Purpose and Scope

Enough public data exists to measure the revenue gap between the top and bottom of NCAA football and basketball with reasonable confidence, though not with equal confidence at every level. The NCAA’s membership financial reporting system covers Division I and Division II annually and reports medians and ranges by subdivision. Federal Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act filings cover every institution at the sport level. Open-records requests to public universities produce program-level detail. Division III and private institutions are the weak points, since Division III reporting is less frequent and private schools are not subject to state records laws.

This paper measures dispersion inside and across divisions using fiscal year 2023–24 as the base year, the most recent year of complete NCAA data. It argues that the dominant financial fact in college athletics is not the distance between divisions but the distance within them, and that the concentration of generated revenue at the top has been accompanied by a matching concentration of institutional subsidy at the bottom.

Data Sources and Their Limits

Three distinctions govern any honest reading of these figures.

The first is between generated and allocated revenue. Generated revenue includes ticket sales, media and broadcast rights, NCAA and conference distributions, donor contributions, royalties, guarantees, and camps. Allocated revenue includes student activity fees, direct and indirect institutional support, and direct government support. A department reporting $25 million in “revenue” may have generated $6 million of it and received the rest from its own university.

The second is between department-level and sport-level reporting. NCAA reporting aggregates the department; EADA filings break out football, men’s basketball, and women’s basketball, but use different definitions and allocate shared revenue by institutional convention.

The third is between operating figures and capital figures. Neither reporting system captures facility debt service consistently, so the operating gaps described below understate the full institutional commitment.

Finally, fiscal years do not align neatly with seasons, and one extra home football game can move a large department’s bottom line by tens of millions of dollars. Comparisons between single years at single institutions should be read accordingly.

Section I: The Headline Finding

Division I institutions reported total revenue of almost $20.5 billion on athletics in 2024, a 7% increase over the previous year. Sixty-three percent of that total ($13 billion) was generated by athletics departments, and 37% ($7.4 billion) was allocated revenue from institutional and government support and student fees. The 69 FBS autonomy schools accounted for about 55% of total Division I revenue but almost 77% of the total generated revenue.

That single comparison captures the structure of the whole enterprise. Roughly one fifth of Division I institutions produce more than three quarters of the money the division actually earns. The remaining four fifths operate on transfers from their own campuses.

The federal government reached a similar conclusion in its own review of the same data. The Government Accountability Office found that 94 percent of Division I athletics programs, including 49 of the 69 Power colleges, spent more than they generated in 2023–24, with the median college reporting a gap of $20.6 million — up from a median gap of $12.3 million a decade earlier. Spending increased more than generated revenue in every Division I subdivision over that period. Division I colleges contributed $7.2 billion to cover the shortfall, funded by tuition, fees, and other unrestricted institutional funds, while the 69 Power colleges generated $10 billion of the division’s $13.1 billion in total generated revenue.

Section II: Football — Dispersion Within and Across Subdivisions

The ranges

NCAA data for 2024 gives medians and full ranges by subdivision:

Group	Median generated revenue	Range of generated revenue	Median total expenses
FBS (all)	$82.19M	$9.6M – $332M	$109.99M
FBS autonomy	$133.8M	$49.8M – $331.9M	$166.8M
FBS nonautonomy	$17.2M	$9.6M – $67.6M	$48.7M
FCS	$6.08M	$1.6M – $68.8M	$25.48M
Basketball Subdivision	$3.95M	$800K – $31.6M	$22.82M

These figures come from the NCAA’s 2024 membership financial data covering 352 active Division I institutions.

Several ratios follow from these ranges by simple arithmetic (see Note 2). Within the FBS alone, the highest generated revenue is roughly 35 times the lowest. Within the FCS, the top figure is roughly 43 times the bottom. Within the Basketball Subdivision, the spread is close to 40 to 1. The gap between the median autonomy school and the median FCS school is about 22 to 1, and against the median Basketball Subdivision school about 34 to 1.

The more telling comparison is the overlap. The top FCS institution generated $68.8 million, more than the highest-generating FBS nonautonomy school at $67.6 million and roughly four times the nonautonomy median of $17.2 million. The boundary between the two football subdivisions, in other words, is a competitive and regulatory boundary rather than a financial one. The boundary that matters financially runs through the middle of the FBS.

The autonomy split

In 2015, the median expense gap between the autonomy and nonautonomy groups was $60 million. By 2024 it was $118 million. Over the same ten years, median generated revenue grew 56% among autonomy schools and 35% among nonautonomy schools, while median total expenses grew 81% and 51% respectively.

