Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
First, I’d like to share a quick announcement. We’re thrilled that so many athletic departments are using the Extra Points Library to help them make better data-informed decisions. But we’re happy to sell Extra Points Library to anybody, not just senior athletic department officials.
One of the use cases that I love the most are when Sports Management departments decide to purchase the tool in order to help their students and researchers. And that’s exactly what just happened.
Thanks to EPL, Florida State students, professors and more will have access to the most current college sports financial information. If you’d like to learn how your academic units can utilize EPL, drop me a line at [email protected]
Speaking of the Extra Points Library,
I’ve been spending a ton of time over the last month in FOIA-hell. We’ve been asking every public school in D1 and DII for their FY25 financial data, as well as tons of updated coach and vendor contracts. Then we’ve had to take that data, turn it into data formats we can actually manipulate, and throw it into the Extra Points Library.
The good news is, there’s light at the end of the tunnel, and I don’t think it’s an oncoming train. We’ve got data tabulated for over 160 D-1 schools right now (and several dozen D-II programs), and I’m hopeful we’ll get information from the stragglers pretty soon.
We don’t have 100% data from too many leagues yet (we’re close!). But one league where we do have every single public school report? The Big Ten. So let’s look at some of that data!
First, here’s what every single Big Ten reported in FY25 in Total Operating Revenue. As a reminder, there will be no data from Northwestern or USC, because those schools are private and won’t share this data with me, even if I ask very nicely.
Via the Extra Points Library
That $336 million figure for Ohio State is second in the country, only behind Texas.
FWIW, this is mostly similar to the FY24 data. Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State and Nebraska were the top four revenue producing teams last year, but UCLA was last instead of 13th, and Washington was 5th instead of 11th.
What about total expenses? Great question. Here’s that chart:
If you’re looking at this data and thinking, “holy crap Rutgers spent waaaay more than it earned”, well, good news. I have an entire newsletter about that. Otherwise, it appears that expenses mostly seem to track with revenues.
Okay, but you can find topline revenue and expense numbers in all sorts of other places. Let’s look up something a little more niche. How about revenue from just ticket sales?
Some of those numbers have to be a function of stadium size and number of actual ticketed sports, but I think these figures are also a possible proxy for total fan interest and engagement. As you’d probably expect, it’s also overwhelmingly driven by football. Ohio State reported $67,018,201 in football ticket revenue.
So just for kicks and giggles…let’s look up the ticket numbers for baseball.
Ahh, that’s the good stuff.
If I’m to read this chart correctly, Illinois and Rutgers don’t even ticket for baseball? Wisconsin, of course, doesn’t have a team at all. For everybody outside of Nebraska and Oregon, you’re seeing revenue figures that wouldn’t pay for the rev-share figures for a backup quarterback. That’s what Midwestern March Weather will do for you.
I don’t have data yet for Florida, Georgia Tech or Mississippi State, so I don’t want to publish a complete list of baseball ticket sale data, but for the sake of context: Arkansas reported selling $4.589 million worth of baseball tickets in FY25. All of the top five programs I see are in the SEC
Over the next few weeks, we’ll do what we did last year, and share national operational spending data for specific sports. But if you subscribe to the Extra Points Library, you won’t have to wait for me to run the numbers. You can make your own charts, whenever you want.
What else is going on with Extra Points?
Hey, glad you asked!
Yesterday, I shared a story (including a few notes that weren’t in the press releases) about the college basketball players and programs that will be featured in NBA2K26. This update should be live around 12:00 EST today, I believe, for those of you who have the game. I’ll share some screenshots of me playing around with the new players/jerseys etc on Bluesky and in next week’s newsletter.
If you’re somebody who is very invested in the expansion of college athlete sports video game properties (in basketball or baseball), I think you’ll enjoy reading that newsletter.I also called around to try and better understand the whys and the risks behind the Sacramento State football/MAC partnership. I don’t mind saying here, I understand the calculated risk that Sacramento State is taking, and I don’t think their rationale is completely unfounded…but boy oh boy that’s a lot of money to join a league with declining linear TV access and absolutely zero tradition or commonality with Sac State.
If you want even more coverage of that story, check out our sister publication at NIL Wire. Kyle got folks on the phone and on the record at the MAC offices and the Sacramento State presidential office, and learned some things even I didn’t know.
And I pushed out a variety of new quality-of-life upgrades, game rebalances and new features to NIL Agency Tycoon 95. This game is completely free, and if you enjoy Tycoon games, I think you’ll have fun playing around with it.
what a neato computer game, in my humble opinion
I’m wrapping up my “Matt Gives Enough Campus Lectures To Hopefully Get An Honorary Masters Degree Somewhere” tour next week, with a visit to the College Football Center Of The Universe…Indiana University. I’ll share specific info next week, if you’re in the neighborhood and want to say hello. Should be fun!
Thanks for reading. If you want to support what we’re doing in reporting, data collection and analysis, computer game production and more, consider subscribing to get the full Extra Points experience,
I’ll see you on the internet next week!
-Matt
