On August 4, gtmoBlue wrote:
Welcome Duke, S 'Cuse & Pitt back to the BEast, maybe KU & Baylor too.
From my extensive research on the topic, I have learned the following verifiable facts:
• It is very important to distinguish the difference between
revenue and
profit.
• With few exception, Power Five Conference
Football programs make a profit.
• With few exception, Power Five Conference
Athletic Departments make a loss.
• Power Five Conference
Football programs subsidize the universities’ non-revenue sports.
• With few exception, the profit generated by Football is insufficient to cover the deficits (losses) incurred by non-revenue sports, which is why Power Five Conference Athletic Departments make a loss.
• Therefore, there is a very strong incentive for Power Five Conference universities to retain their football programs, and retain their memberships in Power Five Conferences.
Top 20 Most Profitable College Football Programs - AthleticsSholarships.net – 2021
The 20 most profitable college football programs made an eye-popping $925 million combined after expenses. The SEC is the leading conference on the field and on the balance sheet, as it has nine schools in the top 20. Of the remaining 11 most profitable programs, there are four from the Big Ten, three from Pac-12, two from the Big-12 and one from the ACC. Here’s the complete list:
1. Texas – $92 million
2. Tennessee – $70 million
3. LSU – $58 million
4. Michigan – $56 million
5. Notre Dame – $54 million
6. Georgia – $50 million
7. Ohio State – $50 million
8. Oklahoma – $48 million
9. Auburn – $47 million
10. Alabama – $46 million
11. Oregon – $40 million
12. Florida State – $39 million
13. Arkansas – $38 million
14. Washington – $38 million
15. Florida – $37 million
16. Texas A&M – $37 million
17. Penn State – $36 million
18. Michigan State – $32 million
19. USC – $29 million
20. South Carolina – $28 million
The
Charts in the lengthy article below by Kristi Doshare well worth a look, and give a truer picture of the situation with real financial figures.
Does Football Fund Other Sports At College Level - Kristi Dosh, Attorney, Forbes - May 5, 2011
First, let me say that it is generally true that football, and sometimes men’s basketball, subsidizes a (sometimes large) portion of the expenses for other teams. It doesn’t matter if we’re looking at a team from Conference USA or the SEC. Accordingly, I pulled numbers for several of the top student fee recipients, both in terms of dollars and percentage, an SEC school, a Big Ten school and Cal-Berkeley because of their recent fundraising efforts to save five sports.
In the Charts that follow, you will see a breakdown of the revenue and expenses for football, men’s and women’s basketball and the catchall for the rest of the varsity sports, “Other Sports”. I’ve also indicated how men’s teams are represented in the “Other Sports” category (with all track and field-related teams being counted as one sport) and how many total participants.
So, no matter whether you’re Ohio University or Penn State, football and men’s basketball are generally the only profit producing sports. When profits from those two sports aren’t large enough to cover the other sports and other expenses like recruiting and coaches salaries, schools generally have to rely upon student fees and other types of direct institutional support.
Protecting the Weak Side: College Football Revenue Props Up Other Sports - Matthew Watkins March 17, 2016
If schools want a profitable department, there’s usually only one place to build it: the football field.
The Texas Tribune analyzed the annual NCAA financial reports of the eight public universities in the state that play in the Football Bowl Subdivision, the top level of college football. In the 2015 fiscal year, the athletic departments at those schools — the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, Texas Tech University, the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of Houston, the University of North Texas, the University of Texas at San Antonio and Texas State University — earned just less than $520 million from athletics. Nearly $300 million of that came from football. Men’s basketball, the next-highest earner, brought in $39 million.
Without football profits, managing a self-sustaining athletic department is nearly impossible. A successful football team can prop up an entire athletic department, and a struggling football team can cause a university to miss out on millions. It’s not unusual for the less popular sports, like women’s tennis, to see their expenses outpace revenues by more than 5,000 percent. At UTSA, for example, the women’s tennis team earned $1,507 in the 2015 fiscal year, while spending $275,012.
