[HN Gopher] College baseball, venture capital, and the long maybe
___________________________________________________________________
College baseball, venture capital, and the long maybe
Author : bcantrill
Score : 113 points
Date : 2025-06-16 16:20 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (bcantrill.dtrace.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (bcantrill.dtrace.org)
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > but for the revenue sports (football, basketball, hockey,
| baseball)
|
| I think that list is two items too long.
| dustincoates wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| I always went to northern schools so my perception is
| probably skewed. Played intramurals in grad school with
| someone who went to Minnesota. I've just never gone
| anywhere that basketball was a particularly big deal (and
| was never into it myself). Hockey was the thing for my
| grad school crowds. But obviously college basketball is a
| big deal more broadly. Final four and all that.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Yeah I'm from MN so my perspective is skewed too.
|
| 6 of the 64 schools with Div I NCAA hockey teams are
| located in my state, and 5 of them are small state or
| private schools. Massachusetts has 10, New York has 11,
| Michigan has 7.
|
| Over half of the Div I hockey teams are in the four
| states mentioned above.
| csa wrote:
| > 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| justinkuang wrote:
| Let's go red :)
| monster_truck wrote:
| College baseball and hockey are 'only' good for a couple
| million a year in the best cases, but it's still revenue.
| CivBase wrote:
| Agreed. The tiny amount of revenue from college hockey and
| baseball is insignificant compared to the cost of opperation -
| especially with how far teams often need to travel now thanks
| to conference realignments.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I think it depends a lot on the school.
|
| Hockey is very popular at some universities and probably makes
| at least _some_ profit for the school. (I 'm thinking
| University of Michigan as an example.)
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| The description of VC fundraising has a similar energy.
| alexpotato wrote:
| 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"
| prasadjoglekar wrote:
| 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...
| par1970 wrote:
| How is that the same thing?
| prasadjoglekar wrote:
| How are college endowments similar to hedge funds?
|
| For one, they put money into hedge funds as investors. And
| broadly, they're long on illiquid investments but have
| short term obligations for salaries, pensions etc. That's a
| hedge fund with a slightly different time horizon and
| intent.
|
| Some of those short term obligations are covered thru
| grants, fed money. But when that dries up (eg, Harvard and
| Trump), you're squeezed.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| Is there any evidence that universities with large endowments
| are paying coaches with them?
| Raidion wrote:
| Money is fungible, doesn't really matter what source the
| money comes from other than optics.
| Kevin_S wrote:
| This isn't really fair I think. Academic money is
| actually not fungible - it can't be used to fund
| athletics, and vice versa. Just because both pots are
| relatively large doesn't mean that the money itself is
| fungible.
| WalterBright wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44328786 nailed it.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| Maybe but most endowments actually have "legally?" bound
| or otherwise contracted uses in universities. Thats why
| Harvard can't just tap it's endowment to fund research
| the current Admin has cut. So I'm doubting that
| endowments are being used in this way to pay coaches.
| 98codes wrote:
| Sure, but if an endowment is paying for, say, the
| football coaching staff, then that leaves that much more
| money free in the general fund to pay for other things.
|
| If the endowment is paying for something that otherwise
| wouldn't be paid for generally, that's a different story.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Sports programs don't always or even usually make a profit.
|
| https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/analysis/2020/11/20/do-
| col...
| LanceH wrote:
| They don't return a net gain to the university, perhaps,
| but the people running them and advocating them are
| profiting nicely.
| slg wrote:
| In my opinion, this is like complaining that the US Postal
| Service isn't profitable. It isn't a business, framing it
| in terms of profitability is missing the whole reason it
| exists. No one expects a middle school soccer team or a
| university's drama department to be profitable, but we
| still invest in those things because we as a society think
| it is valuable for students. College sports has value
| beyond the money people pay to watch it.
| tuna74 wrote:
| You don't pay the director of a university's drama
| department millions of dollars per year. Successful
| football and basketball coaches get paid those kind of
| sums.
| slg wrote:
| What specifically is the problem with that? Do you think
| a "director of a university's drama department" brings
| the same value to a university as "Successful football
| and basketball coaches"?
| Uvix wrote:
| No, I think the director of the drama department brings
| _more_ value.
| slg wrote:
| And is this opinion supported by anything beyond a
| distaste for sports? Because it is objectively wrong at
| the extremes.[1]
|
| [1] - https://www.al.com/news/2024/01/what-economic-
| impact-has-nic...
| Zigurd wrote:
| CMU for example, is known for the school of computer
| science, and the arts, especially drama, though some
| people might know it better for Andy Warhol having been
| an alum.
|
| That's how an elite university should operate. Sport is
| fine. It's healthy. But warping the educational mission
| to feed the maw of an exploitative sports economy is
| something no university should be involved in.
