What if you could simply purchase a college football team like the Alabama Crimson Tide?
Merely buying an NCAA team isn’t a reality, for now. Even college football’s radical shift toward professionalization (jersey patch advertisements like LSU is attempting is only the latest example of this) doesn’t yet permit that. But with private equity firms gaining a stronger foothold in the sport, one college football analyst has posed an interesting question:
How much would programs like Alabama and others sell for, if you could theoretically buy them the same way you can buy their counterparts across the Big Four professional sports leagues?
While it’s an entirely unscientific practice, The Athletic’s Matt Baker ranked every Power 4 college football program based on market valuation rankings (subscription required).
Baker put it this way:
“We approached the hypothetical question with a methodology that was part art, part science. We used real-life pro transactions to gauge purchase prices relative to a team’s revenue over the past three available years of data. NFL and NBA sales guided our ratios in the SEC and Big Ten, while MLB and the NHL were our rough benchmarks in the ACC and Pac 12. For each school in a Power 4 conference (plus Notre Dame), we factored in everything from prestige and championships to facility renovations, population trends and realignment scenarios.”
So where does Alabama land in all this?
Baker’s figures, which notes the Crimson Tide’s annual football revenue is $1.33 million, makes Alabama the sixth most-valuable program in all of college football with an estimated “sell price” of $1.74 billion. That puts the Crimson Tide as the third most-valuable program in the SEC (unsurprisingly, Texas was the No. 1 overall in all of college football).
As Baker explains:
“Alabama was the final team to earn our top revenue multiplier — 13x reported revenue — thanks to the tradition and prestige that predated Nick Saban and will continue to survive after him. Those factors mitigate the risks if the progress regresses under Kalen DeBoer (or any of his successors, as we consider the long-term view).
“Our price puts the Crimson Tide on par with the 2024 sale of the Baltimore Orioles $1.725 billion) or the expected price tag for the Rays ($1.7 billion).”
Alabama’s hypothetical $1.74 billion price tag in Baker’s analysis puts them ahead of the Oklahoma Sooners, USC Trojans, Tennessee Volunteers and LSU. All but one those programs (Tennessee) has won a national championship in the 21st century.
College football is a big business and always has been to some degree. But with national television and broadcast money pouring in at record rates, plus an expanded playoff format and NIL ushering in millions of revenue to players, the sport is only going to become more professionalized moving forward.
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