College baseball, venture capital, and the long maybe

https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2025/06/15/college-baseball-venture-capital-and-the-long-maybe/

62•bcantrill•3d ago

Comments

jgalt212•2h ago

> but for the revenue sports (football, basketball, hockey, baseball)

I think that list is two items too long.

dustincoates•2h ago

Here are more details on this: https://augustafreepress.com/news/public-records-request-is-...

UVA baseball lost >$3 million in 2023 off of $1.7 million revenue. UVA football (a middling program) meanwhile is making a profit of over $20 million.

Baseball is nowhere close to football. I'd be surprised if college baseball was making more revenue than minor league baseball.

sounds•1h ago

Adding the college men's basketball numbers, from [1]:

1. Duke University $45.1M

2. Syracuse University $34.2M

3. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill $32.0M

[1] https://www.2adays.com/blog/top-10-division-i-basketball-pro...

ghaff•1h ago

As far as I know US collegiate baseball may be bigger at some schools but is mostly a marginal spectator thing overall. Hockey is certainly very regional but, in my experience, is a fairly big thing in the North especially at schools with good teams. In fact, I went to a school where hockey almost certainly had larger paid crowds than basketball.

quickthrowman•1h ago

There are 4x as many teams in the NCAA Div I national championships for basketball than there are for hockey.

That being said, hockey is extremely popular at some schools; Gopher hockey is more popular (with both students and alumni) than Gopher basketball at the University of Minnesota.

ghaff•41m ago

I always went to northern schools so my perception is probably skewed. Played intramurals in grad school with someone who went to Minnesota. I've just never gone anywhere that basketball was a particularly big deal (and was never into it myself).

csa•1h ago

> I think that list is two items too long.

This was my thought as well, at least for college sports.

That said, based on the article, I imagine that the author is referring to the big revenue professional sports (“the IPO” outcome). Assuming that’s the case, these four are definitely the largest in the US by a lot.

PaulHoule•27m ago

My understanding is the baseball program at my Uni is carried by a single rich donor. I used to have a view of the baseball field out my office window but it got evicted to build a computer science building which is almost done. The new field is off campus and beautiful and fan friendly. It had one small set of bleachers before but now they fill the parking lot and set up a shuttle bus to ferry people in from a nearby shopping center.

Most of our sports teams play teams that are a bus ride away, but the baseball season starts early when it is too cold to play or spectate in upstate NY so they spend a lot on airplane tickets to play teams down south.

alexpotato•2h ago

There is a great quote from Michael Lewis:

"If hedge funds could buy universities and then split them up so that the HF keeps the sports programs and they sell off the academic departments, they would most definitely do that"

prasadjoglekar•2h ago

Universities are already doing this. Those with modestly large endowments are functionally private equity firms whose job is to generate enough cash flow to pay themselves, top admins, sports coaches and profs.

Academics, research, govt grants etc. are all means to that end.

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/05/harvard-salaries-top...

par1970•1h ago

How is that the same thing?

vonneumannstan•1h ago

Is there any evidence that universities with large endowments are paying coaches with them?

Raidion•1h ago

Money is fungible, doesn't really matter what source the money comes from other than optics.

Kevin_S•51m ago

This isn't really fair I think. Academic money is actually not fungible - it can't be used to fund athletics, and vice versa. Just because both pots are relatively large doesn't mean that the money itself is fungible.

vonneumannstan•24m ago

Maybe but most endowments actually have "legally?" bound or otherwise contracted uses in universities. Thats why Harvard can't just tap it's endowment to fund research the current Admin has cut. So I'm doubting that endowments are being used in this way to pay coaches.

98codes•10m ago

Sure, but if an endowment is paying for, say, the football coaching staff, then that leaves that much more money free in the general fund to pay for other things.

If the endowment is paying for something that otherwise wouldn't be paid for generally, that's a different story.

PaulHoule•33m ago

Sports programs don't always or even usually make a profit.

https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/analysis/2020/11/20/do-col...

saghm•1h ago

Honestly, even from a non-financial perspective, splitting them up just makes sense to me. It's baffling to me that we've come up with a system that essentially combines minor league sports teams with academic institutions of higher learning.

ghaff•1h ago

Except it's sort of a poor correlation. Without making a study of it the best US collegiate football programs at least tend to be large state universities--which, don't get me wrong, are often good schools if you want them to be for you--but tend not to be the schools that come up in discussions of large endowments and the like. Basketball is more of a mixed bag in that it can rely on one or two star players and hockey, as I wrote elsewhere, is very regional and relatively small schools in the North have very good teams from time to time.

t_mann•15m ago

The GP says it's baffling to combine sports teams with academic institutions, and you're saying it's not because those that do tend to have smaller endowments? Talk about a non sequitur

mathattack•1h ago

Some universities with large endowments used to be referred to as hedge funds that happened to have professors. Now they happen to have pro sports teams too.

petethepig•2h ago

Not the first time i see such comparison being made, but it is the first time I see someone go into so much detail about it — great read.

aitacobell•2h ago

I was surprised at how much sense this made

josu•57m ago

This reads as if it were written by a LLM.

apples_oranges•34m ago

You were probably downvoted because the comment doesn't add much value to the convo, but I agree, it was a bit difficult to read. But still interesting.. :)

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