If you’re tuned into the college athletics world at all, you’ve probably seen headlines the last week about record revenues at schools like Texas and Ohio State while the opposite is happening at Rutgers. The reason you’re seeing these stories pop up now, as I’ve alluded to in past weeks, is schools releasing their financial reports at this time of year. Analysts like me can get their hands on these new reports through public record requests and are reporting out what they see.

This week I want to do something that’s long overdue for NILnomics - I’m going to break down the finances of college athletics from 10,000 feet. For those that want to understand where the money is coming and going - this will be a great place to start.

Let’s get into it.

I mentioned last week I hit 400 subscribers and would have another reader Q&A as I have for every milestone on my way to 1,000 subscribers. I didn’t say when I’d do it. Let’s clear that up! I’ll be doing a live stream tonight, Tuesday, February 3 at 9:30pm EST. The stream link is here. I’ve gotten some questions from readers already, but if you reply to this email with a question before the stream I may be able to squeeze it in. You’re welcome to watch the live stream and talk in the chat as well. The stream will be on my Youtube account to watch afterwards for those that can’t make it.

Before I get started, I was contacted weeks ago by infographic and data visualization specialist Roshan De Silva. He offered to do some visualizations for NILnomics - which has allowed me to spend more time this week researching and writing. I think you’ll agree when you see his charts throughout this story just how great his work is. To check out more of his portfolio and learn what he can do for you, your company, or your department, check out his company Datagraphy here.

One last note - the data used in this story is from FY2024. The reports trickling out now are for FY2025 - which in turn is a year behind where we are now (FY 2026 ends in July). College athletics finances - where we’re eternally behind.

For years, the power brokers in college athletics warned us the sky was falling. Any form of athlete compensation—COA stipends, Alston payments, revenue sharing—would bring the whole house of cards crashing down. Former NCAA President Mark Emmert put it bluntly in 2011: "I am adamantly opposed to the notion of paying student athletes to play their games."

You know what happened next.

O'Bannon. Alston (a unanimous Supreme Court, too). Justice Kavanaugh's concurrence: "Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate." Now there's House, and schools are paying athletes directly.

And everyone is doing… fine.

College sports is a billion-dollar business—that much is obvious. The NFL may own Sundays (and increasingly more), but college football owns Saturdays. That cultural and economic power shows up on the balance sheets of the conferences and schools at the top.

Media rights are the engine driving everything. This has been true since NCAA v. Board of Regents in 1984 (the NCAA getting sued is not a uniquely 21st-century phenomenon). Schools grouped with peers based on prestige. As they gained popularity and ratings power, they hunted for new members who could juice their media deals. The Big Ten, famously, was earning roughly $0.80 per subscriber in-market but just $0.05 out-of-market. Hence adding Rutgers, Maryland, Oregon, UCLA, and Washington—each one expanding the footprint and the per-subscriber rates networks would pay.

For a visual break, here's a chart from Nielsen made during the last major wave of realignment that shows the value to adding more out-of-market schools:

Next to media rights, schools are generating massive revenue off of ticket sales and corporate sponsorships/licensing. Let’s look at the data on that:

You'd be forgiven for thinking that at $11.8 billion, the institutions of the FBS are all doing great. They're not. Those revenues aren't distributed evenly—not even close.

What else would conference realignment be for if not to fight over control of the money spigots that are network broadcasters and their media rights deals? The SEC and Big Ten sit at the top, each pulling in over $800 million annually from media rights alone. The ACC, Big 12, and Pac-12 (when it existed) formed a second tier. And then there's everyone else.

This is where it gets uncomfortable. Each conference negotiates its own deals with network partners, and those deals vary wildly in value. The result is a caste system built into the sport's financial structure. A school in the SEC receives a media rights distribution that dwarfs what a Sun Belt or MAC program will ever see—before a single ticket is sold or a single donor writes a check.

Then layer on everything else. Some schools fill 100,000-seat stadiums week after week. Others struggle to draw 20,000. Some have donor bases that fund eight-figure facility projects without blinking. Others rely on student fees to keep the lights on. The range of money schools can generate isn't just wide—it's a chasm.

The bottom line: "FBS" is a single classification that contains wildly different financial realities.

At $11.8 billion in revenue, college athletics sits just behind the NFL, MLB, and NBA. In a sport that (as of the time of this data) doesn't pay its players, surely these programs must be flush with cash. Right?

Not quite.

The proverbial wisdom in the pre-revenue sharing era was simple: win recruits by wowing them with facilities. Indoor practice complexes. Golden toilets. Lazy rivers. That sort of thing.

