Practitioner-grade analysis. Traceable to filed sources. Plain English.
A financial-anatomy case study on the University of Texas at Austin football program, treated as a stand-alone entertainment enterprise. Post-SEC transition financials, media-rights and premium-seating economics, NIL collective and House settlement revenue-share architecture, coach compensation and buyout mechanics, DKR stadium capex, donor architecture overlapping the private-wealth registry of the state, and implied enterprise value of approximately $2-3 billion at entertainment-industry EBITDA multiples.
Download the full case (PDF) →The full Institute case is delivered as a formatted PDF with cover, table of contents, and Institute branding. This page reproduces the case content in web form for search, cross-linking, and reference; the PDF is the shareable delivery format.
Download Texas_Longhorns_Football_Enterprise_CS-CF-01.pdf →The University of Texas at Austin operates the largest college athletic department in the United States by revenue, generating in the neighborhood of $280 million annually before the 2024 move to the Southeastern Conference, and materially more since. Approximately 60 to 65 percent of that revenue is football-attributable when properly allocated across ticket sales, media rights, sponsorship, licensing, premium seating, and donor gifts. On any reasonable read of the financials, Texas football — as a standalone enterprise separated from the broader athletic department — sits between $180 million and $200 million of annual revenue, with operating margins that materially exceed those of most publicly traded entertainment properties.
Applied at the entertainment-industry EBITDA multiples the Institute uses in its NFL Stadium Capex Wave analysis — mid-teens for premium venue and IP-anchored live entertainment — Texas football has an implied enterprise value in the $2 billion to $3 billion range as a discrete asset. That number is analytically defensible even though the "franchise" is legally owned by the state of Texas and cannot be sold, transferred, or spun off. The value is real; the ownership structure is what makes it culturally invisible.
This case study treats the University of Texas football program the way the Institute treats any private-company case: financial anatomy, capital structure, revenue drivers, cost drivers, capital-allocation decisions, governance, comparable set, and implied valuation. The point is not to argue Texas should sell its football program. The point is to teach a practitioner how to read any major college football program as the entertainment-industry enterprise it now unambiguously is — post-House v. NCAA, post-revenue-sharing, post-NIL, post-conference-realignment.
Texas is the right opening case because it is the largest, the wealthiest, the most recently repositioned by conference realignment, the most billionaire-adjacent in its donor base, and the most transparent about the fact that it is running a professional operation.
Every case selection choice at the Institute is a defensibility choice: is this the program that best illustrates the analytical framework we want to teach? Texas answers yes across every dimension.
Scale. The Longhorns athletic department is the largest in the country by revenue in a normal reporting year, and the football program is the largest revenue line inside that department. There is no ambiguity about whether the numbers are large enough to matter.
Recent structural change. The July 1, 2024 move from the Big 12 to the Southeastern Conference is the largest single conference-realignment event in the modern era from a program-economics standpoint. It repriced Texas's media rights, its schedule strength, its recruiting geography, and its capital plan. It also gave the analyst a clean pre-move / post-move comparison that most other realignment cases do not offer with the same clarity.
Wealth-registry donor base. The top-quartile donors to Longhorn Athletics overlap almost perfectly with the private-wealth registry of the state of Texas. Michael Dell (Dell Technologies), Robert F. Smith (Vista Equity Partners), Kelcy Warren (Energy Transfer), Red McCombs (deceased 2023, historical anchor donor), Joe Jamail (deceased 2015, historical anchor donor), John Beckworth, Kevin Eltife (current University of Texas System Board of Regents chair), and dozens of nine- and ten-figure alumni and boosters constitute a donor architecture that reads as a private-wealth membership roster more than as a booster club. Any Institute case about the intersection of high-net-worth capital allocation and college football will inevitably pass through Austin.
Governance transparency. Because Texas is a public university system, athletic department financials are subject to open-records disclosure. Coach contracts are public. Board of Regents meetings are on the record. The Longhorn Foundation's Form 990 is filed. This makes Texas one of the most analytically tractable college programs in the country — the practitioner does not have to reverse-engineer private disclosures, because the primary sources are actually available.
