Profitability of College Football teams

[Tim Eriksen]

Forbes has an article on the revenue and profitability of college football teams.  Surprisingly, the most profitable program was Texas A&M.  Go Ags!

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrissmith/2018/09/11/college-footballs-most-valuable-teams/#3ae541ef6c64

 

[JRM]

Those are some unreal profit margins. 

[augustabound]

Wow. Texans love their football, A&M and the Longhorns 1 and 2.  The rest of the list doesn't surprise me. 

[Gamecock-YT]

Too bad all that money is just going to paying the contracts of fired coaches.

[augustabound]

Too bad all that money is just going to paying the contracts of fired coaches.

Yep.  For ND, they fired Charlie Weis in '09 and the last payment to him was in '16. They paid him close to $20M NOT to coach for ND anymore.  ;D

 

After being fired from ND, he was fired twice more and as of 2016 was getting 3 paycheques from former employers.  Grand total comp to him after being fired from all his jobs was in the neighbourhood of $65M.

[boilermaker75]

Yet at most universities the athletic department expenses exceed revenues.

 

http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athletics-departments-make-more-they-spend-still-minority

[Tim Eriksen]

Yet at most universities the athletic department expenses exceed revenues.

 

http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athletics-departments-make-more-they-spend-still-minority

 

That is more of a byproduct of Title IX.  Very few sports are profitable.  It is my understanding that NCAA CFB teams must have 65 scholarship athletes meaning there must be 65 female scholarship athletes regardless of whether the sport is profitable. 

[CorpRaider]

To me it never makes much sense to look a profitability of a not-for-profit enterprise, smoothed over time they should be running at around a break even, but there's some interesting revenue data. 

[boilermaker75]

To me it never makes much sense to look a profitability of a not-for-profit enterprise, smoothed over time they should be running at around a break even, but there's some interesting revenue data.

 

Something like half of FBS schools football and basketball programs, the revenue sports, do not generate enough revenue to support themselves. Then you have to factor in that athletic departments have to also support all the non-revenue sports. That money comes from the university and donors instead of going to academic programs. Yet almost every school wants a football program,

 

http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/college/ct-college-football-is-forever-20170106-story.html

 

In 2015 only 24 colleges had football and basketball programs that generated enough revenue to cover the athletic program budgets,

 

http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athletics-departments-make-more-they-spend-still-minority