Conference Revenue/Spending, Ranked

Hey everyone thanks for opening up this email and spending a moment with me today. Hope you all had a great Memorial Day weekend and enjoyed time with family and friends. I’m graduating tomorrow (Wednesday) so I’ve only got a short article this week. Let’s jump into it.

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Last week, Sportico’s Lev Akabas published a compelling visualization comparing professional sports franchises by expressing each team’s revenue as a percentage of its league leader. The graphic offered a far more informative perspective than a traditional ranking table by illustrating not simply who leads, but how far ahead they are.

That immediately raised a natural question for me: what would the collegiate version of this analysis reveal?

To explore that question, I built a conference-by-conference visualization for every FBS athletic department. I extended the analysis beyond revenue alone by constructing a parallel comparison for expenses — and that is where the underlying financial dynamics become substantially more revealing.

Ordinal rankings provide only limited insight. Knowing that Ohio State ranks first in Big Ten revenue while Michigan ranks second establishes hierarchy, but it obscures magnitude. Michigan may trail Ohio State by a narrow margin or by a structurally significant one; rankings alone cannot distinguish between the two.

Expressing each institution as a percentage of its conference leader resolves that limitation. Rather than presenting programs as sequential entries in a list, the visualization captures the actual financial distance separating them.

Separating revenue and expense data adds another important layer of interpretation. Revenue reflects institutional earning capacity, while expenses reveal strategic priorities and operational behavior. Examining the two independently makes it possible to evaluate not only which programs generate resources, but also how aggressively they deploy them.

The analysis uses FY2025 athletic department financial data from the NCAA Membership Financial Reporting System, corresponding to the 2024–25 football season.

For the revenue visualization, I excluded student fees, institutional and state subsidies, donations, and transfers to or from the institution. Reported athletic revenue figures often contain substantial accounting artifacts that can distort comparisons of genuine market-based earning power. Removing those categories produces a cleaner approximation of operational revenue generation.

Even with those adjustments, revenue figures should be interpreted cautiously. Expense data, in many respects, provides the more reliable signal. Revenue reporting can be influenced by institutional accounting practices; expenditures, by contrast, represent concrete financial commitments.

The ACC emerges as one of the most financially compressed conferences in the FBS landscape. Excluding the Pac-12’s remaining two institutions, no ACC member generates less than 67% of conference-leading North Carolina’s $122 million in revenue. Relative to its peers, the ACC exhibits a comparatively narrow distribution between top and bottom programs.

The American Athletic Conference presents the opposite profile. Navy leads the conference at approximately $60 million in revenue, while Charlotte operates at just 24% of that figure. The disparity is not merely noticeable — it reflects fundamentally different resource environments within the same conference structure.

Predictably, the largest aggregate numbers appear in the SEC and Big Ten. Ohio State leads the Big Ten with $267 million in revenue, followed by Michigan at $225 million. Tennessee tops the SEC at $193 million.

However, the more revealing story lies among recent realignment additions. In the SEC, Texas immediately ranks near the top at 94% of Tennessee’s revenue total, while Oklahoma sits near the bottom of the conference at 58%. In the Big Ten, UCLA, Washington, and Rutgers all occupy the conference’s lower tier, each generating less than 44% of Ohio State’s revenue.

Conference realignment may have altered institutional affiliations, but the underlying financial hierarchy remains highly uneven.

The expense visualization ultimately provides the clearest picture of where competitive stratification is accelerating.

In the SEC, Texas leads the conference in expenditures with a substantial gap separating it from the rest of the league. Tennessee trails by 24 percentage points, followed by another 13-point decline to Georgia. Rather than operating as a single financial tier, the conference increasingly resembles multiple resource classes coexisting under the same banner.

The Big Ten demonstrates a similar structure. Ohio State leads conference spending, Michigan trails by 19 percentage points, and Penn State falls another 16 points behind Michigan. These are not marginal differences. They represent meaningful divergence in institutional investment capacity.

Several additional patterns stand out.

In the ACC, North Carolina shifts from first in revenue to third in expenses, while Florida State assumes the top spending position. That divergence suggests materially different approaches to resource allocation. Whether Carolina’s position reflects fiscal efficiency or relative underinvestment depends on how effectively those expenditures translate into competitive outcomes.

UMass presents another interesting case. The university leads the MAC in expenses despite only recently establishing itself within the conference. Transitional programs typically lag established members financially; UMass instead appears to be investing at a level more consistent with a long-term incumbent.

Navy provides perhaps the most striking contrast in the dataset. Despite leading the American in revenue generation, the institution ranks last in conference expenses at just 34% of South Florida’s spending level. The figure falls below even Louisiana-Monroe, which spends only 39% of Sun Belt leader Old Dominion’s total. Service academies operate under fundamentally distinct institutional and financial models, and the spending data reflects those constraints clearly.

Viewed together, these charts illustrate something that standalone revenue or expense rankings cannot: the overall structure of a conference’s financial ecosystem.

Some conferences resemble relatively cohesive clusters with limited separation between members. Others display increasingly stratified tiers in which institutions operate under dramatically different financial realities despite sharing conference affiliation.

At the same time, financial advantage does not perfectly predict competitive outcomes. Indiana, for example, occupies a relatively unremarkable middle position within the Big Ten in both revenue and expenses, yet subsequently produced an undefeated regular season and College Football Playoff championship the following year. Financial scale matters, particularly over long competitive horizons, but it is not deterministic.

Still, if the objective is to identify programs best positioned for sustained competitiveness over the next decade, institutions occupying the upper tier of these charts begin with a substantial structural advantage.

I would be interested to hear what stood out most to you. Which gaps were larger than expected? Which programs appear positioned to outperform — or underperform — their financial profile?

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next week.

Best,

Greg Chick, PhD
Data Analyst