The difference between how much money college sports programmes make and how much the athletes get back keeps getting bigger. If college football players could play in a free market, the chart below shows how much they might be worth at the best schools.
We used data from BusinessOfCollegeSports.com to figure out the Fair Market Value of college football players at the ten most profitable programmes. Using the NFL’s most recent collective bargaining agreement, which says that players get at least 47% of all revenue, each program’s revenue was split between the school and the athletes, with each of the 85 scholarship players getting the same amount.
Based on the program’s $109.4 million in revenue, we can estimate that the average college football player at the University of Texas is worth $605,000 per year, which is up from $578,000 last year. The average college football player at the University of Alabama is worth $409,000 per year, which is second.
That is a long way from the $3.8 million that Texas spent on football players’ college aid in 2013, which was about $44,700 per player.