Cultural weight. Texas football is not a marketing exercise; it is one of the load-bearing cultural institutions of the state. Fall Saturdays at Darrell K Royal — Texas Memorial Stadium are civic events. That cultural weight, combined with the financial scale, is the reason Texas is the natural opening case for a College Sports Division that argues college football has crossed the threshold from amateur athletics into professional entertainment infrastructure.
Before laying out the Texas-specific financials, the reader needs the regulatory and structural context. Four separate events, stacked over four years, transformed college football from a labor-suppressed amateur enterprise into a functioning professional industry. Each is worth naming precisely.
Event 1: NIL rights, effective July 1, 2021. The NCAA lifted its prohibition on athletes profiting from their name, image, and likeness following the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in NCAA v. Alston (594 U.S. 69, 2021), Justice Kavanaugh's concurrence writing directly that the NCAA's business model was "unlawful under the antitrust laws." State-level NIL statutes accelerated the transition. The immediate consequence was the emergence of NIL collectives — donor-funded LLCs and 501(c)(3) organizations that channel booster capital to athletes through legitimate marketing agreements, effectively functioning as program-specific payrolls that sit outside the athletic department's formal budget.
Event 2: Conference realignment, 2021-2024. Texas and Oklahoma announced departures from the Big 12 to the SEC in July 2021, with formal transition effective July 1, 2024. USC, UCLA, Oregon, and Washington announced departures from the Pac-12 to the Big Ten across 2022-2023, transitioning July 1, 2024. The Pac-12 collapsed. The ACC entered ongoing grant-of-rights litigation with Florida State and Clemson. The Atlantic Coast added Stanford, California, and SMU. The net effect was a two-conference consolidation of the top of college football economics into the SEC and the Big Ten, with dramatically compressed media-rights revenue per program for the schools left outside those two conferences.
Event 3: House v. NCAA settlement, approved June 2025. The class-action settlement in House v. NCAA (Northern District of California) created a $2.8 billion damages fund payable over ten years to former athletes for pre-2021 NIL restrictions, and — more consequentially — established a new revenue-sharing framework permitting each Division I school to distribute up to approximately $20.5 million per year directly to its current athletes, escalating over the ten-year settlement window. The revenue-share cap is program-wide, not football-only, but in practice at football-dominant P4 programs, football will absorb approximately 70 to 75 percent of the cap, meaning roughly $14 to $16 million per year of the initial cap flows to football rosters.
Event 4: College Football Playoff expansion to 12 teams, effective 2024 season. The CFP expanded from four to twelve teams, materially increasing conference and program-level playoff distributions. Under the new CFP media agreement with ESPN (six-year deal starting 2026-27 at approximately $1.3 billion per year), automatic bids to the top four conference champions and at-large slots reallocate revenue toward the SEC, Big Ten, and Notre Dame more than under the four-team format.
Stacked together, these four events did not incrementally change college football. They completed a phase change. The category is now professional entertainment. The Texas Longhorns case begins at the moment the phase change was complete.
The University of Texas at Austin athletic department reported total operating revenue of approximately $271 million in the fiscal year ended August 31, 2023 (the last full Big 12 season), on operating expenses of approximately $258 million, per the University's NCAA financial report and the Longhorn Foundation's IRS Form 990. Those numbers made Texas the highest-revenue athletic department in Division I by a comfortable margin. The FY2024 report — capturing the transition year — showed revenue in the range of $280 to $290 million on comparable expense growth. FY2025, the first full SEC year, showed material step-function growth as the SEC media distribution replaced the Big 12 distribution, with reported revenue approaching or exceeding $330 million on preliminary figures. Full FY2025 numbers become official on the University's public disclosure calendar.
The revenue architecture inside the athletic department, at approximate proportions that hold across recent reporting years, sorts into six primary buckets. Media rights and NCAA/conference distributions account for the largest single line, in the range of $60 to $75 million pre-SEC and materially higher post-SEC. Ticket sales run approximately $50 to $55 million, with football responsible for roughly 80 to 85 percent of that total given football's outsized crowd size and pricing. Contributions to the Longhorn Foundation — the athletic department's fundraising arm — contribute roughly $50 to $60 million annually in unrestricted gifts, plus additional restricted capital-project giving. Sponsorship and multimedia rights via the Learfield partnership run approximately $30 to $40 million. Royalties and licensing on Longhorn-branded apparel and merchandise contribute approximately $10 to $15 million. Camps, sports-camps revenue, and miscellaneous operating income round out the rest.
