How to Fix the Mess of College Sports

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-upmanship. 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