Accounting methods vary, but the common range for nutrition costs at Power Five schools is $1.5 million to $2.5 million.



"Certainly the Power Five conference schools that have a winning tradition have an operational budget to go with it," said Dave Ellis, a sports nutrition consultant and former executive director of the Collegiate and Professional Sports Dietitians Association. "It's not just Top 25 teams that value fueling. Guy like (Wyoming coach) Craig Bohl has his administration building a new football complex with a training table that will feed all Wyoming sports. The first thing Craig had me do when he arrived at Wyoming was put in a fueling station in the weight room."



Wyoming led the Mountain West Conference in nutrition spending at $900,000 last year, three times more than in 2014-15, and has hired two nutritionists.



Houston, of the American Athletic Conference, is spending just over $1 million, which ranks at the top of the Group of Five schools that responded to the AP survey. On the other hand, East Carolina, which plays in the same conference as Houston, spent $118,000 to provide four extra meals a week to athletes but had no training table, no fueling stations and no nutrition staff.



Of the seven Mid-American Conference schools that responded to the survey, none had a dedicated athlete training table and one had a part-time nutritionist. Ohio provided a snack station for the first time last year, allocating $35,000 for what it described as "dry food items and fruit."



In the Sun Belt Conference, Texas State is spending $380,000 for a training table, $50,000 for a snack station and $12,500 for a campus professor to counsel athletes on nutrition.



Nebraska's athlete nutrition program dates to 1938, when the old Big Six Conference approved training tables for football players only. The Lewis Training Table opened in its current location in 1985, built with proceeds from the Cornhuskers' appearance in the 1983 Kickoff Classic, and was remodeled for $3.25 million in 2010. Nutrition staff and amenities have been added over the years. Since deregulation in 2014, a nutrition station known as "The Landing" was remodeled and 18 student interns take turns staffing it Monday through Friday. The menu includes, among other things, energy shakes and smoothies, yogurt, cottage cheese, fruits and nuts.



Williams, the Akron athletic director, said he is convinced poor nutrition led to the Zips' basketball team struggling at the end of the season in 2016-17. The Zips went 5-5 after a 22-4 start.



"We went into a tailspin where we couldn't muster a full game's worth of energy," Williams said. "It was apparent we were not well-nutritioned. There are a whole bunch of factors that go into that. Clearly, one of those is that we were not lean."



With Akron's total athletic budget of $34 million — about one-third of the budget at big Power Five schools — Williams is left to imagine what full-time nutritionists and carefully planned training table spreads could do. The school did cobble together some money to provide nutritious meals for football players over the summer, and an outside caterer was bringing in breakfasts for the basketball team.



"So at least for one meal they weren't eating out of pocket at Taco Bell," Williams said.



AP Sports Writer Pete Iacobelli contributed to this report.