Then schools paid top dollar for the best coaches. I do mean top dollar. In at least half a dozen states, the highest-paid public employee is a head football or basketball coach at the flagship university. And "paying for the best coaches" doesn't just mean paying them to coach. As we've seen this year, many schools are willing to pay millions for their coaches to not coach for them.

Let's look at where the money actually goes:

If revenues are unequal, expenses are where that inequality becomes strategy.
The same forces that drive revenue—conference affiliation, brand strength, stadium size—also drive spending. Schools at the top don't just earn more; they spend more. And they spend more because they earn more, in an arms race that never stops.

Texas sits at the top of the expense ledger, just as it does in revenue. The Longhorns' budget is 14 times that of Louisiana-Monroe. Same division. Same sport. Fourteen times the resources.

The SEC and Big Ten don't just lead in spending—they also have the widest ranges within their own conferences. That's the tension of super-conferences: Texas and Alabama share a league with schools operating on a fraction of their budget. The rising media rights tide lifts all boats in the conference, but some boats were yachts to begin with.

Where does the money go? Coaching salaries that rival professional leagues. Facilities that double as recruiting brochures. Support staff, nutrition programs, private jets, and the ever-expanding compliance and NIL infrastructure. And increasingly, payments to athletes themselves.

The uncomfortable truth is that spending has become a prerequisite for relevance. Schools don't spend because they're winning—they spend because they're trying to. The gap between the haves and have-nots isn't just about what comes in. It's about what schools are willing—and able—to push back out.

In a rational world, you'd expect a tight correlation between what schools earn and what they spend. More revenue, more spending—but proportionally, sensibly.
College athletics is not a rational world.

The scatter plot above shows expenses on the y-axis and revenue on the x-axis. If every school ran a balanced operation, they'd cluster neatly along a diagonal line. Some do. Many don't.

In professional sports, this would be simple. Owners want profits. The Cowboys, Yankees, and Lakers are businesses—they exist to generate returns. Spending is disciplined by the expectation that at some point, more money should come out than goes in.

College athletics doesn't work that way. Athletic departments are embedded within nonprofit educational institutions. There are no shareholders demanding dividends. No owners extracting profits. The money that comes in doesn't need to come back out—it just needs to be spent on something that enhances the institution.

Now let me put on my PhD hat for a moment. The economist Howard Bowen wasn't writing about athletics when he observed that universities will raise all the money they can and spend all the money they raise—but he might as well have been. Athletic departments are just a concentrated, highly visible expression of how higher education operates more broadly. The goal isn't profit. The goal is prestige. And prestige, by definition, has no ceiling.

Look at Alabama and Ohio State. Both spend well above what their revenue would predict. These are programs betting on themselves—pouring money into the machine because winning breeds more winning, and the returns (in brand value, in recruiting, in future media leverage) are assumed to justify the investment. Whether that math actually works out is a different question. But no one's asking for a dividend check.

Then look at Florida, Georgia, and Texas A&M. All three generate massive revenue but spend more conservatively relative to their intake. They're not skimping—these are still enormous budgets—but they're running tighter ships. Prudence, or just a different theory of the game?

The truth is there's no single right answer. Some schools spend to keep up. Others spend to pull ahead. And a few seem content to bank the difference. But Bowen's Law suggests the restraint won't last. In the prestige economy of college athletics, unspent money is just unrealized ambition.The Visual, Part V

This section is for articles, podcasts, interviews, and any other college sports related content I found interesting this week. If you have something you’d like to share, shoot me an email and it may be featured.

🎧 JohnWallStreet - the newest episode has Big Sky Commissioner Tom Wistrcill on. A really interesting look at how they leverage their late night, West Coast games.

🎧 Higher Ed Athletics - Akron AD Andrew Goodrich joins the pod. Great to hear someone’s perspective who comes from outside the P5 (and FBS!).

🎧 SportsWise - Gabe gets prominent student-athlete attorney Derek Heitner on the pod. This was the first time I’ve listened to him - and it was worth the time.

This was a much more comprehensive post than I usually do, but I think it’s necessary. It’ll also be a good introduction into the world of college sports finances for people going forward. If you know someone whose interested, send them this article and see if it sparks their interest.

If you enjoyed the long-form deep dive I did this week, let me know by replying to this email or messaging me after the fact at [email protected]. Thanks again for your time.

Until next time,

Greg Chick, PhD
Data Analyst

All data comes from the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database and is from FY2024.

Again - I want to thank Roshan for his incredible work with this week’s visualizations. If you haven’t already, please checkout his work at Datagraphy.