Here’s an idea for overhauling the mess that is money in college sports: For every dollar that a university athletic department spends on coaching salaries fatter than a duke’s inheritance, or locker rooms as luxurious as Hadrian’s villa, a dollar should go toward academic funding—to faculty salaries, library maintenance, and other necessities that benefit all students, athletes included.
Such an arrangement might help reform a truly broken system, which demands compulsive, destructive overspending—on coaching, facilities, and more—in a cycle of one-upsmanship. The problem is most acute in football, which is the largest moneymaker in college sports but also the most egregious cost driver. Total revenue shared by the 136 major schools that compete in the top-tier Football Bowl Subdivision amounted to about $11.7 billion in 2024. The money comes from media rights—such as the College Football Playoff’s $1.3 billion yearly deal with ESPN—along with ticket sales, corporate sponsors, donor gifts, and, in some cases, student fees and state funds. These schools tend to spend most of (and, in some cases, more than) what they take in—on waterfalls and golf simulators, on $700 showerheads, on wood-paneled locker rooms with custom pool tables, and, most disproportionately, on a handful of coaches.
Efforts to curb all this spending are rarely directed at the spenders themselves. Instead, athletes are routinely cast as culprits for demanding to be paid and thus in need of strict oversight to keep them pure, an attitude that President Donald Trump expressed last week in an interview with ESPN’s Pat McAfee. “It is a very serious problem because even football, where they give quarterbacks $12 million, $13 to $14 million,” Trump said, “all of a sudden you’re going to be out of control.” But the behavior that needs correcting in this era of billion-dollar-a-year TV contracts and other accelerant revenues is that of shopaholic college administrators, whose expenditures have become so untethered from any scholastic purpose. Regulate them.
Nine head football coaches at major universities began this season with an annual salary of more than $10 million, and 46 others are scheduled to make at least $4 million. Coaches’ pay is the second-biggest athletic expense at Football Bowl Subdivision schools, behind only facility costs. Many of these coaches will collect millions even if they fail. In 2021, for example, Louisiana State University granted Brian Kelly a 10-year, guaranteed contract worth $95 million—only to dismiss him after the team started 5–3 this season. His firing triggered an almost $54 million buyout clause, and a lawsuit over what he is owed. Since the College Football Playoff system was launched in 2015, public universities are on pace to pay more than $1 billion in severance to coaches, according to a report from the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a think tank that studies educational reforms in sports. To repeat: Public universities are paying more than $1 billion in just 10 years to a handful of fired gym teachers. “The severance payments,” the Knight Commission’s CEO, Amy Privette Perko, told me, “have really put an exclamation point on the problem.”
In a normal business, this would be irrational behavior. But the administrators who make these deals are simply responding to extreme forces in an abnormal market. College athletic departments are caught in an asymmetrical situation: They are part of institutions that are legally defined as educational nonprofits, yet they operate in a kill-and-eat environment awash in torrents of profit. They must spend to win and spend to force their competitors to fail. It’s a “zero-sum game,” Kevin Blue, a former UC Davis athletic director, told me. From a “behavioral economics perspective,” Blue has written, college sports’ financial decision makers are “acting rationally.”
But unlike conventional businesses, athletic departments have no owners or boards or shareholders to enforce spending controls. Instead, they’re shadow-ruled by constituencies of powerful alumni donors with idiosyncratic desires. “People are spending essentially nobody’s money to service their own objective of being competitively successful,” Blue said. When an additional $10 million comes in—whether from a big donation or higher-than-usual ticket sales—the incentive is to do more competitive spending, not less. These systemic distortions are why coaching salaries have spun out of control.
This market is badly in need of regulation by Congress, the only body with the authority and reach to enact reforms that could create a fairer, more reasonable system. The main governing body of college sports, the NCAA, has been hobbled by antitrust litigation and the self-interest of its voting-member schools. State laws have been a patchwork. Without Congress’s intervention, athletic departments at schools that don’t win or have fewer resources will face trade-offs. Runaway expenditures could mean cuts—particularly to some Olympic sports and women’s sports that don’t bring in enough revenue to cover their expenses. “Fewer scholarships, fewer teams,” Perko said. It can also mean higher student fees, and for public schools, taxpayer liability. For example: Virginia Tech’s athletic spending rose by 41 percent from 2019 to 2024, and the school recently increased its mandatory student fees to help cover the department.
