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The 2025-26 college sports season has finally concluded with Oklahoma’s win over UNC in the College World Series on Monday. And with all of the games completed, the folks over at NACDA can finally finish calculating who won the 2025-26 Directors’ Cup, the industry-leading award for recognizing athletic success across an entire athletic department.
19 total sports are counted for the final standings including the five countable sports (men's and women's basketball, baseball, women's soccer and women's volleyball), and the next highest 14 (max.) sports scored for each institution, regardless of gender.
If you read the headline, congrats! You already know who won. Texas is this year’s champion, winning its fifth Directors’ Cup ever — and its fifth in the past six years. The Longhorns won national titles in men’s swimming and diving, softball and women’s rowing … but also competed in just about everything else. Texas qualified for the World Series, was a top seed in women’s volleyball and made the Final Four in women’s basketball … the list goes on.
What’s interesting to me is that before COVID, you didn’t need to wait for the press release to know who won the Directors’ Cup each year. Stanford won every single time. Or, okay, fine, almost every time, but the Cardinal did finish first 25 seasons in a row.
Stanford was second this year. UCLA, UNC and UVA finished third, fourth and fifth, respectively, with Florida, USC, Georgia, Michigan and Ohio State rounding out the top 10.
The highest ranked team outside the Power Four? Princeton, at 20. Yale and Harvard also cracked the top 50. The three lowest-scoring programs were Arkansas Pine-Bluff, Florida Gulf Coast and Oakland, all tied for 299th. That’s not technically last place, since all sorts of schools didn’t score any points at all.
Now, I could very well be wrong about this, but my hypothesis is that the top five-ish for the Directors Cup is going to probably be the same five or six schools for the next several years But I could see a fair amount of movement in that 10 to 30 range, as larger P4 programs have plenty of incentives to trim spending and scholarships from sports like golf, tennis, swimming and track so they can focus more resources on a smaller number of sports. That could create a pathway for new schools to substantially jump in the rankings.
The College Sports Industry Data You Need to Make Better Decisions
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Also read about all the new changes we recently launched here, including sports specific spend vs performance, updated financial comparisons, an ai chatbot, game contracts and more.
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Quick reminder: the NCAA doesn’t ALWAYS lose in court
You’ll be forgiven for thinking the NCAA (or the “college sports establishment,” if you will) has lost every single court case since the mid-1970s. But even now, in the post-NIL, post-House world, NCAA-aligned interests win more often than they lose in lawsuits over eligibility, health care, etc.
That said, anything touching athlete compensation tends to be a loser for the side opposite the athletes. But not yesterday.
Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge Nathanael Cousins ruled in favor of the College Sports Commission, and against Jeffrey Kessler and Steve Berman, ruling the CSC can continue to classify MMR companies and their NIL deals as “associated entities.”
In plain English, this means any deal an athlete does with a Learfield, Playfly, JMI, etc. still needs approval from the CSC clearinghouse. Athlete payments that come directly from schools do not. Since deals that go through the clearinghouse a) have to actually be approved and b) need to be in the ballpark of a “fair market value”, an increase in deals subject to clearinghouse authority could theoretically drive athlete compensation downward.
Learfield CEO Cole Gahagan said on Thursday that he does not anticipate the ruling changing how Learfield operates:
If this decision holds up after an appeal, it would limit one of the mechanisms schools are using to get around the “salary cap” established by the House settlement (which I believe is $21.3 million for 2026-27). That would force schools to either comply with the cap, or find another workaround.
Friends … I think we know how this story ends.
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Here’s what else we’ve been working on this week:
Hey, speaking of budgets and whatnot, have you ever wondered which varsity sports cost the least to operate? According to our analysis: beach volleyball, rifle, and … well, maybe you can guess the cheapest one. I’ll give you a hint. It isn’t football.
All of you know I’m a big FOIA guy. I use it almost every day for our reporting, the Extra Points Library or other related projects. So in that spirit, I decided to offer some coaching to UNC’s most famous Adult Cheerleader, Jordon Hudson, on how she could improve her FOIA requests … since that’s a thing she’s doing a lot of these days.
I also wrote about important civics lessons we can take away from the development and debate around the Protect College Sports Act. To me, this is an important reminder that money can buy you access and attention, although it might not buy you the exact legislative solutions you want. It’s also a reminder that the forces supporting the “free market” for athlete compensation … are not as politically powerful or influential as the people who don’t really care about that stuff.
We also added nearly 800 more documents to the Extra Points Library, including tons more game contracts across multiple sports, the official paperwork for many new athletics directors and baseball and softball coaches, our last missing FY25 MFRS reports and much more.
AND we pushed a few updates to Who’s That Football Team? and NIL Agency Tycoon 95. You can play those, for free, over on our games page.
That’s a pretty busy week, in my humble opinion. As always, we’re able to file the FOIAs, crunch the numbers, make the phone calls, write the code and do everything else that we do because of your subscriptions and support.
If you enjoy Extra Points and want to keep it going, now is a great time to upgrade to a premium subscription. It’s just $9 a month!
Thanks for reading, everybody. I’ll see you on the internet next week.
