What’s it cost to feed a major college football team? About $500,000 a year

In April 2014, the NCAA began allowing “unlimited meals” for scholarship players, shortly after UConn’s Shabazz Napier said that he and his teammates sometimes had “hungry nights” because the school was not allowed to give them enough to eat.

It seems silly that this rule wasn’t already in place, but thankfully now, players on scholarship have no limits as far as meals or snacks go. It also means that athletic departments need to spend more money on meals than before.

According to the USA Today in April 2015, 11 schools with major-conference football programs budgeted around $600,000 each for the NCAA’s new provision.

Numbers ranging from Nebraska, Wisconsin and USC on the higher end to Utah, Colorado and Oregon State on the lower end — the Buffaloes and Beavers have allotted an increase of $175,000 and $215,000 for the measure, respectively.

AL.com recently released the monetary figures for Alabama in 2016 and, as a whole, the athletic department spent over $800,000 on meals and snacks. A whopping $512,656 of that was spent on Nick Saban’s football team alone. That figure accounts for 61.2 percent of the total the athletic department as a whole spent on meals, which does not include meals away from campus on away game trips. Tide basketball was second behind the football team, in terms of spending.

Alabama’s men’s basketball team wasn’t far behind in the per-athlete spending. The 12 scholarship players on Avery Johnson’s team got an average of $5,725 per player.

For football, that number was $6,031 per athlete.

These totals don’t account for meals on the road traveling to games.

Amy Bragg, who has been on Alabama’s staff since 2010, takes her job quite seriously. She texts players photos of the fajita bar so they’ll show up for their 10 p.m. feedings, and during fall camp feeds the players 6,000 and sometimes 8,000 calories per day, according to SEC Country.

Taco and wing nights, which Bragg calls “morale boosters,” are also provided during camp. Those consist of 40 pounds each of ground beef and chicken and 3,000 chicken wings.

In June 2014, Alabama247 chronicled how Bragg began to capitalize on the NCAA’s unlimited meals.

She’ll use the NCAA’s new unlimited snack rule to her advantage.

In the morning, before players come in for morning lifts and workouts, the smoothie bar is open at 6 a.m., and there will be options for things like egg wraps and yogurt parfaits. Players can eat at Bryant Hall or take it to-go, and they can get smoothies to take into meetings, which can especially help a player trying to gain mass, for example. At the end of the day, they get a healthy snack at “training table,” and will have access to snacks on the go, like trail mix, to take to class.

On a gameday, it’s much more player specific.

Pre-game meals include chicken and rice, baked potatoes, dinner rolls, fruit bowls and jello - which is there by tradition - or scrambled eggs and pancakes for morning games.

The meals these players are getting aren’t exactly basic, either.