Football-attributable revenue, calculated by direct allocation for football-specific lines (football tickets, football premium seating, football-designated sponsorship, football-driven media distributions on a per-sport rights basis) and by proportional allocation of shared lines (general athletic department sponsorship, licensing, contributions), sits between $180 million and $200 million in a typical recent year, and higher post-SEC transition once media distributions fully step up.
On the cost side, football expenses run in the neighborhood of $60 to $75 million in coaching, staff, recruiting, scholarships, facilities operation, travel, and administrative allocations. The football program's operating margin — defined as football revenue minus football-attributable direct expenses, before allocation of shared athletic-department overhead — sits in the $100 to $140 million range annually. That is a margin structure that would be envied by essentially any publicly traded entertainment property in the country.
The important interpretive move is this: those margins are legally reinvested inside the athletic department in the form of non-revenue sports, women's programs, facility improvements, and administrative infrastructure. The football program subsidizes the rest of the athletic department. Under Title IX and NCAA governance, football effectively cannot distribute its operating profit outside of athletics. But the profit is real, it is generated by the football program specifically, and the enterprise-value implications flow from that fact regardless of where the cash is legally directed after generation.
The Big 12 media rights distribution to Texas ran approximately $42 to $45 million per year in the final years of Texas's Big 12 membership, a figure that had recently been renegotiated but that materially trailed SEC and Big Ten per-school payouts. The SEC's ESPN agreement, which took full effect for Texas with the 2024-25 athletic year, distributes approximately $70 to $75 million per year per member school, escalating over the contract term. That is a step function of $25 to $35 million per year of incremental annual revenue attributable to conference-membership change alone, before considering any secondary effects.
The secondary effects run in the same direction. Schedule strength inside the SEC drives higher television ratings on Texas games, drives higher-value non-conference scheduling opportunities, drives increased attendance and premium-seating pricing power at DKR, and drives elevated sponsorship pricing across the Learfield-managed inventory. Recruiting geography opens further into the Southeast, where Texas already had strong roots. And playoff-qualification math under the twelve-team CFP tilts favorably for SEC programs.
The offsetting cost of SEC membership is real but smaller. Travel expenses rise as opponents shift eastward. Competitive difficulty rises, which puts pressure on the head coach's win-loss record and shortens the coaching-contract cycle. Facility standards inside the SEC (in-stadium production, weight rooms, nutrition facilities, football operations centers) run at the top of the industry, requiring capex to remain competitive.
Net-net, the SEC move added an estimated $30 to $50 million per year of run-rate athletic department profit for Texas, with roughly 70 to 80 percent of that gain attributable to football specifically. That is a repositioning transaction with a payback period measured in months, not years, once the conference exit fees and one-time transition costs are amortized. Whether it turns out to be the best strategic decision in Texas athletic-department history depends on what the SEC's next media cycle looks like in the mid-2030s. On the current numbers, it is not close.
Post-SEC transition, Texas's per-school SEC distribution is the single largest revenue line in the athletic department. The SEC's ten-year ESPN agreement runs through the 2033-34 athletic year, with annual per-school distributions that escalate through the term and that include payment for both the regular-season inventory and the SEC Network channel economics. Texas participates pro-rata in the CFP media distributions to the SEC as a conference. And Texas retains local-rights economics on tier-three inventory that flows through the Longhorn Network arrangement's residual structure. The blended media-rights line for Texas is in the neighborhood of $85 to $95 million per year at full SEC run-rate.
Learfield holds the multimedia-rights agreement for Texas Athletics, one of the largest such deals in Learfield's national portfolio. The arrangement includes stadium signage, broadcast integrations, digital sponsorship, category exclusivity, and the sale of the naming and inventory rights across the Texas Athletics ecosystem. Sponsorship revenue under the Learfield partnership runs in the $30 to $40 million range annually, and the SEC transition is driving a material step-up in that number as sponsor pricing power increases with SEC exposure.
