The governing board of one of Virginia’s largest academic institutions held a special meeting recently to take up a decidedly non-academic agenda item: Should Virginia Tech spend more on sports?
The board’s answer was a resounding “Go Hokies!” By a vote of 13-1, the board voted to adopt a plan that calls for spending an additional $229.2 million over the next four years on intercollegiate athletics. Of that, Tech hopes to get $120 million from “philanthropy” — a delicate word for “boosters” — but $48.3 million would come from “institutional support” and $21.3 million from increasing mandatory student fees that go to intercollegiate athletics that the vast majority of Tech’s students don’t play.
Virginia Tech President Tim Sands, who endorsed the plan, acknowledged that “this strategic decision to invest discretionary resources in athletics now may limit our flexibility in the near future.” And commentators such as myself called the increase in mandatory student fees the equivalent of a tax increase.
I was hardly the first to point out that universities are today essentially operating minor league sports teams under the guise of creating “an indelible shared experience” for students and alumni, as Sands put it.
The marquee college sports at Tech’s level — football and basketball — seem indistinguishable these days from professional sports. The coaches get paid millions and now even the players get paid — and some of them get millions, too, maybe not from the school but from endorsement deals known as “NIL” for “name, image, likeness.”
That raises many questions. One, of course, is why do we need colleges to be operating these sports entertainment divisions, but let’s set that aside. We, as a society, have already decided this is worth doing. Otherwise college football games on Saturday wouldn’t have such high TV ratings and 65,632 people wouldn’t have jammed into Lane Stadium last month to see Tech lose to Vanderbilt.
Instead, I’ll pose a somewhat different question: Why do college sports need “institutional support” — and mandatory payments from students? Minor league sports appear to be self-supporting — Lynchburg and Salem taxpayers aren’t being taxed to pay for those city’s minor league baseball teams — so why can’t college sports be self-supporting?
There are two answers and both are quite simple:
Most college sports don’t make money. The NCAA oversees 24 sports; the only ones that generally make money are football and basketball. The revenues from those sports subsidize all the others.
In theory, college sports could do without funding from the school or its students, but those sports might look fundamentally different than they do today, with less money going into the programs. By state law, no more than 20% of the athletics budget at Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia can come from the school; at other schools it can go as high as 55%. Sportico reported last year — using figures from 2022-23 — that James Madison University was actually at 78% because it had a waiver to get to the 55% mark while it transitioned into a higher-level conference. Take away that school subsidy and sports as we know them simply wouldn’t exist at JMU and would exist on a lower level at Tech and Virginia. That might be fine with some people, but some is not the same as a majority or anywhere close to it. I have not heard a single legislator suggest that these subsidies should be cut to zero. On the contrary, what we saw at Tech was a governing board appointed by a Republican governor embrace what Republicans might otherwise call a tax increase or wasteful, unnecessary spending.
The more I look at it, the less college sports look like minor league sports and more like something else entirely. Something bigger. Minor leagues aren’t nearly as expensive, or as lucrative, as college sports programs. When we compare college sports to minor leagues, we’re trying to make the point that they’ve become professionalized — but that obscures just how much more professional big-time college sports are than minor league sports.
Here’s why minor leagues aren’t a good comparison for college sports. Minor leagues generally operate on much smaller budgets with much smaller revenues than top-level college sports. Let’s look just at football and basketball, the two money-making sports at the college level.
Coaches: College coaches rival pay scale of top pro leagues; minor league coaches don’t
The top coaches in the National Basketball Association make more than the top college coaches, but there is some overlap. The median salary for NBA coaches is reported to be $7 million. At least three college coaches are above the NBA median, according to USA Today (Bill Self at Kansas, $8.8 million; John Calipari at Arkansas, $8 million; Dan Hurley at Connecticut, $7.7 million).
The highest-paid women’s basketball coach is Dawn Staley at South Carolina, who makes $4 million. That puts her at twice what Salary Swish says Chaucey Billups is making for coaching the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers. He’s at $2 million, so behind the $2.75 million that Virginia Tech is paying Mike Young.
We don’t know what coaches are paid in the NBA’s minor league, the G League. Those numbers are kept secret but there’s much speculation on basketball sites on the internet that those coaches might make no more than $300,000 a year — if that.
In football, the NFL coaches likewise make more than college coaches, but they’re not completely dissimilar. The lowest-paid NFL head coaches make $13 million a year, about the same as the highest-paid college coach (Kirby Smart at Georgia). Brent Pry, the football coach that Tech fired this fall, was on a six-year contract with a base salary this year of $4.75 million that was set to rise to $5 million next year.
While it’s easy to compare the NBA to its G League, there is no obvious comparison in football. There is no minor league for football. Colleges fill the function of being a feeder system for pro players, but they don’t function as true minor leagues where the major league team can demote a player for poor performance or a rehab stint, as typically happens in baseball, basketball and hockey. That’s also why each NFL team is allowed a “practice squad” of 17 players in addition to its regular 53-player roster. Teams are allowed to start training camp with 90 players, some of whom get cut, but teams often stay in touch and sign some of those players during the season when vacancies develop.
There are other football leagues out there that are certainly lesser leagues in terms of prestige and fan interest. They often attract players who haven’t made NFL teams but hold out hope that they can impress scouts with their play up north. CFL Newshub reports that salaries for a rookie coach in the Canadian Football League are believed to start at about $108,000 a year (in American dollars) with a successful veteran coach able to command close to $360,000 a year. USA Today last year listed 440 college assistant coaches who make more than that. The Pro Football Network reports that coaches in the United Football League make between $55,000 and $90,000 a year.
