By Watson Scott Swail, President/CEO & Senior Research Scholar, Educational Policy Institute

I’ve criticized the NCAA for years, largely because it treats transparency as a slogan rather than a practice. It releases enough information to appear open while shielding the data that matter most—especially academic outcomes and finances.

On Wednesday, The Athletic, the sports outlet owned by The New York Times, published an analysis estimating what major programs had available to assemble their 2026 football rosters. Three reporters contacted more than 70 coaches, general managers, personnel directors, athletic directors, agents, and others across 68 programs—the Power Four conferences plus Notre Dame.[1] The figures had to be estimated because the schools themselves do not disclose them. That raises an obvious question: Why is a nonprofit university football program allowed to operate with so little financial transparency?

The pattern is unsurprising: the more a program spends, the more likely it is to sit near the top of the rankings. Money attracts talent. What is surprising is the scale. Even programs near the bottom of the list—including Duke, Iowa State, Arizona, Iowa, and Pitt—were estimated to have roster budgets in the $10 million to $20 million range.

Thirty-two teams fell in the $21 million to $30 million tier, among them Florida State, Virginia Tech, Maryland, Washington, BYU, Cal, and Virginia. At the top, seven programs were estimated at roughly $45 million to more than $50 million, including Ohio State, Oregon, Texas, LSU, and Texas A&M. Miami, Notre Dame, and Ole Miss were close behind.

Think about that: more than $50 million available to build a college football roster. Less than a decade ago, players could legally receive little beyond scholarships and permitted benefits. Under-the-table payments, cars, and other inducements were persistent features of the old system. The Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) rules did not create the market; it simply brought much of it into the open.

The legal shift began with challenges to the NCAA’s control over athletes’ names, images, and likenesses. In 2009, former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon sued after recognizing his likeness in an EA Sports video game. A federal judge ruled in his favor in 2014. California followed in 2019 with the Fair Pay to Play Act, and the NCAA adopted an interim NIL policy in 2021. Since 2025, the House settlement has also allowed schools to share roughly $20.5 million annually with athletes across all sports—separate from legitimate third-party NIL compensation. So how do football roster budgets climb toward $50 million?

Part of the answer lies outside the university’s direct payments. Major programs are surrounded by donor foundations, booster organizations, and NIL collectives. Fans may also pay substantial seat-license fees and annual donations before buying season tickets. At Ohio State, for example, a premium basketball seat arrangement can require a $20,000 one-time license plus $2,000 per seat each year, before the tickets themselves. Penn State football likewise pairs major capital donations with expensive annual seating commitments.

Yet the money moving through these arrangements remains remarkably opaque. The public rarely receives a clear account of how much is raised, who controls it, or how it is spent. For institutions organized around a nonprofit educational mission, that lack of visibility should be unacceptable.

The deeper issue is not merely the size of the numbers. It is why public and private nonprofit universities operate what are, in practice, professional athletic enterprises. Universities are supposed to cultivate knowledge, judgment, and expertise. Yet at many major institutions, the highest-paid employee is the football or basketball coach. The compensation signals what the institution values, regardless of what its mission statement says.

How did colleges get into this business? Intercollegiate sports began as student competition, but alumni loyalty, regional rivalries, and mass media transformed football into a commercial spectacle. Ohio Stadium opened in 1922 with 66,210 seats; today the “Shoe” holds more than 100,000. College football has been a major business for generations. NIL simply made the labor market harder to disguise.

Defenders of the system make a fair point: football and men’s basketball can subsidize non-revenue sports and, in some cases, other campus priorities. Joe Paterno and his wife, for example, donated more than $4 million toward Penn State’s library and helped raise millions more.

Successful teams also function as powerful marketing vehicles. National broadcasts put a university’s name before millions of viewers for hours at a time, strengthening alumni loyalty, applications, donations, and sponsorships. Those benefits are real. But they do not erase the need for transparency, academic integrity, or a clearer boundary between education and professional sport.

NIL did not send college athletics off the rails by itself. It exposed how far the system had already traveled from amateur competition. The relevant comparison is no longer between one college team and another; it is between major college football and professional sports. These programs negotiate enormous media contracts, manage multimillion-dollar labor markets, and depend on sophisticated fundraising networks. Calling the product “amateur” no longer makes it so.

My preference is simpler: colleges should be colleges. The European club model separates elite sports from universities, allowing athletes to pursue professional development without pretending that enrollment is their primary purpose. It also removes the pressure to admit or retain players whose real objective is a route to the NBA, NFL, or NHL rather than a degree. Our own recent EPIGraph reported that 79 percent of NBA players never graduate from college. If college is mainly a compulsory waypoint to professional sports, the arrangement deserves scrutiny.

That cleaner separation is unlikely. Universities, conferences, broadcasters, donors, and fans are too invested, and the money is too large. The genie is out of the bottle (my apologies to Barbara Eden!). The least universities can do now is stop hiding behind the language of amateurism and disclose, in full, how much they raise, how much they spend, and what educational purpose the enterprise still serves.

---

[1] Southeastern Conference (SEC), the Big Ten Conference, the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), and the Big 12 Conference.