Big Time College Football: Numbers

Before I started looking at college football I had no idea how much money teams pulled in; I assumed some made a bunch of money but most just got by. But because of the high profile nature of college football over the last 20-years and the numerous deals with ESPN, the main networks, and the roll-out of conference specific networks, college football is truly big time.

For my series on Big Time College Football, I am using the Equity in Athletics Data Analysis Cutting Tool provided by the Department of Education to analyze how much money each program brings in (the 2012-2013 numbers are not out yet). This is self-reported data by all institutions that receive Title IV funds (how it is self-reported is up to the discretion of each institution).

The first set of numbers are the revenue numbers for the six BCS conferences and Notre Dame for 2011-2012 academic school year with the multipliers between the highs and lows (SEC has revenue 3.92 times the Big East). On a side note, this is before the Big East became the ACC for football and before the Big-10 and Big-12 realignment.

The next table contains the revenue of the largest (high) and smallest (low) programs per conference:

The median and mean per conference:.

This table contains the revenue, median, and mean for all I-A and I-AA programs combined, I-A by itself, the BCS, non-BCS I-A, and I-AA by itself:

The final table shows individual programs starting with the top revenue producing program in I-A, followed by Notre Dame, the program closest to the mean for the BCS, the median for BCS, the program closest to the mean for all I-A, the median for I-A, the lowest revenue producing program in the BCS and the lowest revenue producing program for all I-A with the multipliers between the highs and lows (Texas has 28.93 times the revenue of Louisiana-Monroe). 

Each team in I-A; from Alabama to Arizona, to Texas to Tennessee, and USC to the University of Central Florida have to deal with individual market issues that only pertain to their programs, their localities, and their market reach. Some programs have a true national following such as Texas, Notre Dame Michigan, and Alabama allowing them to generate tens of millions in revenue each year. But most programs like Clemson, University of Miami, Indiana University, Baylor, and the University of Connecticut are regional players that desperately try to compete in I-A football but are still able to make a good chunk of change.