Growth rates alone understate the divergence, because they apply to very different bases. A 56% gain on a nine-figure base and a 35% gain on an eight-figure base move the two groups apart in absolute terms every year, even when the percentages look comparable.

Quartiles within the FBS

The NCAA’s quartile breakdown, based on total expenses, shows the internal structure of the FBS:

FBS expense quartile	Median generated revenue	Median total revenue
Quartile 1	$180.74M	$196.98M
Quartile 2	$114.66M	$135.19M
Quartile 3	$31.76M	$66.87M
Quartile 4	$12.99M	$38.73M

The top quartile generated nearly fourteen times what the bottom quartile generated, and the composition of their revenue differed accordingly: alumni contributions were the leading category for the top quartile at 25% of revenue, while direct institutional support was the leading category for the bottom quartile at 36%, with student fees second at 20%.

The bottom quartile of the FBS, at $12.99 million in median generated revenue, sits only modestly above the top quartile of the FCS at $10.28 million. A school in the lower reaches of the FBS is financially closer to a strong FCS program than to a Big Ten or SEC member.

The apex

Program-level reporting shows what the top of the range looks like in practice. In fiscal 2023–24, Texas reported $325 million in operating expenses and $331.9 million in operating revenue, the first time a Division I public school reported more than $300 million in both categories in the same year, while Ohio State reported $292.3 million in expenses. Ohio State operated at a deficit of just over $37 million that year. The following year, Ohio State reported $336.1 million in total operating revenue against $320.4 million in expenses, a $15.7 million surplus, with the swing driven largely by two additional home football games: football ticket sales alone rose by more than $19 million, to $67 million.

Two points follow. First, the largest departments in the country generated more revenue in one year than the entire FCS median school will generate in thirteen. Second, even at that scale, operating results are volatile and deficits are ordinary. Size does not produce stability; it produces larger swings in both directions.

Division II and Division III

Below Division I, the ratio of generated revenue to expense collapses almost entirely. All 295 Division II programs spent more than they generated in 2023–24, spending $2.7 billion against $0.4 billion in generated revenue and drawing $2.3 billion in institutional contributions. Generated revenue covered 14 percent of Division II athletics expenses that year.

Division III data is older and less complete, since the division does not report annually on the same schedule. In the most recent comparable reporting, the median Division III school with football generated approximately $428,000 against median total revenue of roughly $4.4 million, and no Division III school’s generated revenue exceeded its expenses.

The arithmetic across divisions is stark: the median Division III football-sponsoring school generates less in a year than a Power program spends on a single assistant coaching staff.

Section III: Basketball — A Different Shape of Inequality

Basketball distributes its money differently from football, for three reasons: the NCAA rather than conferences controls the sport’s signature postseason property, the tournament admits 68 teams rather than a dozen, and a school need not sponsor football to compete.

The Basketball Subdivision

Division I schools that do not sponsor football reported median generated revenue of $3.95 million in 2024, ranging from about $800,000 to $31.6 million, against median total expenses of $22.82 million and a median negative net generated revenue of $17.55 million. Institution and government support accounted for 64% of their revenue, and the median institution was 18% self-sufficient.

That 18% self-sufficiency figure is the lowest in Division I. The comparable figures were 89% for FBS autonomy schools, 38% for FBS nonautonomy schools, and 25% for FCS schools. A Division I basketball-only department is, in budget terms, a campus service financed almost entirely by the campus.

Program-level concentration

Sport-level EADA data shows the top of men’s basketball. Duke’s men’s basketball program reported $44.8 million in revenue in fiscal 2024, the highest of any program in the country and more than $8 million above the next school, Illinois, while Duke football reported $68.36 million and women’s basketball $5.38 million within a department total of $166.9 million. Kentucky, by comparison, reported $201.7 million in total operating revenue for fiscal 2024, with football at $53.8 million and men’s basketball at $33.2 million; men’s basketball led all sports in ticket sales at $23.5 million.

The top of men’s basketball, therefore, runs in the $30–45 million range at a handful of schools, against a Basketball Subdivision floor near $800,000 in generated revenue for an entire department. The ratio at the extremes exceeds anything observable in football at the sport level, because football has no equivalent to the basketball-only institution.

Concentration looks different when measured as a share of a department rather than in absolute dollars. Men’s basketball accounted for 44% of athletics revenue at Dayton ($40.1 million) and more than 48% at football-free Big East schools such as Marquette ($42.6 million), while at football-driven powers including Duke, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Kansas, men’s basketball accounted for no more than 29% of total revenue, each of those departments exceeding roughly $138 million. The same dollar figure represents a manageable line item at one school and the foundation of the entire department at another.

