Ok? Football is still generating tha revenue or donations or whatever you want to call it.
it absolutely pays for the other sports. Without football you don’t have those donations/revenue.
Collective losses by sport in the NCAA
- Thread starter 615dawg
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it absolutely pays for the other sports. Without football you don’t have those donations/revenue.
The donations don’t pay for other sports. That is the point. Football operates at a deficit most everywhere if that money actually counted on the books like it does in any other business. Donors aren’t paying $30 million to NIL collectives to buy swimmers and shot putters.
Football’s true “profit” can’t be directly measured, because it’s more related to increased enrollment from those who are drawn in by the pageantry and tradition of the football team.
Before NIL, football 100% paid for other sports.
with the new rules football is 100% helping subsidize other sports.
There were still millions being handed out under the table before NIL, and the TV contracts weren’t as lucrative then either.
You can’t say football subsidizes other sports when football itself loses money in the grand scheme of things. A more accurate statement is that donors subsidize other sports by taking the university off the hook from having to fund football’s enormous labor costs and facilities expenditures.
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You’re trying to redefine basic accounting and “profit” to avoid admitting the obvious:
FY2025- football $10.7 million profit (revenue $48.3M > expenses $37.6M).
That’s profit- not cash flow, not “donor charity,”- actual profit on the books. Without football profit, the department would be $10.5 million in the red. With football profit, we scrape a $201k surplus. Football pays for everything- including the subsidies that let baseball ($4.2M loss), women’s basketball ($5.4M loss), and every other sport even exist. You’re dodging the reality with nonsense that football is the only sport that consistently turns a profit and funds the rest- always has- Pre-NIL, post-NIL-always will.
Except for you aren’t including the biggest expense on the books - the money paid out to players. If we are doling out $15 million in NIL to football team, the net result is -$4.5 million for football. That’s the bare minimum of what we’re actually probably paying in NIL, too.
By comparison, if you took football away entirely, just blow up the program….that $15 million in donations / labor cost goes away. So does the $10.5 million “profit”. End result is the other 14 sports (including Men’s basketball) lose a combined $10.7 million, an average of $764,000 per sport. That’s also assuming that Men’s basketball keeps sucking asś at making money for whatever weird reasons that keeps happening (Alabama’s MBB team made $9 million last FY). If basketball were to return to modest profitability, that loss probably goes to ~$5 million for all other sports. Compared to the $4.5 million in the red that football would be at a minimum, it’s really not all that different. Other sports would be actually doing better on a per-sport basis.
Again, all the “profit” from football is due to 3rd parties assuming the labor cost. A lot of that money would move over to basketball / baseball if football didn’t exist. It wouldn’t just disappear entirely.
The other thing that you’re missing is that sports themselves are subsidized by the academic revenue. 20,000 students paying an average of $30,000 per year in tuition / books / fees is $600 million in revenue….so WTF are we really even talking about here? That’s still where all the real money is. And the biggest benefit of athletic investment is making that 20,000 number larger by attraction of quality students who will stay enrolled. The amounts of profit and loss from all the sports is peanuts vs. those numbers. Just adding 1,000 in enrollment adds $30 million in revenue….that’s over 60% of football’s annual revenue right there. That’s what this is really all about. And all the sports contribute something to the attraction of new students….football just happens to contribute more than the others.
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I believe you’re trolling with word salads. Or you’re just a delusional baseball fan. But anyway- NIL is not an “expense on the books” for the athletic department.
NIL payments are not included in the athletic department’s reported expenses or revenue- you can look up EADA/NCAA filings.
Football’s $10.7 million profit is real profit- revenue > expenses- BEFORE any NIL is paid.
If football vanished, the $15M in NIL doesn’t “go away” to other sports. Blow up football = no more wins = no more excitement = no more big checks.
The $15M NIL collective shrinks dramatically and almost collapse, not redistribute- it doesn’t magically shift to baseball or swimming.
Your “football profit is fake because donors cover labor” is BS nonsense.
