Hello again! Thanks for cracking open another issue of NILnomics. I started a series of articles last week (where I’ll be exploring FBS conference tax returns) and then realized that we’re at the start of college baseball’s annual moment in the sun. I couldn’t miss a chance to dive into the finances of the sport. So take a dive into the data with me - it’s my first time exploring baseball. Let’s see what we dig up.

A quick plug for my latest podcast appearance and then we’re onto college baseball:

The 2026 College World Series field is set and began this past weekend. Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Ole Miss, Texas, Troy, and West Virginia have punched their tickets to Charles Schwab Field in Omaha. The SEC, as it has for most of the past decade, sent five of the eight teams. Troy — a Cinderella story out of the Sun Belt — is the lone mid-major, having knocked off programs with budgets several times its own to reach college baseball's biggest stage.

That contrast is not a coincidence. It is a financial story.

College baseball exists in a peculiar economic space — a sport that commands genuine national attention every June, but spends the other eleven months operating largely in the shadow of football and men's basketball. This year, with the House v. NCAA settlement now fully in effect and the revenue-sharing era underway, it is worth asking: what does college baseball actually cost, who is spending the most, and what does the money tell us about competitive outcomes?

College baseball's financial structure has never been subtle about its inequality. The SEC does not just dominate the CWS because it recruits better players — it spends more, coaches more, and builds better infrastructure than almost everyone else.

The chart above tells a story that should surprise no one who follows college athletics: SEC programs sit at the top of baseball's financial food chain, and the gap to everyone else is significant. Big 12 programs check in as the closest competitor, with the ACC trailing behind. Notably, the Big 10 is 5th among all conferences in highest-member spending, beating by lonely old Oregon State. Outside the power conferences, the dropoff is steep.

Let’s look at how much return on investment these baseball programs are getting:

What drives those revenue figures? Baseball is primarily an expense-driven sport — most programs generate little to no sport-specific revenue. What passes through the books as "baseball revenue" is typically a combination of ticket sales, camp income, and small amounts of institutional allocation. The real financial driver is expenditure: how much a school chooses to invest in coaching, facilities, scholarships, travel, and recruiting. That investment, in turn, is funded almost entirely by football. (Still - look at the position of the Big 10 again. Nearly last in generated revenue from baseball. Amazing.)

Baseball is, in the plainest economic terms, a football-subsidized sport. The wealthiest baseball programs play at schools where football revenue is so abundant that the question is not whether to fund baseball well — it is how well.

That relationship between football spending and baseball spending deserves more than a passing mention.

The correlation is real and meaningful (0.82 to be exact). Schools that invest heavily in football tend to invest heavily in baseball. This is partly a resource story — high football revenue creates more discretionary spending across all athletics — and partly a culture story. The SEC, which has always treated baseball as a flagship sport alongside football, has built a feedback loop where competitive success generates fan interest, which generates ticket revenue and donor support, which gets reinvested back into the program.

But there is nuance here. The correlation is not perfectly linear, and the outliers are instructive. Some football-rich programs (Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma) have historically underinvested in baseball relative to their resources. Others — programs like Arkansas, Ole Miss, and Vanderbilt — have made baseball a genuine institutional priority in a way that punches above even their football peers. When you see a school outperforming its expected baseball investment relative to football spending, you are usually looking at an AD who made a deliberate choice and a donor base that followed.

NILnomics has a partnership with NILNewsstand, a leading platform covering Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) and the revenue-sharing era of college athletics. As part of the agreement, NILNewsstand will launch the “NILNewsstand Data Series (Powered by NILnomics)”, a recurring content initiative available within NILNewsstand Pro, the platform’s professional membership offering.

The series is designed to deliver data-driven analysis, custom visuals, and practical insights to help athletic departments, operators, and industry professionals better understand and navigate the evolving NIL and revenue-sharing landscape.

Unlike traditional coverage, the NILNewsstand Data Series is built specifically for professionals working inside college athletics.

“Our goal has always been to inform the people actually building and operating in this space,” said Kyle Ems, Founder of NILNewsstand. “This partnership allows us to add a structured, data-driven layer to our coverage — not just what’s happening, but what it means and what to do next.”

The latest issue is around job titles, positions, and what can be learned analyzing Division I staff directories. Find the full article here.

No single expense line captures a program's ambitions better than the head coach's salary.

The coaching market in college baseball has moved fast. LSU's Jay Johnson is now the highest-paid coach in the sport at $3.05 million annually — a number that reflects not just two national championships but LSU's deliberate decision to treat baseball like a revenue sport deserving a revenue-sport head coach. Brian O'Connor's move from Virginia to Mississippi State brought a $2.9 million annual deal, a striking data point that illustrates how aggressively the SEC is defending its turf. Tim Corbin, who has spent over two decades building Vanderbilt into the program it is, sits close behind.

The broader market has shifted dramatically in just a few years. In 2022, only Vanderbilt's Corbin cleared $1.5 million annually in the SEC. By 2025, that threshold had been crossed by five coaches, and the floor for a competitive SEC program was approaching $1 million.