The unit system

The tournament distribution system spreads basketball money more widely than football’s does, but on a steep performance curve. Teams earn a unit for reaching the field of 68 and an additional unit for each round in which they appear, with an extra unit for the national champion, and unit value rises annually; 24% of men’s tournament broadcast revenue and 41% of women’s is directed to these distributions. Each unit was worth about $2 million for the 2024 men’s tournament, paid to conferences rather than directly to schools. Recent reporting places the annual value of a men’s unit at approximately $337,000, with the two associated funds distributing a combined $222.5 million to conferences in a single year.

Aggregated by conference, the result mirrors football’s concentration. For the 2026 tournaments, nine men’s and twelve women’s teams from the Big Ten combined for at least $69.4 million in distributions, the Southeastern Conference totaled at least $56.2 million, the Big 12 $42.9 million, the Atlantic Coast Conference $34.2 million, and the Big East $22.2 million.

The women’s fund, created recently, operates at roughly one tenth the scale. Women’s units were introduced for the 2025 tournament with a $15 million pool, growing to $25 million by 2028 and thereafter at about 2.9% annually; a unit in the first year was worth just over $113,000, or about $251,000 across three years. The pool represents 26% of the women’s basketball media revenue deal in its first year, rising to 41% by 2027–28.

Two conclusions follow. First, the unit system is genuinely redistributive relative to football media rights, since every automatic-bid conference receives something and a single deep run can matter to a small league’s budget. Second, redistribution operates at a scale that cannot close the underlying gap: a Big Ten haul of roughly $69 million from one tournament cycle exceeds the entire annual generated revenue of all but one FCS institution.

Section IV: The Subsidy Inversion

The most consistent pattern in the data is inverse: the less a program generates, the larger the share of its budget that comes from students and the institution.

In 2024, institution and government support was the largest revenue category for every Division I group except the autonomy schools — 41% for FBS nonautonomy schools, 58% for FCS schools, and 64% for Basketball Subdivision schools. For autonomy schools, media rights, NCAA and conference distributions, and bowl revenue formed the largest category at about 31%, with institution and government support at 10% and student fees at 1%. Student fees accounted for 15% of FCS nonautonomy-quartile revenue and 12% of FCS and Basketball Subdivision revenue overall.

Direct institutional support alone accounted for 48% of total revenue at the median FCS school and 53% at the median Basketball Subdivision school. Measured against total institutional expenses, athletics spending was 9% at the median FCS school — the highest ratio of the three Division I groups — compared with 6–7% for FBS schools.

This is the central irony of the structure. The institutions best able to afford athletics subsidize them least, and the institutions least able to afford them subsidize them most, both as a share of the athletics budget and as a share of the whole university budget. A regional public university in the FCS commits a larger fraction of its institutional resources to athletics than a university with a nine-figure media rights contract.

Section V: Trajectory and the Effect of the House Settlement

The gaps described above are widening rather than stable.

Over the decade to 2024, median generated revenue grew 47% for FCS schools and 29% for Basketball Subdivision schools, while median total expenses grew 57% and 51% respectively. The median FCS operating deficit rose from $11.9 million in 2015 to $16.8 million in 2024, a 41% increase, with a similar 49% increase in the Basketball Subdivision. Expenses exceeded generated revenue at all but one FCS institution in 2024, and generated revenue exceeded expenses at only 21 FBS institutions; the median surplus among those FBS schools reporting one fell to $4.06 million, the lowest figure of the ten-year period.

Costs rose faster than revenue at every level, and the number of self-sustaining programs shrank even as total dollars grew.

The settlement in the NIL litigation has added a new cost layer on top of this structure. Division I colleges may now share up to $20.5 million of revenue annually with student-athletes beginning in 2025–26, and most Division I colleges opted into revenue sharing in the first year. Within that cap, allocation decisions differ sharply by institutional priority: while many SEC schools were reported to be spending under $3 million on basketball, Kentucky was believed to be directing roughly 45% of its $20.5 million cap to basketball for 2025–26.

The cap is uniform; the capacity to reach it is not. A department generating $180 million can fund the full amount from operations. A department generating $6 million cannot approach it without a proportionally massive increase in institutional transfers. The settlement therefore functions as a new sorting mechanism: a nominally equal ceiling that converts existing revenue disparity into a new and more visible competitive disparity. Debt compounds the problem at the top as well. Nearly all Power colleges reported athletics debt in 2023–24, with a median value of $120.3 million.

Section VI: What the Data Cannot Show

Four limits deserve statement.

