What Can You Buy for the Cost of College Football?
Spoiler: a lot!
Dear readers,
It’s the final weekend in August, and you know what that means: the official start of the 2023 college football season. For many Americans (present company notably excluded), the start of college football season is a big deal, but even among lukewarm fans like us, there’s no denying that it’s also big, big business. How big, exactly? Well, that’s our topic this week. Let’s dive in.
What would you do with $2,836,628,233.00. Travel the world? Buy a house? (Or six?) Start a charity? Run for president?
Well, thanks to a nifty little tool called a public records request, we don’t have to guess what America’s top sporting schools would do with that little chunk of change: they’d fund their football programs!
It may be hard to put a price on the feeling that you get when your favorite college football team scores a touchdown, but it turns out that it’s not that hard to put a price tag on all the stuff that universities need to buy in order for their athletes to score a touchdown. In fact, that’s what the fine folks over at Sportico have done by putting together an interactive database of the balance sheets of the athletic departments at public universities in the Football Bowl Subdivision, the premier college football division in America.
We suggest you spend some time perusing the database yourself, but here’s the top-line data from 2021-2022:
Expenses (Top 10)
Total across 107 programs: $2,836,628,233.00
Average: $26,510,544.00
Revenues (Top 10)
Total across 107 programs: $4,346,365,450
Average: $40,620,237
A few things immediately jump out about the data (aside from “holy shit!!”). The first is that many of the programs, and especially the top-earning programs, are turning pretty hefty profits from their football programs — over $100 million in the case of the University of Texas (which spent about $51 million in 2021-22).
These figures raise an obvious question — namely, where is all this revenue going? Of course, some of it is going to fund less profitable programs, and a big chunk of it goes to coaches’ salaries. (UT’s head coach Steve Sarkisian, for instance, is guaranteed to earn $34.2 million in base pay over his six-year contract.) But the more important point is where it’s not going: into players’ pockets. We’ve harped on this plenty of times before, but the NCAA’s claim that its college football players are “amateurs” is pretty laughable when you look at the raw economic data coming out of NCAA football programs. How many “amateur” musicians do you know who are raking in millions of dollars in revenue for their open mic nights?
These are professional athletes, folks — and they deserve to be paid as such.
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