|
| What next? MMA as a college sport? It's a free country:
| beat each other's brains out. But to pretend that US
| college sports is anything but a grotesque distortion is
| disingenuous.
| Zigurd wrote:
| "College sports has value beyond the money people pay to
| watch it."
|
| Debatable. Any college sports program could be dialed
| back to point where it isn't being subsidized by the
| primary mission of the university. American college
| sports is a global outlier. On that basis alone, I would
| bet that arguments for the value of college sports don't
| hold water.
| slg wrote:
| I'm sorry, it's not debatable. People who don't like
| sports tend to really struggle to actually consider the
| larger ecosystem that exists around sports and sports
| fandom. For example, there is a widely studied phenomenon
| that a successful sports team leads to increased
| applications, which in turn allows a school to be more
| selective and thereby increases the school's academic
| standing[1]. You can make all sorts of debates over how
| strong this impact is or whether it is a particularly
| efficient way to raise a school's standing, but there is
| clearly some value here being generated "beyond the money
| people pay to watch it."
|
| [1] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/20
| 13/04/29/...
| analog31 wrote:
| Are selectivity and academic standing beneficial to
| society overall? Maybe we'd be better off more broadly
| supporting higher education rather than turning it into a
| weird competition based on non-academically-related
| marketing.
| analog31 wrote:
| What's happened with Division-1 college revenue sports is
| that the word "students" has been mangled beyond
| recognition. Meanwhile the investment in the drama
| department is in perpetual decline.
|
| The question in my mind is if society would be better off
| recognizing the athletes as "workers" instead of as
| "students."
|
| To offer a bit of contrast, I attended a Division-3
| college where the starting quarterback was a physics
| major, and the captain of the basketball team majored in
| chemistry. When a Divsion-1 football player majors in a
| substantive discipline, it makes the national news.
| senderista wrote:
| Even less reason for them to exist then.
| saghm wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| ghaff wrote:
| I do think that sports are part of the college/university
| experience which you are of course free to disagree with.
| There are, of course, smaller schools that have
| relatively minimal athletic programs. Without making a
| scientific study of it, I also don't think the biggest
| endowments really correlate to the biggest and most
| successful sports programs, especially in football.
| WalterBright wrote:
| At Caltech when I attended, the football team was known
| to proudly lose every game.
| nradov wrote:
| 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).
| mathattack wrote:
| 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.
| petethepig wrote:
| 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.
| aitacobell wrote:
| I was surprised at how much sense this made
| josu wrote:
| This reads as if it were written by a LLM.
| apples_oranges wrote:
| 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.. :)
| btrautsc wrote:
| I thoroughly enjoyed this read
| system7rocks wrote:
| A profoundly wise and great article.
|
| My son is a big kid and is playing high school football. It was
| not on our radar, so we have begun to navigate these kinds of
| questions. Like - do you want to play at the next level? What do
| you even need to do if you would like to? But also the
| realization of how much money is made off of these kids and how
| cruel and unforgiving it can be.
| mayoff wrote:
| Have you heard of CTE?
|
| https://www.bu.edu/articles/2017/cte-former-nfl-players/
| WalterBright wrote:
| I've always suspected that to be true, even as a kid. I
| wonder about the soccer players "heading" the ball. No
| thanks.
| anthomtb wrote:
| The ball for soccer/association football is fairly pliable
| and headers are not that common. You also don't see players
| obviously dazed or knocked out after heading the ball. I
| have to think the damage from soccer headers, if any, is
| orders of magnitude below that of American Football.
|
| I didn't spend much time researching but here is one
| article backing up my assertion:
| https://www.orthocarolina.com/blog/heading-the-ball-in-
| socce...
|
| Edit: I am happy to see good research supported that
| headers can cause damage. However, please note that I am
| suggesting headers in Association Football are much less
| damaging compared with American Football, as a opposed to a
| complete avoidance of damage.
| criddell wrote:
| And here's one article saying the opposite:
|
| https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/heading-soccer-
| ball-do...
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Even if headers themselves are safe for brains (and there
| is some evidence they're not), going for one puts you at
| increased risk for an unpadded, head-to-head collision
| with your opponent. That kind of thing we do know is bad
| for brain health.
| slg wrote:
| Matters of health are probably the wrong ones to
| speculate on or try to speak authoritatively about when
| you "didn't spend much time researching" them. CTE can be
| a problem in soccer specifically because "Evidence
| indicates that repetitive concussive and _subconcussive_
| blows to the head cause CTE "[emphasis mine][1]. You
| don't need to be "dazed or knocked out" to cause damage.
| Suggesting otherwise is dangerous.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_enc
| ephalopat...