Enrollment economics are invisible. At tuition-dependent private institutions in Division III and in non-scholarship Division I football, the athletics program functions partly as an enrollment instrument. A roster of a hundred football players paying tuition is a revenue line that appears nowhere in the athletics ledger. Programs that look purely costly in NCAA reporting may be net contributors at the institutional level. The reporting system was not designed to capture this, and analyses that treat the athletics deficit as the full picture overstate the case against small-college football.

Private institutions report less. State open-records laws produce detailed program-level data at public universities and nothing comparable at private ones. Aggregate NCAA medians include private schools, but individual comparisons often do not.

Accounting conventions differ. Indirect institutional support, facility charges, and debt service are treated inconsistently across institutions, which affects the deficit figures more than the revenue figures.

Capital spending is largely outside the frame. Stadium and arena construction, the most consequential long-run financial commitment many departments make, appears in operating statements only through debt service, and unevenly at that.

Section VII: Findings

1. Within-division dispersion exceeds between-division dispersion at the margins. The financial distance between the top and bottom of the FBS is greater than the distance between the bottom of the FBS and the top of the FCS. Divisional labels describe competitive classification, not economic peer groups.
2. Generated revenue is concentrated far beyond what membership counts suggest. Sixty-nine institutions produce roughly three quarters of Division I’s generated revenue.
3. Subsidy dependence runs inverse to revenue. Self-sufficiency falls from 89% at autonomy schools to 38%, 25%, and 18% across the remaining Division I groups, and athletics consumes the largest share of institutional expenses at the FCS level, not the FBS level.
4. Basketball’s distribution system is more redistributive than football’s but operates at a much smaller scale. Unit payments reach every automatic-bid conference; they do not approach the magnitude of conference media rights.
5. Women’s basketball distributions began recently and at roughly one tenth of the men’s scale, though at a higher percentage of the sport’s media deal.
6. Deficits are the norm at every level, including the top. Ninety-four percent of Division I programs and all Division II programs spent more than they generated, and the median Division I gap nearly doubled over a decade.
7. The revenue-sharing cap is a uniform ceiling on a non-uniform floor. Its practical effect is to convert existing revenue concentration into more visible competitive concentration.

Conclusion

The financial structure of NCAA football and basketball is best described not as a pyramid but as a spike attached to a wide, shallow base. A small number of departments operate at a scale comparable to professional franchises, with revenue volatility to match. The great majority operate as instructional and student-life units funded by their institutions, with generated revenue covering somewhere between one sixth and one quarter of their costs, and in Division II about one seventh.

The most consequential finding for institutional governance is the inversion described in Section IV. Institutions with the least capacity to fund athletics devote the largest share of institutional resources to them, and that share has been growing. Whatever position one takes on the merits of college athletics, this pattern places the heaviest burden on precisely those institutions whose students are least able to absorb it through fees and tuition. The recent addition of a revenue-sharing obligation, uniform in its ceiling and wildly non-uniform in the capacity to meet it, gives every indication of widening the gaps documented here rather than narrowing them.

---

Notes

1. Fiscal year conventions. Figures identified as 2024 refer to fiscal year 2023–24, generally July 1, 2023 through June 30, 2024. NCAA trend reporting released in December 2025 covers this year. Single-year comparisons at individual institutions are sensitive to the number of home football games in the period, as the Ohio State fiscal 2024 and 2025 figures illustrate.
2. Ratio calculations. The ratios in Section II (35:1 within the FBS, 43:1 within the FCS, roughly 40:1 within the Basketball Subdivision, 22:1 and 34:1 for autonomy-to-FCS and autonomy-to-Basketball Subdivision medians) were calculated by the author from the NCAA’s published medians and ranges and do not appear in the source documents. They are approximate, since the NCAA reports rounded range endpoints.
3. Generated versus allocated revenue. The NCAA defines generated revenue to include ticket sales, NCAA and conference distributions, contributions, broadcast rights, royalties, guarantees, camps, concessions, third-party support, and endowment and investment income. Allocated revenue comprises student activity fees, direct and indirect institutional support, and direct government support. “Self-sufficiency” is generated revenue divided by total expenses.
4. Quartile construction. NCAA quartiles are based on total expenses within each subdivision for the corresponding year, not on revenue. Quartile 1 is the highest-spending group.
5. Division III data vintage. Division III does not report on the annual cycle used for Divisions I and II. Division III figures cited here are drawn from the NCAA’s fifteen-year trend report and are substantially older than the Division I and II figures. They are used to establish order of magnitude only.
6. Unit payment schedules. Men’s basketball units have historically been paid to conferences over a six-year rolling period, so a single unit’s headline value of roughly $2 million represents cumulative payments rather than a single-year transfer; recent annual unit values are reported near $337,000. Women’s units are paid over a three-year rolling period beginning in 2026. Conferences, not the NCAA, determine how unit revenue is distributed among member institutions, and conference policies vary.
7. EADA and NCAA data are not interchangeable. Sport-level figures cited for Duke and Kentucky derive from EADA filings and open-records requests respectively. Departmental totals in those sources may differ from NCAA membership financial reporting totals for the same institution and year because of differing treatment of allocated support and shared revenue.
8. Revenue-sharing figures. The $20.5 million cap applies to the 2025–26 academic year and is scheduled to rise in subsequent years. Reported internal allocations among sports are based on journalistic sourcing rather than public filings and should be treated as indicative.

