A New GameDay Dawns

If you’re like me—i.e., just another beleaguered, non-tenure-track professor—when you watch the meathead legions and soused sorors come out for a College GameDay broadcast, you think: I wonder how much those talented young people are contributing to the economy. The answer in America, of course, is quite a lot. Thanks to fans like these and the millions of others who tune in around the country, college athletics generated about $13.6 billion in revenue in 2022 alone. Of that total, $4.2 billion came from TV rights packages, which see money flow from networks to the conferences that negotiate media deals and then to the schools themselves. For the most successful athletics programs, the big business of college sports can be extremely lucrative. The top three programs by revenue in 2022, Ohio State University, the University of Texas, and the University of Alabama, generated $251 million, $239 million, and $214 million in revenue per year, respectively. Ohio State’s athletics profits are so substantial that the program funnels money back into the university’s general budget, where it is (of course) used for education.