DKR-Texas Memorial Stadium seats approximately 100,119 after the recent south end zone expansion, making it one of the largest college football venues in the country. Premium seating — suites, club seats, loge boxes, and Longhorn Foundation-tied donation-linked seat licenses — generates a disproportionate share of ticket revenue relative to seat count. A material portion of that premium revenue flows through the Longhorn Foundation as tax-deductible contributions rather than as ticket revenue per se, which shifts the accounting line but not the economic reality. Total football ticket-plus-premium revenue at Texas runs in the $45 to $55 million range annually, and stadium capex investments — including the south end zone project and continuing infrastructure upgrades — are being underwritten against continued premium-seating price appreciation.
The Texas One Fund is the primary NIL collective supporting Texas football and men's basketball. Structured as a 501(c)(3) organization in its initial form, then restructured as market practice evolved, the Texas One Fund channels donor capital to Texas athletes through NIL-compliant marketing agreements. Reported annual capacity of the Texas One Fund and adjacent collectives has been estimated in the $15 to $25 million per year range for football alone, though the exact figure varies by year and by donor engagement cycle, and no single filing captures the full picture because collective structures split payments across multiple entities.
The strategic function of the Texas One Fund is straightforward: it is the vehicle by which the Longhorn donor architecture pays for roster construction inside a regulatory framework that formally forbids the athletic department from paying players directly (pre-House) or beyond the revenue-share cap (post-House). It is, in economic substance, the payroll function of the football program, run through a nominally independent donor-supported entity so that the university retains its regulatory posture. Every P4 program has a functional equivalent. Texas's version is one of the largest in the country by donor scale.
Revenue sharing under the House settlement adds a second, formal payroll channel starting July 1, 2025. Texas is expected to allocate the maximum permissible revenue share (approximately $20.5 million in year one, escalating) across its athletes, with football absorbing the majority of the cap in dollar terms consistent with football's revenue contribution to the athletic department. The revenue-share payments are made directly by the university to the athletes under agreements the athletic department administers.
The interaction of the two channels — collective NIL payments plus revenue-share direct payments — is the practitioner-relevant complexity. Both are subject to House settlement anti-circumvention rules that empower a new clearinghouse (Deloitte-administered under the settlement terms) to review third-party NIL agreements for fair-market-value compliance. Deals judged to exceed fair-market value can be rejected. Whether that clearinghouse mechanism holds up in practice — or whether collectives find structures that work around it — will be one of the most consequential open questions in college football economics through the second half of the 2020s.
Two second-order tax questions matter for practitioners. First, the tax treatment of revenue-share payments to athletes: these are self-employment income to the athlete, subject to federal income tax and self-employment tax, subject to state income tax in the athlete's state of residency (which for many recruits is complicated by transfer-portal state changes and by NIL income sourcing rules), and required to be reported on Form 1099. The compliance burden for a nineteen-year-old football player receiving $600,000 per year across multiple 1099s is meaningful; the emerging support ecosystem (specialized CPA firms, NIL-focused financial advisors) is a growth industry that maps precisely onto the Institute's Athletes Wealth Playbook framework, extended one life stage earlier. Second, the tax treatment of the collectives themselves: 501(c)(3) collectives face unrelated business income (UBI) exposure on their NIL-marketing activities, and IRS guidance on whether collective structures qualify for the charitable-purpose exemption has tightened materially since the IRS Chief Counsel memorandum released in mid-2023.
Steve Sarkisian became the head football coach at Texas in January 2021. His initial contract, restructured multiple times since, currently runs through the 2030 season at a total annual compensation package in the low $10 million range, including base salary, media and radio revenue, and performance incentives. The full contract package positions Sarkisian in the top ten to twelve of college football head-coach compensation nationally, appropriate for the revenue scale and expectations of the program.
The economically interesting feature of any modern college football head-coach contract is the buyout structure. Sarkisian's contract, like most top-tier P4 head-coach contracts, contains meaningful buyout provisions in both directions. If Texas terminates Sarkisian without cause, the university owes a scheduled buyout that declines over the contract term but that, in the middle years of a contract, can run into the tens of millions. If Sarkisian leaves for another program, he owes Texas a smaller buyout that his new employer typically pays as part of the hiring package.