---

References

Berkowitz, S. (2025, January 27). Ohio State athletics reports 2024 operating expenses of $292.3 million and deficit of $37.7 million. USA Today Sports. https://www.aol.com/ohio-state-athletics-hits-ncaa-205906392.html

DiSalvo, A. (2025, January 17). Women’s basketball teams to earn revenue for NCAA Tournament participation and performance. The Chronicle. https://dukechronicle.com/article/duke-womens-basketball-college-ncaa-tournament-revenue-2025-conferences-units-kara-lawson-charlie-baker-20250117

Duke records $166.9 million in revenue in 2023-24 Equity in Athletics Disclosure Report. (2025, September 12). The Chronicle. https://dukechronicle.com/article/duke-sports-equity-in-athletics-report-explainer-ncaa-revenue-mens-womens-basketball-football-olympic-sports-20250912

Feinberg, D. (2025, March 20). Women’s teams in the NCAA Tournament getting individual revenue share for 1st time. What’s a “unit”? The Washington Times. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/mar/20/womens-teams-ncaa-tournament-getting-individual-revenue-share-first/

Fox News. (2026, April 9). Big Ten Conference earns nearly $70M in March Madness incentives. https://www.foxnews.com/sports/big-ten-conference-earns-nearly-70m-march-madness-incentives.print

Fox News. (2025, January 15). Women’s basketball teams will finally be paid for playing in the NCAA Tournament. https://www.foxnews.com/sports/womens-basketball-teams-will-finally-paid-playing-ncaa-tournament.amp

Fox Sports. (2024). Basketball-centric schools face different challenges with NCAA settlement. https://www.foxsports.com/stories/college-basketball/basketball-centric-schools-face-different-challenges-ncaa-settlement

Front Office Sports. (2025, January 28). Winning comes at a price: Texas and Ohio State report record expenses. https://frontofficesports.com/article/winning-comes-at-a-price-texas-and-ohio-state-report-record-expenses/

Kaufman, J. (2026, January). Ohio State exceeds $300 million in athletics revenue for first time. Columbus Dispatch. https://www.aol.com/articles/ohio-state-exceeds-300-million-204414538.html

Legis1. (2026). Division I athletic programs spending: GAO finds 94% spend more than they generate. https://legis1.com/news/division-i-athletic-programs-spending-gao-94-of

Libit, D., & Novy-Williams, E. (2025, January 27). Ohio State athletics spending rose to nearly $300M in FY24. Sportico. https://www.sportico.com/leagues/college-sports/2025/ohio-state-athletics-spending-revenue-1234825504/

Mujid, Z. (2025, March 7). How Kentucky basketball, football did financially in FY2024. BVM Sports. https://bvmsports.com/2025/03/07/how-kentucky-basketball-football-did-financially-in-fy2024/

National Collegiate Athletic Association. (2020). 15-year trends in Division III athletics finances. https://ncaaorg.s3.amazonaws.com/research/Finances/2020RES_D3-RevExp_Report.pdf

National Collegiate Athletic Association. (2025). Division I athletics finances: 10-year trends from 2015 to 2024. https://ncaaorg.s3.amazonaws.com/research/Finances/2025D1RES_DI-RevExpReport_Final.pdf

National Collegiate Athletic Association. (2025). Finances of intercollegiate athletics. https://www.ncaa.org/what-we-do/finances/finances-of-intercollegiate-athletics/

National Collegiate Athletic Association. (2024). Proposal No. 2024-53: Questions and answers [Division I governance document]. https://ncaaorg.s3.amazonaws.com/governance/d1/legislation/2024-25/AUG2024DIGOV_ProposalNo2024-53QA.pdf

Sportico. (2026). March Madness daily: How much is an NCAA Tournament win worth? Yahoo Sports. https://sports.yahoo.com/march-madness-daily-much-ncaa-143000193.html

U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2026). College athletics: Most programs spend more than they generate (GAO-26-108640). https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-108640