In Reply to: Why football has to posted by SehornBlew on January 29, 2024 at 16:02:46
It's the USFL or XFL or the Carolina Panthers (OK, it's NOT the Carolina Panthers but they were pretty terrible this year).
Whatever you think of the USFL or XFL, they're clearly not as valuable as even mediocre college football teams.
Duane "The Rock" Johnson bought the entire XFL for $15M. Media rights are worth about $20M per year.
Fox is running the 8-team USFL and has committed $150M over 3 years, a little over $6M per team.
Players in both leagues will earn a minimum of around $5,000 per game, or $50K per season if they play in all the games. That doesn't even cover room and board at most colleges.
Brett Hundley is apparently the highest played minor leaguer, at $200K. Lots of CFB players are earning more than that in NIL money.
In many cases, football needs the university more than the university needs football. The entire athletic department makes up about 1% of the overall UCLA budget. UCLA wouldn't even miss the football team financially, but the football probably couldn't survive without UCLA.
Looking at the linked "X" tweet, LSU WBB received no media rights income, but almost $27M was allocated to the "Non-Program Specific" category. I'll bet a large part of that was directly due to WBB broadcasts, and that amount, almost double football media rights, more than covers the coaches' salaries.
The question of player salaries is certainly worthy of consideration and discussion. I'm not sure what the answer it, but I would have led with that if I was you.
One thing seems clear, based the dollars being thrown at the USFL and XFL, despite repeated failures and dismal ratings, and that is, despite the protestation of those posters who claim the era of sky high media rights deals is over, that CFB media rights are very likely undervalued, and if valued in line with what the minor league operations are getting, with far less brand value than CFB represents today, there would be more than enough money to pay players and still fund other sports.