Dave Sez

Making Money The Old College Way

Michael over at Braves & Birds has a very interesting post up about a fascinating table published in the Orlando Sentinel.

The table lists the total revenues and expenses of (nearly) every Division 1 athletic program, along with the same numbers for just the women's programs and football teams. Talk about your juicy data. You could chop this up a zillion ways and come up with lots of interesting observations.

One thing that jumped out at me right away is that Duke makes a phenomenal amount of profit. Their net profit for the 2003-4 school year was over $21 million! The next closest ACC school was UNC at just over $6 million. That's a huge gap.

The thing that really surprises me about Duke's tally is that I just assumed that their meager football program was an anchor on their finances. They are hardly ever on TV, they don't go to bowl games and they don't sell many tickets. Nonetheless, they managed to make over $3M in football profit, more than Maryland, NC State and Wake Forest and comparable to Virginia. If you do the math from there, you can tell that Duke's basketball program makes a ton of money. I'm not surprised that Duke's hoops makes a lot of money, but given that Cameron seats only about 9,000 people, I wouldn't have guessed it was that much.

If you look at Duke's total athletic expenses (about $17M), they are comparable to a typical MAC program. They are by far the cheapest program of any in a power conference. Wake Forest at about $27M is the next cheapest.

I sorted the whole table by net profit and it turned out that Duke was #2 in the nation behind only Kansas. That's right, Kansas. The Jayhawks made over $24 million in profit. The next closest school was Ohio State, way down at plus $13M. Behind tOSU are a bunch of other football schools, just as I'd expect. That Kansas and Duke finished so high up shows that there is a way to be extremely successful by putting only meager resources into football. Obviously, you need to be in a power conference and reap those financial rewards and at the same time, have a huge basketball program. I guess not too many schools could pull this off, but it's still pretty interesting.

The top 20 schools by net profit:

Another fact this data shows is that women's sports are very costly. Few schools actually make money on women's teams. In fact, out of 116 Division 1 programs only four made money on their women (and three more basically broke even).

That's not to say that I think women's sports should go away. Not at all. I'm a proponent of Title IX. I don't like the way that Title IX has been used as an excuse to axe men's sports like wrestling and golf and to limit the spread of sports like lacrosse, but I don't really think that's the fault of the legislation. Nonetheless, it's illuminating to see how much the women's teams cost. It would be interesting to see how much the other non-profit men's sports cost as well.

If you look at just the largest football earners, you'll see that the ACC doesn't fare so well. Clemson, with just over $24 million, made the most money of any ACC school, but was just 19th in the country. New additions Virginia Tech and Miami came in just behind the Tigers (although these earnings are from their last year in the Big East). Four Big Twelve teams, seven SEC teams, four Big Ten teams and two Pac Ten teams came in above Clemson.

Another thing you'll notice looking at the football numbers is something Michael pointed out in his article. I've long heard that only a few of the biggest programs actually make money on football. These numbers say otherwise. Only a handful of schools in power conferences (Wake Forest, Baylor, Rutgers, Texas Tech and Stanford) lose money. Most make lots (and lots) of money on the ol' pigskin. Five programs made over $30M and eight more made over $20M.

Edit: I found my original article (with help from poster Mark) and restored it here over my post bitching about losing it. I also deleted my nearly-identical rewrite.