Players: Minor leagues hold down player costs; college players are generally making more
It’s only been recently that college players could get paid. The fact that they now can be is changing the college sports landscape. One of the reasons Virginia Tech cited for increasing its sports budget is the Howe v. NCAA court case that clears the way for schools to pay players directly.
However, it’s already clear that college players are going to make more than their minor league counterparts. The NCAA has released data that says the men’s basketball players average $65,853 in NIL deals. Front Office Sports reports that most players in the NBA’s G League make about $40,500. That’s right: College players generally make more money than players in the NBA’s minor league system. The top college basketball players will make far more: Sports Illustrated says that the best-paid college hoopster is A.J. Dybantsa at Brigham Young, who has $4.1 million in NIL deals.
Football is where things really get expensive. The NCAA says the average NIL deal for football players is $40,000 a year, but that doesn’t truly capture the full expense of presumed “impact” players. Sports Illustrated reports that Arch Manning at the University of Texas is the nation’s highest-paid college player, with NIL deals worth a reported $6.8 million. It lists 10 college athletes with deals of $3.1 million or more — of those, nine are football players (and eight of those are quarterbacks).
To the extent that the Canadian Football League is the NFL’s minor league (don’t tell Canadians that; they’d react the same way they did when President Donald Trump referred to Canada as “the 51st state”), it’s incredibly cheap. The league has a salary cap; teams can spend no more than $4.34 million (in U.S. dollars). That would barely pay for one top college quarterback south of the border. Pro Football Network says the average pay for United Football League players is $55,000 a year, somewhat higher than the college average, but that college average is expected to rise as NIL deals and other payments expand. It’s unclear what the highest-paid UFL players get, but the sports gambling site Bet Us says it’s believed some quarterbacks are making six figures. That’s far less than the top college NIL deals.
Revenue and fan interest
These two are intertwined. The only reason college sports conferences get such big TV contracts is that networks know fans want to watch those games — and they can make money by selling advertising to companies that want to reach those fans. (Cue your favorite beer commercial.) With no fan interest, that revenue goes away.
Here’s the biggest way that college sports (well, basketball and football) are closer to major league sports than minor league sports: There’s simply a lot more fan interest.
This year’s NCAA men’s basketball championship game at the Alamodome in San Antonio drew 66,602 fans. The championship series in the NBA’s G League — between the Stockton Kings and the Osceola Magic — may have had just as much talent on display but had far fewer fans in the stands. Only 1,724 showed up for the first game in Osceola, Florida; game two in Stockton, California, drew the highest attendance: 4,194. Only 3,421 were on hand for the decisive game three, which Stockton won.
The NBA invented the G League because it wanted a North American-based developmental league (as opposed to pro leagues in Europe) and it’s now in its 24th year, so the NBA must consider it a success. However, the NBA has built the league on the cheap, by sports standards, partly because it’s had to — there’s no big TV contract or lots of fans coming through the turnstiles to pay the bills.
If college football were to disappear (don’t worry, fans, it won’t), the NFL would have to create a minor league — but would fans follow those teams (and pay to see them) with the same fervor that they do college teams? Based on what we see with minor leagues in other sports, probably not.
Colleges have brand names, and built-in fan bases. The 65,632 fans that Tech drew to the Vanderbilt game was more than the Washington Commanders have drawn in any home game this season. Those fans are coming to cheer on their school’s team. Take away the school connection and you likely lose much of the crowd.
The NBA learned that in the early days of its developmental league. One of the founding teams was the Roanoke Dazzle. The talent level might have been comparable to — or maybe even better than — what Virginia Tech had in Blacksburg. But the Hokies had the brand name. Why pay to see some unknown players from the — checks program — Asheville Altitude when you can go to Cassell Coliseum and see Tech play Duke or North Carolina?
Here’s my point: Big-time college sports aren’t a minor league equivalent — not in expense, not in revenue, not in fan interest. They’re really a junior version of the NFL or NBA — a junior version that is required to operate other sports that won’t make money. That’s another big way college sports are different from minor leagues: Minor leagues don’t have to financially support other sports. If colleges are going to have those additional sports, football and basketball have to generate the revenue to pay for them.
If you withdraw school funding, the whole business model would start to unravel, because college sports are built to operate at a high-dollar level. Tech is aiming to reach that cap of 20% of the athletic budget coming from the school. Take that away and what happens? What happens to any business that loses 20% of its revenue? You either find other sources of revenue or you start cutting expenses. Presumably if Tech could find other sources, it would, so the more realistic outcome would be cutting expenses. Let’s also be honest about where those cuts would come. From a business standpoint, they wouldn’t come from your most profitable programs, football and basketball. They’d come from all those other sports that the revenue from football and basketball help subsidize. Maybe you don’t care about those but somebody does; some of those are necessary for Title IX requirements for gender proportionality to balance out football.
I’m a sports fan, but I don’t think colleges should be spending money on what amounts to a professional sports division. I definitely don’t think students should have to pay mandatory fees to support those professional sports. However, I’m enough of a realist to understand that the system isn’t going to change — not very much and definitely not anytime soon. This is the system the marketplace has evolved, and it would be impossible to replicate at the current levels — levels the public clearly craves — without some “institutional support.” But could we at least stop forcing students to pay for it?
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