Football generates revenue- tickets sales almost $20M, SEC TV money well over $50M, then sponsorships, concessions, merch ect.
Then donors give and give more because of that success or excitement. Football earns the money, and donors reward the product. It’s not charity- it’s investment in a winning brand. This is why football is so important and so important for the university to invest and go ALL in with- it compounds.
Btw- Your $600M tuition number is irrelevant- the athletic department is self sustaining, barely, but it still is- because of football profit, not because academics are bailing it out. Again, without football profit, the department would be $10.5M in the red. Football pays for everything- including your golden turd (baseball program).
No 17ing shít. That’s the whole point. It’s not “on the books”, but it’s still paid by someone….and it must be paid. And its a substantial 17ing amount that is not brought in as legit revenue via ticket sales, licensing, parking passes, or TV contract. It’s money for nothing.
If colleges and universities were held to the same financial reporting standards as private enterprise, those would be a straight negative on the balance sheet.
Its not losing money if i'm giving them money b/c i like to watch football. You pretend like the donations dont matter. They absolutely do. If we cut football all other programs would suffer financially. FACT.
If the NIL revenue and the paid expenses aren't on the books then we still made $10,000,000 with or without NIL. If you want to include NIL as an expense, then you absolutely have to include NIL donations as revenue.
YES OR NO. Would other athletic programs financially suffer without football at MSU?
Imagine you have a lemonade stand. You sell lemonade for $2 a cup. It costs you $1 to make each cup with lemons, sugar, cups, etc. So every cup you sell, you make $1 profit. Now some rich friends love your lemonade and love what you’re doing so much that they decide to give you $10 every time you sell a cup. That $10 isn’t part of the lemonade price- it’s extra money they hand you separately. At the end of the day your little notebook says:
Sold 10 cups = $20 from customers
Cost to make lemonade = $10
*Profit from lemonade = $10
The extra $100 from your rich friends is bonus money- it’s nice, but it doesn’t change the fact that the lemonade stand itself made $10 profit.
Football is the lemonade stand. It sells tickets, gets TV money, sells jerseys, fills stadiums ect- then and after paying for coaches, travel, weight rooms, etc., it still has money left over. That’s called real profit- And that real profit was $10.7 million last year. The stand still made profit all by itself.
Saying “football loses money if we count the NIL as a labor cost” is like saying:
“My lemonade stand lost money because my rich friends gave me extra cash- if they hadn’t, I would’ve lost money.”
No, that’s retarded. The stand made money- Football makes real profit. That profit pays for baseball
, women’s basketball, and everything else. Quit trolling and pretending the math is complicated. 
Except in this example you left out the part where the bonus money goes to directly to the lemons because they wouldn't play for your lemonade stand without all of your rich friends' off books contributions.Imagine you have a lemonade stand. You sell lemonade for $2 a cup. It costs you $1 to make each cup with lemons, sugar, cups, etc. So every cup you sell, you make $1 profit. Now some rich friends love your lemonade and love what you’re doing so much that they decide to give you $10 every time you sell a cup. That $10 isn’t part of the lemonade price- it’s extra money they hand you separately. At the end of the day your little notebook says:
Sold 10 cups = $20 from customers
Cost to make lemonade = $10
*Profit from lemonade = $10
The extra $100 from your rich friends is bonus money- it’s nice, but it doesn’t change the fact that the lemonade stand itself made $10 profit.
Football is the lemonade stand. It sells tickets, gets TV money, sells jerseys, fills stadiums ect- then and after paying for coaches, travel, weight rooms, etc., it still has money left over. That’s called real profit- And that real profit was $10.7 million last year. The stand still made profit all by itself.
Saying “football loses money if we count the NIL as a labor cost” is like saying:
“My lemonade stand lost money because my rich friends gave me extra cash- if they hadn’t, I would’ve lost money.”
No, that’s retarded. The stand made money- Football makes real profit. That profit pays for baseball
It's like abusing a special purpose entity to make your company look more profitable or less levered than it really is. Might as well start renaming the program University of Enron.
