What non-football or basketball sports made the most from selling tickets? I crunched the numbers

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

I’ve been having a lot of fun with comparing budget numbers from our Extra Points Library tool. This database has allowed us to publish stories on operational budgets for sports like football, softball and volleyball, and we’ll probably do stories on other sports in the future.

But the Library has more information than just operational budgets and total revenues. It also tracks itemized expenses and revenues across specific sports. One can look up how much a particular school earned from guarantee games, NCAA distributions, parking and concessions, and many other revenue sources.

That got me thinking. You don’t need to be Wikipedia Brown to figure out that the sport that generates the most ticket revenue is football. Texas football led the way in FY24, generating a whopping $52,817,580 in football ticket sales, followed by Michigan and Ohio State. Turns out, you can make a lot of money when your stadium seats over 100,000 people.

But what about sports that aren’t football or basketball? Who generates the most ticket revenue?

Good question! I checked the Library to find out.

But first, because this comes up every time I do one of these, a quick reminder about methodology:

This data comes from each school’s NCAA-mandated MFRS report filing. Every single D-I and D-II school has to submit one of these things every year, and there’s a dedicated line item for “ticket revenue”. Here’s an example of what that form looks like, via Northern Colorado’s FY24 filing:

I have this data because I filed over 200 Open Records Requests for these reports. I do not have data from private schools, because those institutions do not have to respond to open records requests, and no private school has elected to share their MFRS report with me out of the goodness of their heart. I also do not have this data from the tiny handful of public schools that do not have to share it with me due to quirks in their state law (like Delaware, Pitt or UCF). There are also about seven schools in D-1 that have never bothered to share data with me, despite me filing multiple requests.

That’s a problem when we’re looking for completely exhaustive datasets. But for this particular exercise, I think we’re okay if we don’t have data from Jacksonville State, UMass-Lowell or Texas Southern.

Based on the data from these FY24 reports, here are the individual sports that reported the highest ticket revenue, besides football, men’s basketball or women’s basketball

The rest of the Top 25, plus some important #context, after the jump.

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