out this year:
Both of the University of North Carolina schools that made the tournament (Chapel Hill) and (Wilmington) reported their own lobbying, so they each were assigned a dollar figure. Because Edwardsville was the only SIU school to make the tournament, it gets to take credit for the entire system’s lobbying. Both UCLA and the University of California, San Diego made the tournament but neither reported their own lobbying so they are each assigned $0 — even though the University of California system spent $2.2 million in 2024.
The Longhorns, as the only school in the University of Texas system to get a tournament bid, likewise benefited from the rules by getting credit for all lobbying expenditures.
This post was originally published on Original Journalism from OpenSecrets News.