How important is athletics revenue to a university budget, REALLY? Let's do some math.

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

I am not here to argue that college sports isn’t already a big business. It absolutely is.

Take my beloved alma mater, Ohio State, for example. In FY25, the most recent athletic department budget filings we have, the Buckeyes reported generating more than $330 million in athletic revenues, the second highest figure in the country. (Texas generated a little more than $352 million.) That type of annual figure would represent a very big business in the state of Ohio.

But it is also true—and sometimes we, as sports fans, forget this — that sports is not the largest budget item at major universities. In fact, it isn’t even anywhere close. In FY25, do you know what Ohio State reported in total university revenue? More than $10 billion, with a B. Sure, that’s in part due to the massive hospital system, but the school also secured well north of $1.5 billion in just research grants.

So depending on how you want to pencil out the numbers, all of the money Ohio State earns from broadcast rights, licensing the Block O to every t-shirt vendor in the state, ticket sales, donations, corporate sponsorships, the entire kit and caboodle — it’s somewhere around, like, 3 to 5 percent of the total university budget. It’s a bit staggering, when you think about it that way.

But I also understand Ohio State isn’t like many other schools. Unlike most Division I athletic departments, it doesn’t generate student fees that it counts as athletic revenues, nor does it heavily rely on institutional cash transfer support. Even if you decide to not count any of the money associated with Ohio State’s hospital system, you’re still looking at a school with more than 50,000 students and huge research concentrations. Of course it should generate a lot of money.

But typing this out got me thinking: Are there schools where specific athletic department revenues actually do generate a more significant chunk of total revenues? Like, places where the school really does need to sell tickets, beers and corporate sponsorships in a way that, I dunno, your typical state flagship R1 school wouldn’t?

I The data I have and the calculations I used are absolutely not perfect, and I’d view this effort as closer to a rough draft than ready for peer review. But I suspect it’s at least directionally accurate.

We already have a pretty decent data set for reported athletic department revenues. Every D-I and Division II institution has to file an annual itemized athletic department budget report to the NCAA, called an MFRS report. Nosy reporters like me can file a ton of open records requests and get a copy of those reports for almost every public school. I’ve been doing this annually for years (as have others, like the Knight Foundation), and I use the data for much of my own reporting, as well as the Extra Points Library.

That data isn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, and it has significant limitations when we try to make apples-to-apples comparisons across institutions … but it’s also the best data we have.

The National Center for Education Statistics runs something called the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or IPEDS. This database has a ton of higher education data, from student demographics to budgets to graduation rates and much, much more. It would be a very valuable tool for policymakers, academics, and anybody who lives in the higher education data world.

I grabbed the most recent financial reports in the database (FY24), matched those with the FY24 athletic department revenue reports, built a gateway to only pull data from D-I institutions, and tried to get my laptop to come up with some charts and graphs.

Here’s what the computer spit out: