Good morning and thank you for taking the time to read NILnomics. This week I’m going to dive into the Learfield Director’s Cup. If you’re not familiar, it’s an award college athletic directors made up in 1993 to award the school who performs the best across a number of sports. The Fall 2025 scores were just released and I think looking at the award and the influence of money on it is revealing. So if this is all new to you - strap right in as I’ll walk you through it.

Let’s get into it.

North Carolina leads the 2025-26 Learfield Directors' Cup Fall standings with 359 points, narrowly ahead of Stanford's 346.5. By June, when the final tallies are in, one athletic department will hoist a trophy celebrating their comprehensive excellence across 19 different sports. Press releases will tout their commitment to the full student-athlete experience. Administrators will congratulate themselves on supporting opportunities beyond the revenue sports.

Here's what won't be in those press releases: the Directors' Cup is a vanity project created by athletic directors to award themselves points for doing what Title IX already requires them to do.

Think about it. The National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics—the athletic directors' own trade association—invented this award in 1993 to celebrate... athletic directors. They created a scoring system that rewards the thing that makes their jobs look more sophisticated: managing sprawling Olympic sports portfolios. Then they convinced sponsors to pay for the privilege of putting their name on it.

And it worked. For three decades, athletic departments have pointed to Directors' Cup standings as proof of their commitment to broad-based athletics, even as they've systematically prioritized football revenue over everything else, realigned conferences purely for TV money, and eliminated Olympic sports programs when budgets got tight.

So which is it? Is the Directors' Cup a disingenuous PR exercise—athletic departments performing virtue about Olympic sports while the industry structurally undermines them? Or does it represent something genuine about what athletic administrators actually value, even if that value is secondary to football and basketball?

The answer is probably both. And the Fall 2024-25 standings, combined with the financial realities of the schools at the top, reveal exactly how that tension plays out.

Schools get points for where they rank at the end of each sport (1st place: 100 points, 2nd place: 90 points, 3rd place: 85 points, etc). Once each sport gets scored, each school has to count the following sports:

then add their next highest 14 sports regardless of gender, for a maximum of 19 total sports. A few pieces to note about the scoring system:

Why the mandatory requirement matters: If athletic directors truly valued comprehensive excellence, they wouldn't need to mandate which sports count. The mandatory list exists because without it, schools would ignore these sports entirely for Directors' Cup purposes. Three of the five required sports are women's programs—a tacit admission that without forcing the issue, athletic departments would underinvest in women's sports even more than they already do.

FBS Football's Special Treatment: Football doesn't just earn points—it gets its own scoring system. The top 25 teams in the final Coaches Poll receive points based on ranking. Bowl participants get points even if unranked. This complexity exists for one reason: football is actually important to athletic directors, so the scoring system bends to accommodate it.

Compare that to men's water polo, which is the only NCAA championship sport that earns zero Directors' Cup points. NACDA has never explained why, but the message is clear: some sports matter, others don't, and athletic directors reserve the right to decide which is which.The Visual

Stanford had a 25-year dynasty with the Director’s Cup, built on caring more about Olympic sports than everyone else. They spent more money than everyone else and chose to spend it on Olympic sports. The Cardinal sponsors 36 varsity programs and invests heavily across all of them. That's a choice, but it's a choice enabled by an $8+ billion endowment and a fundraising operation that treats Olympic sports as part of Stanford's brand identity.

Texas's recent dominance (four titles in five years) represents the other model: football prints money, which funds everything else, which earns Directors' Cup points, which provides PR cover for the fact that you're essentially running a professional football franchise on a university campus.

Then their’s the schools who conspicuously under perform. Alabama. Georgia. LSU. Auburn. The SEC schools that dominate the actual revenue sports and don't particularly care about a trophy that their own trade association invented.

Let’s look at whose spending what and how they performed this Fall:

Stanford sponsors 36 sports. North Carolina sponsors 28. Texas sponsors 20. These aren't arbitrary numbers—they're strategic decisions about how to deploy resources and manage Title IX compliance.

The real question: Are these schools investing in Olympic sports because they value comprehensive athletics, or because Olympic sports provide efficient Title IX compliance while generating positive PR through Directors' Cup performance?

The cynical answer: Both, and that's exactly why the Directors' Cup exists. It creates a framework where doing what you're legally required to do (provide equitable opportunities for women) becomes something you can win a trophy for.

Let's look at what Directors' Cup success actually costs, which schools are efficient vs. wasteful in pursuit of points, and whether athletic directors actually care about this trophy or if it's just convenient PR.

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.

🎧 Moneyballers - Toledo’s new Assistant AD for student athlete analytics at Toledo gives a behind the scenes look at what working in the NIL space is like.

🎧 NIL Clubhouse - Rick and Dave get Athlete.org’s Jim Cavale to give his organization’s perspective on the future of college athletics.

🎧 Coaches Hot Seat - when Mark talks I listen. He gives great insight on why December has become such a pressure cooker in college athletics.

Thanks for reading this week’s issue! If you liked it, share it with a friend. It goes a long way!

Until next time,

Greg Chick, PhD
Data Analyst

It was a bit messy to put this data together. The latest financial data is for FY 2024 (FY 2025 data continues to trickle in…) so you’re seeing Fall 2025 results with Fall 2023 - Spring 2024 financial data. That’s not ideal - but it’s the world we live in.