● From our sister site, TheSportsExaminer.com ●
We are seeing the death of American collegiate athletics as it was conceived, with college football the no. 2 sport in the U.S. and players pushing to be paid as employees of the universities they represent, instead of students getting an education and receiving free tuition, accommodations and board in return.
If some sort of payment for football players is coming, that sport may end up morphing into something like a professional under-23 league in a structure like the National Football League, with geographically-based divisions, collective bargaining and all the rest (and why have them go to class?). Casey Wasserman, the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games organizing committee chair, said in a March interview that the NFL could take the lead on this:
“I actually think the NFL can say, look, we can help solve the problem, not take control of college football, but sort of create the pathway, and use that as a means to save all these Olympic sports that are good for this country and by the way, think about the Paris Olympics this summer: there’ll be 100 athletes competing in Paris for countries not for the United States, who went to college for free and got their athletic training at American universities.
“We train our competitors. Talk about power and soft power … that’s a powerful thing. All those things are going to go away if we don’t fix this problem.
“To push the institutions to do what’s right to maintain the sanctity of non-football sports, I think the NFL has a real opportunity to be a leader in that movement.”
The question is how will a chunk of money – and how much – from a fully-professionalized “college football” league be transferred back to universities which license their name, logo, practice facilities and stadiums to a new “college football” league?
One of the first questions is what do these non-football programs cost now? In fact, the real question is how much do all sports cost – outside of football and men’s and women’s basketball – at the 68 universities which will be part of the four major conferences as of this fall, which will be the core of any NFL-style future football league.
(This includes the Atlantic Coast Conference (18 schools); Big 10 Conference (18), Big XII Conference (16) and Southeastern Conference (16).)
There are some answers, if you know where to look. TSX asked George Perry of Texas-based NALathletics to take a look at the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity in Athletics database, a public presentation of revenues and expenses at U.S. university athletic programs. It’s not the best data available on college sports spending, but it is the best that is publicly available.
The numbers are fascinating. For the 2023-23 academic year, the 68 schools in the four major conferences to be:
● $8,566,114,905 ($8.57 billion) in total athletics spending.
● $4,764,306,894 ($4.76 billion) in spending outside of football and basketball (men and women).
● $392,858,132 ($393 million) in spending for individual sports outside of football and basketball.
There’s a big difference between the $393 million for individual-sport spending and $4.76 billion for all-other athletic department expenses. What makes up that $4.371 billion?
Perry noted that while the accounting divisions between schools in their reports is not completely consistent, elements which are important include general administration, shared services (finance, rent, technology support, sports medicine to provided to all teams, academic support) plus coaching salaries, recruiting expenses, and so on.
So the ask from the 68 ACC-B1G-XII-SEC would not be $393 million to cover the other, non-revenue sports, but somewhere between $393 million and $4.76 billion.
If we assume that 60% of the $4.371 billion went to support football and basketball, that leaves $1.748 billion in other costs and added to the sport-operations total, would create a non-revenue-sports cost of $2.141.4 billion.
A lot of money, right? You bet it is. But (and there is always a but): do those “non-revenue” sports bring in any money? Perry was asked and with his magical spreadsheet touch, came up with more amazing numbers:
● $3,389,879,617 ($3.390 billion) in non-revenue-sport “revenue.”
● $2,285,868,096 ($2.286 billion) “Not Allocated by Gender/Sport Revenue.”
● $1,104,011521 ($1.104 billion) in non-revenue sports, by-sport revenue.
Now what does this mean? The “Not Allocated” total – 67.4% – is likely athletic department donations which are not broken out on a per-sport basis. And which are also likely to be primarily focused on football and basketball, although not exclusively.
But what the numbers show is that “non-revenue” sports brought in more than $1.1 billion at these 68 schools in 2022-23! The leaders:
● $45.91 million: Stanford
● $41.69 million: West Virginia
● $38.92 million: Notre Dame
● $35.15 million: Arizona State
● $34.38 million: Virginia
Some additional calculus will be needed to figure out how to integrate basketball into these calculations, assuming it stays within the NCAA framework and is not spun off as an NBA/WNBA U-23 league. But it says that:
● $1.104 billion a year is realized in “non-revenue” sport revenue
● $2.141 billion a year estimated in “non-revenue” sport costs
● $1.037 billion a year “gap” between “non-rev” revenue and costs
Translation: an NFL-style, 68-team, U-23 professional football league should pay the 68 universities which would host their teams at least $1.037 billion a year to make them whole for the revenue lost from football (there is a better number to be had, but not from the Equity in Athletics database).
Is this possible. Well, Kristi Dosh’s BusinessofCollegeSports.com site reviewed the available college football television contracts in March. For the 2024 college football season:
● ACC: $240 million per year expiring 2026-27
● Big 10: $1.05 billion per year expiring 2029-30
● Big XII: $220 per year deal expiring 2024-25; $380 million per year starting 2025-26
● SEC: $740 million per year starting 2024-25
● Playoffs: $470 million per year expiring 2025-26; $1.3 billion per year starting 2026-27
● All: $2.72 billion per year through 2024 football season
● All: $2.88 billion per year for the 2025 football season
● All: $3.71 billion per year for the 2026 football season
Is a $1.04 billion transfer to the 68 schools possible (about $153 million each) for stadium and practice field rent, team facility spaces, on-campus medical support and the rest? Sure looks like it.
Moreover, some of the money which is now going to donations for football at these schools (not mention name-image-likeness money) will come back to school athletic departments as the football programs become professionalized and separate entities.
Bottom line: It is possible to allow collegiate sport to continue across a broad base of sports and avoid a catastrophic contraction because football players want to be paid in money instead of education. But it’s a business deal and Wasserman’s contention that the NFL is well poised to lead this transition is absolutely right.
Commissioner Goodell, the NFL Draft is over. Ready to start a new “NFL-U” league?
~ Rich Perelman
(Special thanks again to George Perry for his wizardry with the Equity in Athletics database.)
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