Of 133 College Football Powers, Twenty-One Actually Pay for Themselves.
Last year only 21 of the 133 top college athletic departments earned more than they spent. The other 112 covered the gap with student fees and university money. Ohio State cleared $33 million on football. Ohio State is not the rule. It is one of the 21.
The question: yesterday we saw Ohio State clear $33 million on football. Is that what college sports looks like?
The answer: no. Last year only 21 of the 133 top athletic departments earned more than they spent. The other 112 covered the gap with student fees and university money.
Why that is surprising. Everything you hear about college sports — the TV deals, the coaching salaries, the enormous stadiums — comes from those 21. They are 16% of the tier and close to 100% of the coverage.
What you get from it: a name for the trap, and the one question that defuses it.
The trap here is a natural one; college sports is built to spring it, and we walk into it every autumn.
You hear constantly about the money in the game. The TV deals. The coaches’ salaries. The 90,000-seat cathedrals. Every one of those stories is about the same small handful of programs, because those are the only ones worth a broadcast.
So notice what has happened: the picture in your head was assembled entirely from winners, and the winners look nothing like the field they came from.
Twenty-one green dots
The NCAA counts the money every year, and it draws a careful line between two kinds; hold onto the distinction, because everything turns on it.
Earned revenue is tickets, media rights and gifts. It is what a department makes by being a sports outfit. Allocated revenue is the polite word for a subsidy. Student fees skimmed off tuition, plus money from the general fund.
A department pays for itself only if the first kind covers its bills. In 2024, across all 133 schools in the top football tier, that was true of exactly 21.
The other 112 spent more than they earned. They made up the gap with money that came, one way or another, out of students’ pockets.
Two universes, one label
Look at the spread. The green dots and the tan ones are not two ends of a smooth range; they are two different worlds that happen to share a name.
Among the three dozen or so biggest brands — the SEC and Big Ten money — earned revenue covers about 89% of the budget. They mostly fund themselves, and a few turn real profits.
Step down to the rest of the tier and earned revenue covers about 44%. The middle school outside the power leagues pays only about 38 cents of every athletics dollar out of what it earns. The other 62 cents is a subsidy.
Same “FBS” on the schedule. Completely different books.
This is why the cash-cow story is so durable and so wrong. We are looking at survivorship biasi in its purest sporting form.
The programs that earn a broadcast are the ones with money. That is what earns them the broadcast. The hundred that quietly bill their students a few hundred dollars a year for a team most never watch will never lead a segment.
Judging college sports by Ohio State is like judging every restaurant by the three with a line out the door; we are looking at the survivors and calling it the industry.
And the bill just went up
Now consider the timing, which turns a quiet imbalance into a reckoning.
Starting this year a legal settlement lets schools pay athletes directly, capped at about $20.5 million per school. That is about a fifth of a big program’s whole athletic income. It is set to climb past $30 million within ten years.
The richest 21 can absorb it. The SEC and Big Ten schools have already promised to pay the full freight.
But drop a $20 million cost on a department already covering less than half its bills. The money can come from only two places. A bigger subsidy, or fewer sports. Group-of-five leagues are already asking permission to cut teams.
The gap between the 21 and the rest is not closing. It is about to become a canyon.
You hear about the twenty-one because they are the only ones worth televising. The economics of college sports live in the other hundred and twelve.
The ColumnistWhat to take home: look at the whole board
None of this contradicts yesterday’s piece; it completes it. There the lesson was to draw the box in the right place. Here it is to look at the whole board, not the lit corner of it.
“College football makes money” is true of 21 programs and false of 112. Which one you believe depends on whether you counted the dots you could not see.
Every field has its rich few, and their winnings are real. But a distribution is not its richest member, and an industry is not its highlight reel.
So before you judge a field by the ones on television, count the ones that are not. I have to remind myself of this every time somebody quotes a success story at me.
Notes & sources
The central figures are from the NCAA’s Division I Athletics Finances: 10-Year Trends from 2015 to 2024 (December 2025). In fiscal 2024, generated revenue exceeded total expenses at 21 of the 133 Football Bowl Subdivision members. “Generated” revenue (tickets, media rights, donations, and the like) is distinguished from “allocated” revenue — student fees and direct institutional or government support, i.e., subsidies. Generated revenue covered about 89% of total revenue at FBS “autonomy” (power-conference) schools versus roughly 44% at non-autonomy FBS schools, and the median non-autonomy school was about 38% self-sufficient. The 133-dot figure fixes 21 as self-supporting and 112 as subsidy-dependent; it does not identify individual schools.
On the new cost: the House v. NCAA settlement, approved in June 2025 and effective July 1, 2025, permits schools to share revenue directly with athletes up to a cap of about $20.5 million per school for 2025–26 — roughly 22% of the average power-conference athletic budget — rising over the ten-year agreement toward $30 million and beyond. Every Southeastern and Big Ten school committed to funding the full amount. Figures are subject to revision as reporting and the settlement’s implementation continue.
This is the companion to the previous issue on reading a college athletic budget at the right altitude. The error at its center — generalizing from the visible winners — is treated in the primer on Survivorship Bias (Concept No. 4). The archive is at thesportspage.net.
