The largest programs. Every one an entertainment enterprise. Post-House, post-NIL, post-realignment.
College football has crossed the threshold from amateur athletics into professional entertainment infrastructure. The House v. NCAA settlement (effective July 2025) established formal revenue sharing of up to approximately $20.5 million per school per year. NIL collectives function as program-level payrolls. Conference realignment collapsed the Pac-12 and concentrated the top of college football economics into the SEC and Big Ten. Media-rights step-ups have repriced program economics. The Institute treats each flagship program as the entertainment enterprise it now is — revenue architecture, capex plan, coach compensation, donor architecture, governance, and comparable set. All from publicly-available sources: NCAA financial reports, university system disclosures, Longhorn Foundation and equivalent booster-foundation Form 990 filings, coach contracts released under state open-records law, and filed conference media agreements.
New · Coaching Changes & Contract Movement Reference — 17+ head-coach changes, ~$285M aggregate buyouts, 8+ material extensions this cycle. Also live: Coach Tracker, Stadium Capex Tracker, and NIL Disclosure Reference.
Living valuation hubs, an interactive after-tax team-picker, and the coach-tax brief — all free, all sourced. The paid guide and toolkit sit at the bottom of the cross-reference block below for practitioners who want the deeper build.
Each case follows the same practitioner-grade framework: financial anatomy of the athletic department, football-attributable revenue and expense, media-rights and conference economics, NIL collective and revenue-share architecture, coach compensation and buyout mechanics, stadium and facility capex, donor architecture, governance, comparable set, and implied enterprise value. All from public sources.
Five living-reference builds sit above the flagship program cases and will be cross-linked from every case they apply to. They are the reusable analytical vocabulary for the entire College Sports Division — learn them once, apply them across every case.
The Institute's Pro Sports Division treats each NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL franchise as the entertainment enterprise it is — revenue-share formula, stadium capex, media contract, family-office ownership, estate structure. That framing carries directly into college football, with two modifications.
First, the ownership structure. A P4 college football program is legally owned by the state university system (or, in the cases of Notre Dame, Miami, USC, Stanford, and a handful of others, by a private university). It cannot be sold. The enterprise value is real; the ownership structure is what makes it culturally invisible. A practitioner reading the athletic department financials without applying an entertainment-industry multiple simply sees "revenue." A practitioner applying the multiple sees a multi-billion-dollar asset held on the state balance sheet at essentially zero carrying value.
Second, the governance overlay. Public-university athletic departments operate under Board of Regents or Board of Trustees fiduciary oversight, state legislative attention, gubernatorial appointment authority, and open-records disclosure requirements. Coach contracts are public. Capital plans pass through board action. Athletic department financials are filed under NCAA reporting requirements. This makes the top P4 programs among the most analytically tractable enterprises the Institute covers — the primary sources are actually available, unlike most private companies at similar scale.
What the four post-2021 events (NIL rights, conference realignment, the House v. NCAA settlement, and CFP expansion) collectively did was complete a phase change. The category is now professional entertainment. Media rights, sponsorship, and premium seating are the three revenue lines that grow with capex investment and platform pricing power. NIL collectives and revenue sharing are cost lines that compress operating margin without changing the revenue base. Coach compensation and buyouts are capital-allocation decisions. The donor architecture is the balance-sheet analog to a private company's shareholder register. Every one of these is a familiar practitioner-analysis frame, applied to a category that the fan-facing sports press cannot cover competently because it lacks the financial literacy the material demands. That seat is empty. This division is the Institute's claim on it.