The buyout mechanism is what makes college football head-coach compensation economically similar to guaranteed-money professional contracts in the NFL, and it is what makes coach-changing decisions at the P4 level fundamentally capital-allocation decisions rather than football-personnel decisions. Jimbo Fisher's ten-year, $75 million fully guaranteed contract at Texas A&M — and the reported $77 million buyout Texas A&M paid when it terminated him in November 2023 — established the current outer bound of what a college football buyout can cost. Every Board of Regents at every P4 program now underwrites the head-coach hire with the buyout scenarios explicitly modeled and approved.
Offensive and defensive coordinator compensation at Texas runs in the $2 to $2.5 million range per position, again competitive with the top of the P4. The full football-staff annual cost — head coach, coordinators, position coaches, strength and conditioning staff, football operations staff — runs in the $25 to $30 million range. That number is roughly 40 percent of total football operating expenses.
DKR-Texas Memorial Stadium has undergone continuous modernization over the past fifteen years, with the most recent major project being the completion of the south end zone Moncrief-Neuhaus Athletic Center and premium seating expansion. Total capex on the stadium and adjacent football facilities across the past decade approaches $500 million. Continuing projects include additional premium seating optimization, stadium technology upgrades, and integration of the football operations building with the broader athletic campus. The scale is one to two orders of magnitude below the current NFL stadium capex wave, but the operating logic is identical — premium-seating revenue drives capex, which drives repricing power, which underwrites the next round of capex.
The Moody Center, the University's basketball and events venue, is not football-specific but is worth mentioning in the athletic department capital-allocation picture. Opened in 2022, developed with Oak View Group as the operating partner, and structured with a mix of university, philanthropic, and third-party capital, the Moody Center is a case study in venue-development structures that college athletic departments can borrow from professional entertainment developers rather than trying to build in-house. The Moody Center generates non-basketball revenue from concerts and events year-round, exactly the non-game-day booking pattern the Institute's NFL Stadium Capex Wave analysis identifies as the third-order revenue driver of modern venues.
Under the Institute's sports-as-entertainment reframe, DKR is best evaluated the way one would evaluate an Ohio State's Ohio Stadium, a Michigan's Big House, or, one tier up, an SoFi Stadium — as premium entertainment infrastructure whose capex is underwritten by premium-seating revenue growth and whose value should be measured against theme-park and integrated-resort comps rather than against 1990s-era stadium construction benchmarks.
The University of Texas System is governed by a nine-member Board of Regents appointed by the Governor of Texas and confirmed by the Texas Senate. The Board has ultimate fiduciary responsibility over the University's operations, including athletics. Kevin Eltife, a former state senator and businessman from Tyler, has served as chairman of the Board in recent years and has been closely involved in the SEC-transition decisions, coach-contract approvals, and major athletic capital projects.
The governance overlay matters because it puts athletic department decisions inside a public-fiduciary process. Every major coach contract, every major capital project, every conference-membership decision passes through Board action or Board-committee review. The public-record nature of that process is what makes Texas one of the most analytically tractable college programs in the country, but it also imposes a discipline on decision-making that private-sector executives sometimes find uncomfortable and public-university trustees generally find appropriate.
The Longhorn Foundation, a separate 501(c)(3), operates as the primary donor-facing entity for athletic fundraising. Its board and staff manage the donor pipeline, the giving societies, the seat-license contribution programs, and the capital campaigns that underwrite facility investment. The Foundation's Form 990 is publicly filed and is one of the two primary financial documents (alongside the athletic department's NCAA financial report) that a practitioner would use to build the football-program financials from public sources.
The single most under-appreciated feature of Texas Longhorn football, from a practitioner-audience standpoint, is that the top of its donor pyramid is functionally identical to the private-wealth registry of the state of Texas.
