College baseball, venture capital, and the long maybe
30 comments
·June 16, 2025alexpotato
prasadjoglekar
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...
PaulHoule
Sports programs don't always or even usually make a profit.
https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/analysis/2020/11/20/do-col...
vonneumannstan
Is there any evidence that universities with large endowments are paying coaches with them?
Raidion
Money is fungible, doesn't really matter what source the money comes from other than optics.
par1970
How is that the same thing?
mathattack
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.
saghm
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.
nradov
You're not thinking things through. Splitting off sports from academics would wreck alumni fundraising for a lot of schools. For better or worse, when the team wins the alumni open their wallets. And the less lucrative sports would essentially disappear (especially for women).
ghaff
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
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
btrautsc
I thoroughly enjoyed this read
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petethepig
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.
jgalt212
> but for the revenue sports (football, basketball, hockey, baseball)
I think that list is two items too long.
PaulHoule
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.
csa
> 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.
dustincoates
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
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
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
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.
aitacobell
I was surprised at how much sense this made
josu
This reads as if it were written by a LLM.
apples_oranges
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.. :)
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"