College FootballNFL · later
Home › Money

Money hub

Who has the money in college football and where it is going. Every figure carries its year and a source link (hover a [S#] tag for the citation). CONFLICT marks figures where sources disagree; UNAVAILABLE marks figures that could not be verified and were not estimated.

NIL & revenue sharing

NIL market size, House settlement terms, NIL Go clearinghouse, reported player pay, collectives, school rev-share allocations, roster payrolls.

Coach pay & buyouts

Top head-coach pay, record buyouts, assistants, GMs and ADs, plus full USA Today salary tables.

Media rights & conference revenue

Conference TV deals, the CFP contract and split, conference revenue and per-school payouts, top department revenue.

Deficits, subsidies & debt

GAO deficit findings, subsidies and student fees, Knight-Newhouse FBS categories, stadium debt.

Donors & endowments

Mega-donors, donation leaders, endowments vs. athletics, Power 4 endowment and giving table.

Who has the money and where it’s going

  1. The money is concentrated in two conferences. The Big Ten ($1.47B) and SEC ($1.11B) out-earned the ACC and Big 12 combined in FY2025 [S52]. They lock in 58% of the new ~$1.3B/yr CFP contract [S54]. Per-school conference checks of ~$72-92M dwarf the ~$10M SEC schools got in 2007 [S58][S53].
  2. Athletes went from $0 to billions in five years, but mostly at the top. NIL spending grew from ~$0.9B in 2021-22 to a projected $4.5B in 2026-27 [S19][S20]. A ~$21M-per-school cap now sits on top of uncapped "commercial" deals, which lets the richest football programs run $40-50M rosters [S22][S23]. Inside schools, >80% of rev-share goes to football and men's basketball [S19][S24][S25].
  3. Coaches remain the biggest winners on guaranteed money. Nine coaches passed $10M in 2025 [S31], and the top three are at $13M+ in 2026 [S32]. Guaranteed buyouts mean schools committed ~$268.5M in 2025 to coaches they had fired [S39].
  4. Donors and students fill the gap. Donations are a $2.7B line for FBS public schools [S48]. Most D-I programs still lose money: the median gap was $20.6M, covered by $7.2B in college contributions, including student fees that reach $8,500 per student over four years at the median [S45][S46]. The lower a school sits in the hierarchy, the more of its athletic budget comes from students and the general fund [S49 calc][S46].
  5. Next dollars are going to three places:
    • roster payrolls, which already run above the cap at the top [S22][S23];
    • premium-seat stadium rebuilds financed with debt [S72][S71];
    • legal costs (House appeals, Johnson, state-law fights) while Congress decides whether to write the rules into law [S5][S12][S16].

Known gaps and unverifiable areas are listed on the About page.

Sources cited on this page

All money sources

Data credit: Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database, a joint project of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University.