This matters beyond the headline numbers. Head coach salary is a leading indicator of total program investment. Programs that pay their head coach $2–3 million are also paying competitive assistant salaries, funding elite recruiting budgets, and building the support infrastructure that sustains success. Programs paying their coach $700,000 are generally not doing all of those things. Coaching salary, in college baseball, is less a compensation figure and more a signal of institutional commitment.

The mid-major programs that are perennially competitive — programs that show up in regionals year after year despite having a fraction of the budget — are generally doing so with one of two things: an unusually well-compensated coach for their conference tier, or a coach who has chosen to stay for reasons beyond the paycheck. Both situations are fragile. The transfer portal and the revenue-sharing era have made the gap between the haves and have-nots harder to bridge, not easier.

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The 2025–26 academic year was the first operating under the House v. NCAA settlement framework, and baseball is learning what it means to be a non-revenue sport in a world where direct athlete payments have arrived.

The numbers are stark. Football and men's basketball account for roughly 90% of revenue-sharing allocations at most FBS schools, leaving 10% for everything else. Baseball — despite being the third-most-followed college sport in terms of NCAA tournament interest — accounts for an average of just 2.8% of reported team-specific revenues at FBS schools. Translated into dollars: the average revenue-sharing allocation for a college baseball program is around $265,000 per team, or approximately $7,800 per player.

For context, a Power 4 quarterback at a top program may be receiving a revenue-sharing allocation fifty times that amount.

The scholarship situation has changed in ways that could reshape recruiting. Baseball previously had one of the most restrictive scholarship structures in college sports — 11.7 equivalencies spread across a roster — which effectively forced programs to partial-scholarship most of their players. Under the new model, roster limits replace scholarship caps, and schools can now offer up to 34 full scholarships. Programs that fully fund baseball will have a real recruiting advantage. But fully funding 34 scholarships costs money that most programs outside the power conferences simply do not have.

The result is that the structure of the House settlement — by design or otherwise — accelerates the financial stratification already visible in the MFRS data. Rich programs will fully fund. Mid-majors will offer what they can. The gap will widen.

It would be incomplete to tell this story without acknowledging what Troy is doing in Omaha this week.

Troy is not a financial giant. The Trojans are a Sun Belt program, competing on a budget that does not approach the upper echelon of this CWS field. They made it to Omaha anyway — winning their regional and their super regional to become the only No. 3 seed to reach the CWS this year. They knocked out programs with significantly more resources along the way.

This happens in baseball more than in football, and that is not a coincidence either. Baseball's long season, its reliance on pitching depth, and its inherent variance make it the college sport most hospitable to upsets. A hot pitcher on a given weekend can make the financial gap largely irrelevant. That is part of what makes the College World Series compelling.

But at the same time, look at the other seven teams in Omaha. Five SEC programs. Texas and North Carolina — two of the most well-resourced programs in the country. The financial signal is clear: money does not guarantee success in any individual game or series, but it dramatically improves your odds of being in the building when June comes around.

Longtime readers know I’ve been hard at work building a free, public dashboard out of all the MFRS data I have. Many of you have already signed up to be beta testers and I’ve started to roll subscribers into the program. Beta testers have been providing me feedback and I’m actively building out improvements and new features. One of these fine young people said to me, “congrats on all this - so cool to see and I know all of the hard work that goes into it”

If this interests you at all and you want to be on the ground floor using and improving the tool, shoot me an email and I’ll add you to the list. More volunteers will be rolled into the beta test this week.

The charts in this article capture something real about how college baseball works in 2026.

Revenue and expenditure flow through conferences in a way that mirrors the broader athletic department hierarchy. Coaching salaries have become an arms race with the SEC writing the rules. And the relationship between football spending and baseball spending reveals something important: in college athletics, there is no such thing as a self-contained baseball program. What happens in the football stadium on Saturday afternoons in the fall determines, in large part, what happens at the College World Series the following June.

As we watch the 2026 CWS unfold at Charles Schwab Field, that financial context is worth keeping in mind. The teams in Omaha did not get there by accident. For most of them, it took years of deliberate investment — in coaches, in facilities, in scholarships, in recruiting infrastructure — to build programs capable of making that run. Troy is the wonderful exception. Alabama, Georgia, Texas, and their SEC counterparts are the rule.

And if history is any guide, the financial data we have now is about to become the competitive landscape of the next five years.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 to you and the other 1,277 subscribers who get this newsletter weekly. Please feel free to share it with anyone that would enjoy it - here, on LinkedIn, or elsewhere. You can find me on LinkedIn or X if you want my latest thoughts.

Best,

Greg Chick, PhD
Data Analyst

NILnomics is a research and analytics platform covering the business of college sports. We build original data infrastructure — drawing on IRS Form 990 filings, NCAA Membership Financial Reports, and athletic department records across hundreds of institutions — to produce in-depth reporting, interactive dashboards, and financial models. Our work helps administrators, agents, and sports-industry leaders understand how athletic departments raise, spend, and account for money. Founded by a data analyst with a PhD in NCAA financial policy, NILnomics combines academic rigor with practical, decision-ready analysis.