“I know there are people within any university saying we ought not to be spending money on football,” Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp said. “But sports like football pay for themselves, and generate money for virtually everyone else.”
Football has been college sports’ golden goose since the 1800s Alex Kirshner, - BannerSociety - April 8, 2020
Football is the gravy train that feeds everything else in college sports. And football’s load has been heavy since the beginning.
From the late 1800s, football financed not just every other sport, but the growth of schools themselves.
In 1929, the Carnegie Foundation visited colleges nationwide and dropped a 383-page report that covered college sports’ growth before and after the turn of the century.
“Commercialism has made possible the erection of fine academic buildings and the increase of equipment from the profits of college athletics,” the report said, while noting how weird it was the players driving that growth were not officially compensated.
The report made clear that “athletics” really meant “football” when it broke down finances at dozens of schools for either 1926 or ‘27. In one year, Alabama made $150,000 in revenue on athletics, and $72,000 came from football ($60,000 of that from one Rose Bowl). Cal’s athletic revenue was $486,162, with football chipping in $457,016. Harvard’s athletic profit was $131,000, with football revenue coming in at $429,000.
“Football,” the Carnegie authors wrote, “carries the bulk of the monetary burden.”
As the 20th century rolled on, football only became more of a financial cornerstone.
In 1951, Michigan State football made a $264,000 profit. MSU’s men’s basketball team made $33,865. Every other sport lost money, and the athletic department as a whole lost $80,873, the Associated Press reported. The football profit would’ve been greater if the school hadn’t retired stadium bonds (used for a recent enlargement of the stadium) and re-sodded the field at a cost of nearly $9,000.
In 1974, the Atlanta Journal published financial figures for 15 Southern athletic departments. All of them profited on football, with LSU, Alabama, and Tennessee each clearing $1 million after expenses. All 15 lost money on non-football sports, with several finishing 1972-73 in the red overall. Tennessee posted $1.1 million in football profit and a $23,686 department-wide loss.
In 1984, the Supreme Court took control of TV rights away from the NCAA and let schools and conferences negotiate their own deals. The schools wanted to make their own deals for football broadcasts, specifically. With TV, football became even more of a meal ticket for entire athletic departments.
In 2018, LSU’s athletic department reported $145 million in revenue to the NCAA. Of that, LSU reported $87 million came from football. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. LSU also reported $39 million from media rights, the result of the SEC’s negotiations with ESPN and CBS. The athletic department only credited $12 million of that to football, even though anyone in college sports would tell you the vast majority of CBS’ interest in the SEC was football-based.
Football’s real contribution was well over $100 million of LSU’s $145 million in total athletic money. But even going by LSU’s accounting, football made $55 million in profit. Men’s basketball and baseball, together, added a little less than $1 million. Everything else lost money, but thanks to football, the department still made about $8 million.
The situation is similar at schools that don’t have blue-blood football teams. Take Kansas, probably the school with the widest gap between its men’s basketball team (consistently in the top five) and football team (one of FBS’ worst). In 2018, the hoops team brought in $16 million in ticket sales, compared to $4 million for football. But football had $34 million in total revenue, compared to $19 million for hoops, because Kansas was honest and credited most of its Big 12 media money to the football column.
The only schools where football isn’t financial king are small ones that don’t have big TV deals but do have another sport with tons of tradition. For example, in 2018, North Dakota’s not-great FCS football team posted $1.7 million in revenue, less than a men’s hockey team that sold $4.2 million in tickets and makes frequent postseason runs.
Ohio State Athletics Facing $60-70 Million Deficit For 2021 Fiscal Year - Dan Hope, Eleven Warriors - February 26, 2021
With the Big Ten’s decision not to allow fans at any sporting events this year due to COVID-19, a substantial deficit for the Ohio State athletic department was inevitable. Ticket sales made up nearly $66 million of Ohio State’s revenues for the 2020 fiscal year (which included the 2019 football season), and other streams of revenue have also been impacted by the year-long pandemic.