Which program sold the most tickets in FY25?

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

Over the past few months, we’ve shared a lot of charts that we’ve created in the Extra Points Library on sport-specific operational expenses. If you want to know what your favorite football/basketball/soccer/baseball/softball/hockey/etc. team spent on everything but athlete compensation, we’ve got you covered.

But operational expenses aren’t the only thing we can track in EPL. We can also get granular in how we examine revenue.

Like expenses, the financial reporting around revenue can get a little messy. Not every program breaks down conference distributions or TV revenue specifically by sport, and some licensing revenue can be hard to track down between athletics and central campus. But there’s one income source that is generally a little cleaner to break out than the others: ticket sales.

So let’s say we wanted to look at which programs generated the most ticket revenue across their entire departments in FY25.

Here’s what the Extra Points Library tells us:

(In case you’ve forgotten, or this is your first time reading one of these stories, we obtain this information via the FY25 MFRS report that we obtain via open records requests. Private schools like Notre Dame, BYU and Liberty are not obligated to respond to open records requests, so we can’t get this data. A tiny number of public schools — Pitt, Temple, Delaware and Delaware State — are also exempt from these requests, thanks to quirks in state laws. And finally, we’re still missing the FY25 data from Alabama State, Tennessee State and Troy. Hit me up if you have it!)

No major surprises here, as all ten of these programs teams play in massive football stadiums and large basketball arenas. If you wanted to look at the top 10 in nearly any revenue stream, you’d likely find a similar breakdown of schools, albeit in a slightly different order. Texas, for example, reported the most total revenue of any school in FY25 but is just third in total tickets. Texas A&M was seventh in total revenue but fourth in total ticket sales.

I don’t know if this chart tells us anything interesting, other than “these schools all sponsor a bunch of sports, play in front of 80,000-plus people at every football home game and have larger basketball arenas.”

We can also pull this data for individual sports. As you might imagine, ticket revenue from football tends to tower over generated revenue from other sports … but depending on the school and the program, other sports can represent big money.

Let’s dig into all of our data and see which sports beyond football, men’s basketball, and women’s basketball reported the most ticket revenue in FY25? When we crunched the numbers last year, North Dakota men’s hockey reported the highest ticket sales number. Did that remain the same in FY25?