Michael Dell, founder and chairman of Dell Technologies, is a Texas alumnus and one of the largest donors to the University generally, including material athletic-adjacent giving. Robert F. Smith, founder and CEO of Vista Equity Partners, is not a Texas alumnus (Cornell undergraduate) but is deeply connected to Austin business and philanthropic networks. Kelcy Warren, executive chairman of Energy Transfer, is a University of Texas at Arlington alumnus with significant Longhorn athletic connections. Kyle Bass, John Arnold, Ross Perot Jr., Trevor Rees-Jones, Ray Hunt, T. Boone Pickens (through the OSU rivalry cross-connection), and dozens more sit in the extended donor and alumni network. Historical anchor donors — Red McCombs, Joe Jamail, the Moncrief family, the Neuhaus family — established the philanthropic architecture that current donors continue to build on.
The point is not to name-drop. The point is that a practitioner-grade case study of Texas football is, by mechanical implication, being read by exactly the audience the Institute exists to serve. Longhorn Foundation donors sort into the top decile of American private wealth. Alumni Council members and Board of Visitors appointees at the McCombs School of Business, the Cockrell School of Engineering, the LBJ School of Public Affairs, and the University System generally overlap materially with the Foundation's donor list.
This is why the College Sports Division, and specifically the flagship-program cases inside it, has an audience-growth economics that pure pro-sports content does not. NFL franchises are owned by thirty-two families. Alabama Crimson Tide donors number in the tens of thousands. Texas Longhorn donors number similarly. The addressable practitioner audience for a well-written Texas football case is one to two orders of magnitude larger than the addressable audience for a well-written case on any single NFL franchise, precisely because college football fandom is structurally distributed across a wealth registry rather than concentrated in an owning family.
The comparable set for Texas football sorts into three tiers. Direct college football comps include Alabama, Ohio State, Georgia, Michigan, Notre Dame, LSU, Oklahoma, and Oregon — the small set of programs with revenue scale, media exposure, and donor architecture in the same category as Texas. Adjacent comps include the flagship SEC and Big Ten athletic departments generally, plus a small number of Notre Dame-style independent and near-independent programs with distinctive media and brand economics. Cross-industry comps, applying the entertainment-industry framing that anchors the Institute's approach to sports, include the parks segments of Disney and Comcast, integrated Vegas resort operations, premium live-entertainment IP franchises, and — one tier removed — the individual NFL franchises the Institute has already analyzed in the Stadium Capex Wave work.
Applied enterprise-value multiples from the entertainment sector — mid-teens EBITDA multiples on premium venue and IP-anchored live entertainment, adjusted downward for the ownership-transfer restriction that legally prevents Texas football from being sold — produce an implied standalone enterprise value in the $2.0 to $3.0 billion range on current earnings power. The range widens if the analyst gives credit for continued media-rights escalation through 2033-34 and for expansion of the CFP economic base. The range compresses if the analyst discounts for the settlement compliance overhang, the possibility of collective-bargaining or unionization pressure, or a future regulatory shift that changes the operating rules.
None of this is intended to argue that the University of Texas should or could sell its football program. It cannot, and it should not want to. The analytical point is that a program generating $180-200 million of annual revenue at mid-teens EBITDA margins, in an industry that trades at mid-teens EBITDA multiples, has an implied economic value of approximately $2-3 billion regardless of whether that value is ever realized in a transaction. The number is real. The ownership structure makes it invisible. A practitioner reading the athletic department financials without applying the multiple simply sees "revenue"; a practitioner applying the multiple sees a $2-3 billion asset the state of Texas holds on its balance sheet at essentially zero carrying value.
Settlement compliance and clearinghouse enforcement. The Deloitte-administered NIL clearinghouse under the House settlement is the mechanism intended to prevent circumvention of the revenue-share cap by inflated third-party NIL agreements. Its effectiveness in practice is untested. If enforcement is loose, collective spending will exceed the settlement's intended cap; if enforcement is tight, top-program collectives will need to find structural workarounds or accept a compressed roster-construction budget. The medium-term equilibrium is materially uncertain.
Coach retention and the Sarkisian succession scenario. Steve Sarkisian's success at Texas has put him in the coaching-market rotation for both other P4 programs and NFL head-coaching opportunities. Any material coaching change at Texas would involve a nine-figure combined cost picture across buyout, replacement compensation, and roster-continuity effects (transfer portal outflow following a coaching change is now a first-order risk that did not exist a decade ago).