Only a handful of major football powers are equipped to compete sustainably in this landscape. The University of Texas at Austin is one of them. With almost $332 million in athletic revenues in 2024, it is a self-perpetuating department that doesn’t rely on state funds or student fees. Of its nearly $66 million football budget, almost $23 million goes to coach Steve Sarkisian and his staff, who are in the middle of a disappointing season. If Sarkisian were fired, he would be due more than $60 million on his guaranteed, seven-year, almost $81 million contract extension. But the burden would be easily shouldered by the school’s oil-rich, football-fevered boosters, who in 2024 provided $137 million in gifts to the athletic department.
Texas’s fiscal behavior squeezes its competitors, especially the smaller ones. The Football Bowl Subdivision is a jigsaw puzzle of different-size schools with varying incomes and priorities. Appalachian State University’s football budget is just $16.2 million—and it grew by 66 percent over five years, while its overall athletics debt rose by 20 percent over the same time. At Middle Tennessee State University, where athletics debt has grown by 102 percent in five years, thanks in part to a more than $100 million upgrade to its facilities, the department has cut back on football uniforms. Texas administrators are not being intentionally villainous. They’re simply playing to win, within the market structure.
The great fear of NCAA-member schools is that they are now encountering another artificially inflated market, this one for players. From 2021 to 2025, court decisions and legal settlements have rightly granted long-denied economic rights to athletes, including control of their own names, images, and likenesses (NIL). Ambitious donors have turned NIL into another distorted market by forming “collectives,” large collaborative funds that sign athletes for real or purported commercial endorsements, in deals known as “pay-for-play.” These collectives essentially establish payrolls, further widening the competitive gap. One coach estimated that some college rosters are being paid as much as $40 million a year.
In a panicked response, NCAA lobbyists are pressing Congress and the White House for antitrust protection to restrict athlete compensation. In an obliging July executive order called “Saving College Sports,” Trump identified the “waves of recent litigation” that “eliminated limits on athlete compensation” as a “mortal threat” to American games and commanded various agencies and departments to study federal interventions. An alphabet soup of congressional proposals, such as the SAFE Act and SCORE Act, would also regulate athlete pay and behaviors, though to differing degrees.
But none of these measures properly aim at the colleges and universities themselves, or what drives them. Yes, the LSU quarterback Garrett Nussmeier will reportedly make $4 million on NIL deals this season. But he didn’t create the market. Nussmeier is not the “mortal threat” to college athletics. The mortal threat is a system that compels an otherwise-sage school president to authorize paying a coach $130 million over 10 years.
Until the NCAA’s structural fault is recognized, no reform can work. Campus officers actually crave federal help in curbing their reflexive spending. A poll conducted last summer by Elon University and the Knight Commission of 376 school officials found that 79 percent of them fear they’ll have to rely on institutional money and student fees in the future to fund sports. Nearly seven in 10 respondents said that they favor national legislation that would limit how much they can spend on their athletic budgets.
Several feasible proposals for spending limits are floating around, which Congress could incorporate into a bipartisan bill. One, from the Knight Commission, would require institutions to devote at least half of shared athletic revenues either directly to the education and health benefits of its athletes, or to university academics. Some schools already follow this guidance, but not many. A similarly strong proposal comes from the Drake Group, another academic think tank. It recommends a mandate that whatever a school’s “aggregated annual coaches and staff compensation and benefits,” the same amount must be devoted to financial benefits for student athletes. This is an ingenious cap: LSU probably wouldn’t pay another football coach a ludicrous $95 million under those conditions.
The most dominant football programs, and their influential donors, are likely to oppose such broad measures for fear of surrendering their competitive advantage. But Congress has the leverage to make it happen. These institutions badly want a reform of their own: legislative antitrust protection to cap the talent market and stop endless litigation with players. This should be conditional on also capping broader athletic spending. As Blue has written, “If we are asking Congress to treat symptoms of the athlete compensation problem, we should also ask for help dealing with its root cause.” Lawmakers have a golden opportunity to force these schools to act like what they are supposed to be—schools.
