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As NCAA schools continue to cut Olympic teams in favor of football - folks will recite the myth that football “brings in all the money to fund all sports.” Let’s break this down and debunk some of the myths about how and where that “revenue” stems from
If you are referring to television $ allotments from conference networks - football is not solely responsible for “bringing in all of the revenue” and filling all the air time. How do conference networks make money? Similar to other networks, they rely on a variety of programming
Additionally, while the conferences receive the revenue from the networks, the networks receive their revenue from the carriage providers, and those carriage providers receive revenue from the viewing public - aka public subscribers
So the amount of revenue that a conference network receives from the carriage provider for this type of conference sport channel will often fluctuate on a monthly basis, as it is dependent on the total number of subscribers who pay for the channel through the carriage provider
For example, if you have an Xfinity cable package, part of what you pay for in order to have that cable subscription goes to the BTN. The amount of monthly revenue per subscriber is generally higher if the subscriber lives in a state in which that conference has a member
This means that all sports/programming within a specific NCAA P5 conference assist in “brining in the revenue” since people are not individual “paying” to watch a football game and football itself isn’t being aired on those television networks on a 24/7 basis
So the millions brought in from conference networks that are distributed to each conference team are the result of all sports filling airtime, the amount of subscribers, and not just football
If you are referring to ticket sales, because this accounts for roughly 25-40% of football revenue, then you need to note that for football (and MBB) the ticket purchases come along with forced donation amounts - similar to a NFL personal seat license
For some college football programs this can be as much as $5,000 per seat for a season, plus the cost of the ticket per game. These are not optional “donations” - if you don’t pay the “donation” you don’t get those tickets. Better seats require higher “donations” each year
So, these large chunks of “revenue” that folks are mistakingly crediting solely to football are in fact not directly the result of a football team/football playing and/or football performance. They are a collective effort of all teams and/or forced on fans in a non-profit setting
Some great info here on network revenue for conferences: https://theosceola.com/in-depth-a-journey-from-the-creation-of-conference-networks-to-now/