| triceratops wrote:
| There's plenty of recent news coverage linking soccer
| players and dementia. https://www.theguardian.com/footbal
| l/2023/mar/16/footballers...
| WalterBright wrote:
| The thresholds for brain damage keep getting revised
| downwards.
|
| "60 Minutes" recently ran a segment where soldiers
| experiencing a lot of gunshot sounds get brain damage,
| too. The result is soldier training is now done with
| rounds that are much quieter.
|
| P.S. as a kid, I was a miserable failure at baseball. The
| reason was I did not want to get smacked in the head with
| a hardball. I avoided the ball. That didn't please the
| coach at all.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Less damaging. But still damaging. Compare smoking a
| cigarette a day to a pack. Clearly less is more healthy,
| but still not healthy and probably should mostly be
| avoided all together.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| IFAB doesn't directly restrict heading, but permits each
| national FA to place their own restrictions at the
| grassroots level.
|
| The US adopted restrictions 10 years ago. No heading at all
| for age 10 and under (indirect free kick to the opponent
| for violations). Under 13 years old coaches are required to
| keep track of heading and limit any individual player to
| fewer than 25 per week total between training and matches.
|
| The English FA also has adopted rules limiting heading for
| youth. I image most of Europe has as well.
| WalterBright wrote:
| That's good progress. But I don't see any reason to
| believe that heading is dangerous for kids but safe for
| older people.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| smoking's not more dangerous for kids either, that's not
| why there's age restrictions on cigarettes
| triceratops wrote:
| Older people are better-able to decide if the risk is
| acceptable. Personally I'd like to see heading limited to
| over-16s.
| triceratops wrote:
| The current guidance is no/limited heading for youth soccer
| players. [1]
|
| Futsal, a small-sided variant of soccer, has way less
| heading because of the type of ball and how the game is
| played. It also teaches excellent technical skills, so it's
| great for kids who want to play regular soccer later on.
| [2] If as a society we continue the trend towards less and
| less acceptability of brain injury risk in sports, then
| futsal may well become the more-popular form of soccer.
|
| 1. https://usclubsoccer.org/headinjuries/
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futsal
| vitaflo wrote:
| It's not as cruel as it used to be with NIL.
| g0xA52A2A wrote:
| The latest Oxide and Friends podcast episode is - as one may
| expect - a great pairing if you enjoyed reading this.
|
| https://youtu.be/3z_TQxe9jx4
| ungreased0675 wrote:
| I'm not sure how or when, but it seems inevitable that college
| sports will be split off into club teams or some kind of minor
| leagues.
|
| For the big sports like football, the college part seems barely
| relevant to the sport, it's mostly just a logo and color scheme.
| The players don't even go to most classes, it's online, and there
| are full-time tutors assisting with every assignment. When they
| do have to physically attend class, someone drives them there on
| a golf cart, in order to minimize time spent on academic work.
| It's not at all a normal college experience.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I don't really see this happening just because of how closely
| sports ties in with the identity of the schools. I don't see
| them ever giving that up. As a graduate of a school with a
| massive football program, I don't want them to.
|
| It would also mean the death of most college sports in general
| and sports like rowing or field hockey might just cease to
| exist (at the level they're currently played) since they won't
| have sports like football and basketball paying for them.
|
| I'm not sure it's important that all of the athletes have a
| "normal" college experience. Just that they leave school
| prepared to be productive members of society.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I see no reason why those hobbies should not have their
| participants fund them themselves. Or get some direct
| donations from alumni. Or raise funds somehow.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| That's why I added the qualifier "at the level they're
| currently played" because right now those sports all get
| access to extremely high level facilities that simply
| wouldn't exist without cash cow sports like football.
| Zigurd wrote:
| That's perfectly sensible. While there are notable exceptions
| who have made it work, there aren't enough hours in the day to
| be an elite athlete and get a good education. Full contact
| sports add the danger of injury. If you want to put on a show
| pay the people in the show for their time and risk.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| I think you can extend this transposition across a lot more
| career paths: athletes, entrepreneurs, musicians, models, film
| directors, etc. Any career where the financial outcome can be
| described by a power law follows the same dynamics, has the same
| gatekeepers, who have the same abusive/sycophantic relationships
| to market participants.
|
| When I was raising VC I related more to struggling artist than
| employed technologists. Being constantly rejected, needing to be
| seen as more gifted than the competition and the goddamn urgency
| to catch on fire yesterday were the same and we got along great
| even if we understood and cared nothing about each other's work.
|
| People who are considering one of these paths have an opportunity
| to learn from folks who might not do what they do exactly, but
| have been in the same sort of system. To realise the
| relationships they're buying into, the price they'll need to pay
| for a shot at stardom and to think if it's really an experience
| they can afford.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-06-20 23:01 UTC)