———–
See Also:
- College Sports Revenue 2011: The Longhorns’ Big Bucks
- College Sports Revenue 2011: Michigan Money
- College Sports Revenue 2011: Auburn Closes The Bama Gap
- College Sports Revenue 2011: The List
- College Sports Revenue 2011: Changes
———–
When I first created ENSBSN, it was to give better focus and branding to the one thing I still found myself interested in writing about – college football and specifically LSU football. But as it’s happened, something that caught my interest has become a pretty big deal in the sports world and has been the big driver of traffic here – the money behind college sports.
All I’ve really done on the topic is perform some basic research, publish easily-available figures before most others find them and learn enough about the numbers to know when some media outlet is reporting misleading or erroneous extrapolations of the raw data. But as has become crystal clear, the people who are paid to publish such things are doing such a spectacularly horrible job and presenting such flawed and simplistic “analysis” somebody needs to dig a little deeper to show why downloading one set of seemingly comparable data and running it through an Excel formula doesn’t produce meaningful information.
But let’s back up. What I’m talking about here are the revenue and “profit” stories the media derive from Equity In Athletics (EIA) data published each year. EIA is a program of the Department of Education that tracks revenue and expenses in college sports to make sure Title VI rules about women’s sports funding are followed. Every university – public and private – that participates in the federal student loan program and has an intercollegiate athletics program has to file this info each year.
And as I said when running down the Top 100 college programs by revenue last year, to the extent that any of this data should be taken as the truth, all one should ever think of as figures comparable across programs is total revenue. I’ve written about this issue before and then some more. Simply put, there’s so much behind the numbers that get reported, you cannot assume University A’s numbers mean the same as University B’s.
Real quick example is Alabama vs. Georgia. For the period of July 1, 2009 – June 30, 2010, we are given this information:
Alabama Total Revenue: $129 million
Georgia Total Revenue: $88 million
Alabama Football Revenue: $72 million
Georgia Football Revenue: $71 million
Alabama Football Expenses: $31 million
Georgia Football Expenses: $18 million
It’s not hard to believe that Alabama brings in 46% more revenue than Georgia. It’s a little harder to believe that the 2009 BCS Champion Crimson Tide generated just $1 million more in revenue than the 8-5 Independence Bowl Champion Bulldogs. As it happened in 2009, Georgia also had only six home games to Alabama’s seven. So in a championship year (coming off a 12-2 year) with 92,000 more tickets to sell (and likely pre-sales that included 10,000 more seats a game for 2010), Alabama brought in just $1 million more than Georgia.
Right.
And football expenses at Alabama are 72% higher than at Georgia? I’m not buying that big of a spread, though I’m sure Bama spends more.
Look a little deeper and you see Alabama leaves $40 million in the “unallocated” revenue column while Georgia only has $2 million there. That’s 31% of Alabama’s total revenue remaining “unallocated” while just 2.2% of Georgia’s revenue sits there. Meanwhile 45% of Georgia’s expenses are “unallocated” while 34% of Bama’s is classified as such.
That’s not a very deep analysis, but it’s enough to see there’s obviously more to the story. And it should be enough to not write a story saying Georgia has the second most-profitable football program based only on EIA numbers.
So as I await the release of the 2010-11 numbers in the next couple of months, I want to take a closer look at some of the dynamics that have raised my curiosity as I’ve looked at these numbers in the past. That way, I can hopefully have something to say that’s clearer than “don’t believe the numbers” when the updated figures come out and the media jumps recklessly to believe what they should not.
