Spending In Place
The College Football Playoff is considering expanding to 24 teams. Reflecting on the possibility last month, University of Texas athletics director Chris del Conte said:
We're just growing at rapid speed. Our whole industry was pretty methodical for 75 years. In the last five years, there has been so much tumultuous change, from NIL to the portal to two portals to a playoff to an expanded playoff, we're moving as quickly as AI is coming onto the scene. No industry has ever changed this rapidly in such a short amount of time.
College sports administrators do live very busy lives these days. But remarkably little of the competitive landscape has changed since the Supreme Court's 2021 decision in NCAA v. Alston, which alongside several state legislatures moved the NCAA to finally issue its first permissive NIL policy.
A sensible baseline for modern college sports is 2019, the last pre-COVID season before Alston. Each public school's disclosures provide a general look at the strength and standing of institutional sports – how wealthy a school is, how much revenue its athletics department creates on its own, and how much of the school's total budget athletics consumes. As a first pass, we can put private school numbers aside (though reasonable estimates abound). And since college conferences are themselves a competitive battleground right now, our baseline excludes the distributions that schools receive from them.
This is how schools in the then-Power 5 Conferences compared in 2019:
Then, the Power 5 schools spanned a diverse range of university systems, typically with sub-$2 billion endowments but stretching into some of the world’s richest public and private institutions. The upper crust of programs – mainly from what is now the SEC – generated more than $100 million annually before conference distributions and other support. More often than not, they got there by committing larger allocations of their university budgets than did the rest of the field. The 2018-19 College Football Playoff finalists Clemson and Alabama, for example, spent roughly twice as much of their university budgets on athletics as did Ohio State, the highest-ranking Big Ten football program that year.
Ohio State was one of a handful of schools – alongside Michigan, Texas, Texas A&M, and likely Notre Dame – that formed the leading financial edge of college sports. These blue-blooded programs commanded both the largest revenue engines in sports and some of the largest endowments in higher education.
Here is how schools in the now-Power 4 Conferences compared heading into last season, four years after Alston:
Nominally, the dispersion broadened a bit. Most of 2019's upper-crust programs – still mainly in the SEC – generated closer to $200 million on their own in 2025. Their bubbles got bigger, meaning their athletics allocations of university budgets grew from low- to mid-teen percentages. And the blue bloods continued drifting up-and-to-the-right.
Adjusting for inflation, here is how the Power Conference schools shifted from 2019 to 2025:
Does this look like disruption at the speed of AI to you?
College sports is undoubtedly a different world today compared to 2019. The formal NIL economy was prohibited then, but today is $2 billion annually and rising. Football and basketball roster turnover has accelerated, complicating sports operations even at schools that have maintained their stature. The Big Ten has won three consecutive College Football Playoffs. Emerging pro leagues in women's volleyball alone have raised hundreds of millions, relying on Power Conference schools as their primary feeder and addressable audience.
And significant change may be on the horizon. 2025 was the last fiscal year before schools began implementing revenue shares under the House settlement. Within months, we will see something closer to the full brunt of NIL economics hit school books, migrating from unreported collectives. Those disclosures will arrive right as the Power Conference universe has spent itself into collective annual operating deficits approaching $1 billion:
But in the big picture, the institutions in this space are shuffling in place. Unlike in true competitive disruption, there has yet to be a school that jumped decisively from one cohort into the center of another. No blue blood has left the field in its dust. No affluent institution with a modest athletics operation has become a blue blood. No SEC school devoted to football has pulled back. And no bottom-left school has waved the white flag or punched into a heavier weight class.
Much of this inertia is by design. The base layer of college sports enterprise comprises long-term contracts in which intermediaries rent operating control of university functions – media companies with conferences, MMR agencies with schools, and smaller administrative utilities with individual sports teams. Since Alston, far more conferences and schools than not have deepened their dependence on intermediaries. Several schools are now tied to their sales and marketing intermediaries even longer than to their conferences.
President Trump and Congress's intense ongoing efforts would reinforce that inertia. Prediction markets nevertheless deem the Protect College Sports Act less than a coin flip to pass the House before the end of the year (if at all). Washington's latest, frenzied attempt at intervention began at an early March White House roundtable, during which President Trump promised an executive order within a week and urged Congressional legislation before the football season. It's now Week 7 of that season.
Most trustees, boosters, and fans aspire to be more than a static bubble on a matrix. How does an institution "win" when its peers, en masse, are intensifying spending and ceding discretion for the apparent goal of staying in place?
Whatever the PCSA's fate in the coming months, I have argued elsewhere that universities have underinvested in competitive athletics infrastructure – the functions that drive winning but aren't controlled by coaches and players. If built thoughtfully, these win conditions – from personnel evaluation to capital allocation to sports science to org logistics – buoy institutions as high-priced talent comes and goes. Pro teams the world over long ago realized this. The best among them have trained their strategic investment sights on these categories ever since.
Perhaps unwittingly and definitely ironically, no one articulates this better than the most coveted talent themselves. In his eponymous ESPN docuseries released last week, Nick Saban explains why he made his coaches meet at 7:30 the morning after winning the 2010 then-BCS National Championship: "There's no history in sports. I mean, the history is the history. But if you're going to focus on the history, you're never going to do anything in the future."
Sports, after all, is the rare industry in which the most prized achievements can't compound past the season in which they accrue. Once a champion is crowned in sports, a new season resets – no network effects to rest on. Brands, media deals, and marketing contracts can, in some cases and time periods, outlive wins and losses. But ask trustees, boosters, and fans which one should be their institution's North Star.
Competitive infrastructure becomes no less important if the future is regulated. For all the Congressional handwringing about the haves leaving the have-nots behind, disparity is growing even atop the Power Conferences. The haves' core tension is among themselves:
Student athletes are trained to compete as though no lead is safe. It's time for institutions to do the same.