So which colleges actually generated their revenue?

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

Before we get to the story, I’m excited to announce of the biggest additions yet to the Extra Points Library Family….Creighton!

Now, the Blue Jays can use EPL to save money on building schedules, benchmark their team spending, research potential hires and make more informed decisions. If you’d like to learn more about how EPL can save your program (or newsroom!) money, check out Extra Points Library here.

So far, all of the FY25 FOIA Fun stories we’ve published have centered on Total Expenses, or what certain schools tell the NCAA they’re spending on certain sports. We have a few more of those stories left to publish (including football, which I promise I didn’t forget about)..,but I want to try something a little different today.

The NCAA MFRS reports don’t just tell us what schools spent money on, they also tell us what revenues they claim. But the “Total Revenues” figure can be a little misleading, since the NCAA forms include some items that laypeople probably wouldn’t consider to exactly count as revenue.

For example, many institutions use student fees to help balance their athletic department budget. If an athletic department generated funds via student fees, they’re allowed to count that figure as “revenue” even though students don’t really have an option of not paying, even if they never attend an athletic event. Schools can also claim “Direct Institutional Support”, or even “Direct State or Governmental Support”, as revenue.

That’s valuable information, sure. I’m not saying it doesn’t belong on these reports. But I suspect when Joe Fan is talking about athletic department revenue, they’re really trying to talk about Generated Revenue, or all the money that an athletic department produces via ticket sales, TV money, corporate sponsorships, concession stands, etc.

So I dug into all of those MFRS reports, found each school’s “total revenues” in FY25, and subtracted everything from student fees, direct institutional support, indirect institutional support revenue, Direct State or Other Government Support, and Indirect Institutional Support – Athletic Facilities Debt Service, Lease and Rental Fees.

The remainder? Let’s call that Generated Revenue. That figure includes everything an athletic department earned from:

Is this a completely perfect figure? No, because the MFRS data isn’t perfect. But I do think it’s close enough to be useful.

Before I share the data, three quick caveats:

This data also comes from FY25, or July 1 2024-June 30 2025. It does not include data from the 2025 college football season or 2025 fall sports.

We can only obtain data from schools that respond to open records requests. Private schools, like Cal Baptist, Duke, Notre Dame, etc., do not have to respond to FOIAs and thus do not publish their MFRS reports. A few public schools, like Pitt, Temple, Delaware, and Delaware State, are exempt from state open records laws. A handful of other schools have not yet responded to our repeated requests, either because they limit FOIAs to in-state residents (so we have to pay a stand-in) or because they’re simply very slow at responding to requests.

We are currently missing data from Alabama State, Alabama A&M, ETSU, Morgan State, Texas Southern, Troy, UNC-Asheville, UL-Monroe, and Tennessee State. If you happen to have the FY25 MFRS report for any of these schools, I’ll happily give you free premium Extra Points in exchange (and/or give you any of ours).

If you want to dig even deeper into this data, (like say, run these numbers without any donations or contribution, because you don’t think those should count as generated revenue) you can run your own reports on a per school, conference, sport or line item basis, via the Extra Points Library.

Okay! Enough jibber jabber. Let’s get to the data!

Here are the top 10 programs in FY25 EARNED REVENUE. We’ve also calculated what percentage of a school’s total revenue came from generated revenue, which can give you an idea for how directly subsidized an athletic department is:

We’ll get to the rest of the data after the jump: