[82lsju]

I hope this all implodes sooner than 5 years, Eric.  The cross country travel toll on the basketball and women's volleyball teams is brutal.  The men's hoops team left on Tuesday morning to fly east.  Tough to take classes when you are back in NC most of the week.    As for the conference media rights hit, I believe Stanford and cal made $5m each from the ACC for the 24/25 fiscal year and another $1.9 from the ncaa (maybe not as much for cal).    That's a big drop from what we were making from the Pac12 - thank you traitor trojans.   $C was also the problem when Texas and Oklahoma wanted to join the Pac.  The current model in this funding (or lack thereof) environment is not sustainable.   Time for Swarbuck and Luck to create the NFL minor league and return the other sports to regional models.    There are others making moves on this front as well.

 Yeah I think this is the endgame as well. Hopefully this current insanity lasts no more than a couple years-- feel bad for the student athletes.

---

The prompt was actually about football but there is a relative paucity of data that separates football revenue and costs from non-football revenue so Google provided me with what it could find.  This is partly because the biggest single revenue source for most schools is “media and broadcast rights”, which comes from the conference, and commingles football revenue with revenue from other sports.  It’s also because a non-insubstantial amount of cost is fixed in an athletics department (things like compliance, office of the director, etc.) that cannot be allocated to a particular sport.  Finally, while you could definitely cut a number of men’s sports (like baseball), Title IX prevents you from cutting a lot of women’s sports, so the costs of football sort of have to include the women’s sports that would offset the 105 male athletes that constitute the roster limit.

BC

Right- I should be forthcoming and share that I have seen the last couple years' balance sheets (I think they're public, or at least I thought so? Some Cal fans submitted FOIA requests, I believe but need to look back) and football revenue is significantly green. We actually had a bit of a donor snafu when it was revealed that our department was moving some football revenue to broader AD revenue in order to make the numbers look nicer. I guess dollars are fungible but the donors threw a bit of a fit when they found out. I digress.

Our football program is revenue generating by a significant margin. I think someone else mentioned that the stadium debt should be factored in: I don't agree because a) Central campus has agreed to cover it, this was (largely) a state-mandated expense for the retrofit and more importantly b) it's a fixed cost, the point isn't even that football runs red/green but rather that for every dollar put into the program we expect a positive return (which is the case). It is clear that until we hit some marginal return threshold, we should continue to increase spending because it returns more than we put in. Fixed costs that do not fluctuate with money spent don't make sense to factor in- it's a simple input/output equation and until we hit a level upon which we're no longer returning X% more than we're putting in, it makes sense to fuel the fire. At least in my mind, happy to hear disagreement

Note that this may not be the case for Stanford, I don't know the situation as well. I'd be surprised if this weren't the case. Most schools similarly are ROI positive from football and that's not including the brand / visibility that great football gives you. I know a lot of smart kids who took Stanford over MIT/Ivies during the Harbaugh/Shaw years because they wanted a fun school-spirit experience. So I really do think it's a good investment.

revenue generating is not the same as not losing money....

and the Stanford AD makes its financials available (in aggregate not by sport) in their annual report

the last one available is here (2023-24)

https://gostanford.com/documents/35853ce...da16d1.pdf

[82lsju]

I hope this all implodes sooner than 5 years, Eric.  The cross country travel toll on the basketball and women's volleyball teams is brutal.  The men's hoops team left on Tuesday morning to fly east.  Tough to take classes when you are back in NC most of the week.    As for the conference media rights hit, I believe Stanford and cal made $5m each from the ACC for the 24/25 fiscal year and another $1.9 from the ncaa (maybe not as much for cal).    That's a big drop from what we were making from the Pac12 - thank you traitor trojans.   $C was also the problem when Texas and Oklahoma wanted to join the Pac.  The current model in this funding (or lack thereof) environment is not sustainable.   Time for Swarbuck and Luck to create the NFL minor league and return the other sports to regional models.    There are others making moves on this front as well.

 Yeah I think this is the endgame as well. Hopefully this current insanity lasts no more than a couple years-- feel bad for the student athletes.

---

The prompt was actually about football but there is a relative paucity of data that separates football revenue and costs from non-football revenue so Google provided me with what it could find.  This is partly because the biggest single revenue source for most schools is “media and broadcast rights”, which comes from the conference, and commingles football revenue with revenue from other sports.  It’s also because a non-insubstantial amount of cost is fixed in an athletics department (things like compliance, office of the director, etc.) that cannot be allocated to a particular sport.  Finally, while you could definitely cut a number of men’s sports (like baseball), Title IX prevents you from cutting a lot of women’s sports, so the costs of football sort of have to include the women’s sports that would offset the 105 male athletes that constitute the roster limit.

BC

Right- I should be forthcoming and share that I have seen the last couple years' balance sheets (I think they're public, or at least I thought so? Some Cal fans submitted FOIA requests, I believe but need to look back) and football revenue is significantly green. We actually had a bit of a donor snafu when it was revealed that our department was moving some football revenue to broader AD revenue in order to make the numbers look nicer. I guess dollars are fungible but the donors threw a bit of a fit when they found out. I digress.

Our football program is revenue generating by a significant margin. I think someone else mentioned that the stadium debt should be factored in: I don't agree because a) Central campus has agreed to cover it, this was (largely) a state-mandated expense for the retrofit and more importantly b) it's a fixed cost, the point isn't even that football runs red/green but rather that for every dollar put into the program we expect a positive return (which is the case). It is clear that until we hit some marginal return threshold, we should continue to increase spending because it returns more than we put in. Fixed costs that do not fluctuate with money spent don't make sense to factor in- it's a simple input/output equation and until we hit a level upon which we're no longer returning X% more than we're putting in, it makes sense to fuel the fire. At least in my mind, happy to hear disagreement

Note that this may not be the case for Stanford, I don't know the situation as well. I'd be surprised if this weren't the case. Most schools similarly are ROI positive from football and that's not including the brand / visibility that great football gives you. I know a lot of smart kids who took Stanford over MIT/Ivies during the Harbaugh/Shaw years because they wanted a fun school-spirit experience. So I really do think it's a good investment.

revenue generating is not the same as not losing money....

and the Stanford AD makes its financials available (in aggregate not by sport) in their annual report

the last one available is here (2023-24)

https://gostanford.com/documents/35853ce...da16d1.pdf