This Is America’s Most Profitable College Football Team

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Oct 28, 12:54PM EDT

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

This Is America’s Most Profitable College Football Team — © Tom Pennington / Getty Images

College sports is big business. According to The Wall Street Journal, three college football programs are worth over $1 billion: Texas, Ohio State and Alabama.

College sports have also made a number of people wealthy. The most obvious of these are coaches at Big Football schools. In 40 states, colleges coaches are the highest-paid public employees. After many years of debate, college athletes can make money on endorsements. Some of these will be worth millions of dollars.

Apart from how much a college football program is worth, a more direct calculation is how much money it makes. AthleticScholarships.net recently released a study titled “Top 20 Most Profitable College Football Programs.”

The list was topped by Texas at $92 million. The Texas Longhorns are the team of the University of Texas at Austin. The team has won over 900 games since inception and has a win/loss record of better than .700.

The team has been national champion four times, based on the AP poll: 1963, 1969, 1970 and 2005.

The University of Texas at Austin is huge. Founded in 1883, today it has a student body of over 50,000 and faculty and staff of over 24,000. It ranks 42nd among all colleges in the latest U.S. News rankings and 13th among public universities.

The university also has large baseball, golf, basketball, cross country, track, soccer, tennis, swimming and rowing programs.

These are the 20 most profitable college football programs:

Texas ($92 million)
Tennessee ($70 million)
LSU ($58 million)
Michigan ($56 million)
Notre Dame ($54 million)
Georgia ($50 million)
Ohio State ($50 million)
Oklahoma ($48 million)
Auburn ($47 million)
Alabama ($46 million)
Oregon ($40 million)
Florida State ($39 million)
Arkansas ($38 million)
Washington ($38 million)
Florida ($37 million)
Texas A&M ($37 million)
Penn State ($36 million)
Michigan State ($32 million)
USC ($29 million)
South Carolina ($28 million)

Click here to see the most valuable football teams.
[wallst_email_signup]

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.