I love college football. I’m just not always sure why.
Educational institutions pay coaches millions of dollars and build extravagant facilities to woo 17-year-olds to play a game that has proven to risk their later quality of life. What does it say about our society that the highest paid state employee is almost always the football coach? Now, Penn State will pay James Franklin roughly $50 million not to coach them anymore; this at a time when they’re closing branch campuses.
We worry we’re losing our talent edge to China and India. We recognize we’re not prepared for the AI race. We see a major skills mismatch in a changing labor market. Our response? Cut off funding for research while new weight rooms pop up across campuses. At a time when we need a more educated citizenry capable of reasoned debate about the future of the country and the world, we’re building game rooms and mini-golf courses adjacent to our football offices.
We complain about the NIL Wild West and the Transfer Portal, but we still show up at 8:00 a.m. to tailgate for a kickoff some 12 hours later. We buy the jerseys and the tickets and send in our donations so we’ll be eligible for playoff tickets.
I’ve blamed fans (including me) for this perverse display of values. Sure it sounds crazy, but it must pay off for the Penn States of the world to pony up and buy out James Franklin. The alumni were done with him. It’s big business and donations and revenue will more than cover the extravagant cost of finding a new coach. Right?
Not so fast.
The Big Ten’s potential deal with Private Equity has exposed the real story. In case you haven’t been following, the Big Ten, one of the super conferences of college sports, has plans to form an entity that will negotiate TV contracts and rake in playoff revenue. The schools would give a PE Firm a 10% stake in exchange for a $2.4 billion bag.
This looks like a naked money grab from tax-exempt institutions that get rich off of kids, right? But when you dig a little deeper, you realize it’s really about bailing out schools drowning in debt from their own financial mismanagement. Here’s what a few Big Ten institutions pay each year to service their debt*:
- Illinois: $20 million (11.8% of its ’23-24 total expenditures)
- Ohio State: $33.7 million (11.5% of budget outlay)
- Oregon: $18.3 million (10.9% of total spending)
- Penn State $17.3 million (8%)
Said another way: The biggest and best football programs can’t afford all the luxury items they’re buying. What I thought was an indictment of our culture is an object lesson in runaway ego and multi-polar traps. The President and Athletic Director can’t not spend the money or they’ll lose support of the alumni. Indiana extended Curt Cignetti this past week; you’d better believe every top coach’s agent placed a call to their school.
Businesses take on debt to finance investments that will generate future returns. College football programs take on debt to stroke the ego of alumni and compete with Alabama and Clemson. I’d be shocked if this debt issue is unique to the Big Ten. That’s the thing about multi-polar traps.
Someone needs to save the conferences and the schools from themselves. Newsflash: It ain’t Private Equity. In fact, this move doubles everyone down on a broken system. They’re locking race-to-the-bottom conferences into a long-term deal and, if I know PE, they will extract sizable rent along the way. Smart money wins. Despite their bounty of PhDs, the universities aren’t the smart money in this Faustian bargain.
This dynamic is not isolated to college football. Our AI “investments” appear to be fueled by ego rather than economics. Zuckerberg whiffed on his Metaverse, so he’d better offer the best and brightest $100M contracts to AI researchers. Altman worked for a board obligated to look out for humanity’s best interest… until he needed to raise hundreds of billions of dollars.
When anyone raises questions about AI safety, we hear, “but we must beat China.” We lack leadership willing or able to see across the broken system and inject sanity. Instead, we allow opportunists to pit competing factions against each other, negotiating bi-lateral financial deals rather than dealing with the risks of a complex, broken system.
The result in both cases? A fragile, interdependent beast with no leadership, untethered to any purpose other than to enrich a few people.
I still love college football. But it hasn’t been about education for a long time. And it hasn’t been about the athletes either. Now, we can stop pretending it’s even about the game.
The Big Ten isn’t just selling equity — it’s mortgaging its soul. Whether it’s a new stadium or a new data center, we keep mistaking acceleration for progress.
Someone will get rich. It just won’t be our future.
* Debt information comes from this Pat Forde Sports Illustrated article. Worth checking out: https://www.si.com/college-football/how-the-big-ten-spent-its-way-into-a-2-billion-dilemma