They gonna have to start flipping when they catch a fly ball, pitching on stilts, and dancing on the field.
You’re losing money. That is the point. No way to sugarcoat it. You and others are providing a no-strings-attached handout to compensate the players. That is the very definition of a subsidized cost. The money you are giving is presumably generated by your employment or other wealth you have accumulated that has jack shít to do with MSU athletics. You give it away for players to receive. They get 100% of whatever is promised, whether they suck or not, whether they get hurt or not, whether they enter the portal a year later or not. Again, it’s money for nothing. Money NOT generated by the business that is still plunged into the business for reasons that are not fiscally responsible at all. Which is fine for those individuals who choose to do that, but if it were a real business with investors, stakeholders, etc., it would 100% be a labor cost that shows up on the balance sheet.
Of course donations matter. I never said they didn’t. The problem is that they matter too much. The system as it has been created essentially rewards those who are willing to go deepest into the red in order to build a championship team. When considering all of the measurable revenues and expenses that are associated with running a college football program…..it consumes more money than it generates just about 100% of the time. It’s not even remotely debatable.
That is an accounting parlor trick, though. Using the university collective as a pass-through entity essentially classifies NIL donations as “revenue”, which is horse shít considering that its a direct labor cost that is actually being subsidized out to multiple willing 3rd parties who are not benefitting financially from the arrangement. This is my point. All the numbers point to profit when you do that, but it’s not a reality of the cash flow. Again, if you truly add up all the money coming in and money going out, it’s a negative number. There’s no way to get around that fact.
If football was cut, we’d be kicked out of the SEC, and we’d lose $70 million per year in actual revenue of TV payout, bowl game distributions, and so forth. That would also lead to lost sponsorships and substantially less revenue from our licensing partners for apparel, less marketing revenue for advertisers at DWS, and a few other things. So of course all programs would suffer, but probably not more than they are already suffering. The biggest loss would be the SEC TV revenue, which is also its own form of subsidy because it’s essentially fans of Texas, Alabama, LSU, and Florida funneling money indirectly to our athletic department via TV service provider subscriptions. But that’s another discussion. The same thing would happen if we cut men’s basketball, and possibly women’s basketball or baseball. In fact, we’d actually be reclassified as FCS if we cut any sport and don’t replace it with something else that’s even less profitable….because we are at the minimum required to maintain D1 status as it is.
Ultimately the hit from losing the SEC association and essentially becoming a G5 or FCS school would obviously lead to a substantial loss of interest in all athletic programs. So your question is really not relevant in the sense that you think it is. Ultimately, we have to sustain the football program to maintain SEC membership and keep engagement of the fans across the board. But that doesn’t mean that football is inherently bringing in net profit on its own merits. It’s essentially a very large stream of cash flows we must maintain with a net negative result for what is measurable….but still has indirect very, very positive benefits for enrollment and academic revenue that is not directly measurable.
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would other sports at MSU suffer financially if MSU football ceased to exist starting next year? YES or NO?
The answer is 1000000% yes. Every sport other than basketball would significantly suffer. Basketball might suffer significantly too. I'm sorry if you are too dumb to see that or are too stubborn to admit it.
This is the very definition of a red herring argument. I’ve already answered this question, and I never suggested that cutting football was a good idea.
That still doesn’t mean that it is not consuming more money than it is generating when looking at all the cash flows that are actually measurable. Again, that’s not up for debate. A big time football program still has a lot of intangible benefits for the school as an enrollment booster, which is where the real money is. But that can’t be measured directly for obvious reasons. Both of those things can be true.
The dishonesty happens when people pretend that football is this huge moneymaker that offsets all these other sports as money losers, because it completely ignores the hidden subsidized costs that aren’t on the balance sheet. The reality is that all sports are money losers when you actually consider all those costs. But that doesn’t mean any of them need to be cut. It sinply means they provide other intangible financial benefits for the school, OR they balance out the regulatory requirements (Title IX) that are required so that the more popular sports may flourish.
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I’m going with the latter for sure. He just said, “I never suggested cutting football was a good idea.” Then immediately says, “football is consuming more money than it is generating” lol.
He’s trying to have it both ways while hoping no one notices. Hes purposely trying to manipulate the conversation, and maybe you, with long word salad essays, because admitting “football pays for everything” would force him to admit the obvious- That we should prioritize funding football first and foremost so it can generate even more profit and subsidize all sports better- including his shiny baseball turd.
So let him keep moving goalposts, redefining terms, and writing essays and all that bs- The numbers stay the same:
$10.7M profit football
$4.2M baseball loss.
Football covers it.
Always has. Always will. The math isn’t going anywhere.
Sorry bulldoghair but our javelin championship most likely lost more money than your smooth brain can collect at any level. Just keep overselling how much we undersell sports and one day you will realize baseball wins.
…..because the boosters and donors subsidize football. End of story. Choose to look at it however you want.
At the end of the day, the full costs required to run an FBS football program exceed the revenue that is generated DIRECTLY. There are still millions upon millions of uncountable dollars generated indirectly that still make having a football program a fantastic idea. There’s a smaller number of uncountable dollars that make having other sports a good idea, too. /soapbox
At the end of the day football subsidizes the other sports. FACT. If you didn't have football, the other sports would suffer. Point proven.
Thanks for playing.
Or said another way....don't kill the golden goose. All for "fair share" but don't stick your head in the sand and act like there are no consequences. There will be consequences.
Tax the rich (football) to subsidize the poor (non revenue generating sports) worked pre-nil.....not so much now. Like you said the math ain't mathing nor will it. It's now a spending issue and to fix it services (non revenue generating sports generating sports) need to be cut or you could just keep running a deficit like the knuckle heads in DC.
Where your argument fails is inn assuming the player costs are fixed. But they are not. Higher NIL donations lead to higher player coasts. If NIL donations dried up tomorrow, the money we pay players would plummet in short order. It’s not true to say we need these NIL donations to balance the football expenses.
Wow. Not sure if you are serious. First off, if our NIL / revenue share given to football went to $0 tomorrow, and stayed there, we’d essentially become an FCS school (not even a G5 school) in football. What does that look like? Something between 2-10 and 0-12 EVERY year in the SEC, 0-9 in league play every year, with none of the league games being close…all losses by 4 TD’s at bare minimum. No coach would touch our job. Season ticket sales and attendance would plummet to the point that we absolutely would get voted out if the league in short order (think Temple with the Big East a few years back) which would be a death sentence. And even if that worst case scenario didn’t happen with a league exit, we’d transition well into the red in football from the loss of attendance and legitimate donations alone.
If you’re saying that player costs aren’t fixed in the sense that 100,000 donors at 80 schools could just all magically collaborate and agree to stop all payments tomorrow, then, OK? Is it theoretically possible? Sure. Is it also theoretically possible that the Red Sox, Yankees, Dodgers, Cubs, Mets, and Cardinals could all agree tomorrow to just drop their payroll down to match that of the Rays? Also yes. Is either of those things EVER going to happen in reality with the competitive dynamics in place? Absolutely not. Is the exact opposite of what you suggest going to be what actually happens, with player costs continuing to skyrocket upwards? Absolutely 100% guaranteed.
So, you’re 100% right that player costs aren’t fixed. But you’re completely wrong in your reasoning. The only reason they aren’t fixed is because they are going to keep climbing, and make that total cost required for basic competitiveness to be even more every single year. This problem is only going to get worse. Not better.
Yes.
Do you realize both are essentially required payments to maintain any semblance of what you call “profitability” for the football program?
Do you realize that the figures quoted by @bulldoghair / @Will Rogers.sixpack are pre-revenue share implementation, meaning the $15 million we’re putting forth towards football rev share turns that $10 million profit into a $5 million loss, ON THE BOOKS, pretty much right now?
Do you realize that none of those figures account for another $15-20 million in NIL that we’re also putting forth from essentially booster bankroll?
You can be a moron all you want. Football subsidizes the other sports. It’s a fact. It’s not an opinion.