Roster-limit changes and Title IX exposure. The House settlement's roster-limit provisions materially reshape the football walk-on economics. Title IX compliance in a post-revenue-share environment introduces novel legal questions about how gender equity applies when the athletic department is paying revenue-share directly to athletes.
Media-rights cliff in 2033-34. The current SEC-ESPN agreement runs through the 2033-34 athletic year. What happens at renewal — whether media inflation continues, whether direct-to-consumer streaming compresses the traditional TV distribution model, whether the SEC restructures its distribution formula — is the single largest medium-term financial uncertainty for Texas football.
Political and legislative overhang. Texas is a public university, and its athletic operations are subject to state legislative attention, gubernatorial appointment of the Board of Regents, and the general political dynamics of a large state. Any material shift in Austin or the state Capitol's posture toward the University System has downstream implications for the athletic department.
Emergence of jersey patches and the further commercialization frontier. In summer 2025-26, jersey-patch sponsorships arrived at the very top of the college football brand hierarchy essentially simultaneously — Notre Dame with SoFi, along with reported patch deals at Ohio State and Michigan. Any one of those programs going first would have been a signal moment; all three moving in the same window is a completed inflection. Notre Dame is a private Catholic university, football-independent, historically the most brand-conservative program in the country. Ohio State and Michigan are the two largest Big Ten brands and, together, the largest revenue and viewership rivalry in college football. If those three programs are wearing sponsorship patches on the uniform, the commercialization taboo that held the last remaining pre-professional line in college football has fallen everywhere. Every P4 athletic department is now working on its own uniform-sponsorship architecture. Texas, with Learfield already managing the multimedia inventory and a donor architecture that will absorb any reasonable brand-partner assignment, is well-positioned to participate — an additional annual revenue line that did not exist eighteen months ago and that will be in the $5 to $15 million range per year for top P4 programs within the decade. Jersey-patch pricing is likely to converge toward NBA benchmarks (roughly $10 to $20 million per year for top-market franchises, per publicly reported deal terms), adjusted downward for the shorter college season and upward for the higher regional-market intensity that college football uniquely commands.
One. A P4 college football program is a stand-alone entertainment enterprise with revenue, margins, and asset value that can be measured against entertainment-industry benchmarks — not a sports team in the amateur sense. The ownership-transfer restriction is a legal fact; the enterprise value is an analytical fact. Both are true.
Two. The correct comparable set is not other college programs; it is premium entertainment venues, live-experience IP franchises, and integrated resort operations. Multiples applied should be entertainment multiples.
Three. Media rights, sponsorship, and premium seating are the three revenue lines that grow with capex investment and with the operating platform's ability to command pricing. NIL collectives and revenue sharing under House are cost lines, not revenue lines — they compress the operating margin without changing the revenue base.
Four. The donor architecture is the balance-sheet analog to a private company's shareholders. Read the giving-society structure, the top-tier donor list, and the Longhorn Foundation's Form 990 the same way you'd read a shareholder register: as the entities with capital at risk and residual claims on program success.
Five. Coach compensation and buyouts are capital-allocation decisions. Every major coach hire is a nine-figure decision when properly modeled including buyout exposure. The Board of Regents (or Board of Trustees at private programs) is the fiduciary approver.
Six. The regulatory frame is unfinished. House settlement enforcement, potential future athlete employment status, Title IX interaction with revenue-share payments, potential collective-bargaining structures, tax treatment of collectives — every one of these open questions will resolve over the next five to ten years, and the resolution will materially shift the operating economics of every P4 program. The current numbers are the current numbers. The framework is the durable takeaway.
This case study is Institute Case No. CS-CF-01, the opening piece of the College Sports Division. Companion pieces in the wave will follow the same framework applied to Ohio State, Georgia, Alabama, Michigan, and Notre Dame — the natural next five flagship programs by revenue scale, media exposure, and donor architecture depth. Adjacent living-reference builds will include a College Football Media Rights Reference, a College Football Stadium Capex Tracker (parallel to the NFL version), a Conference Realignment Ledger treating each conference as a strategic acquirer of programs, and a College Football Coach Compensation & Buyout Reference. NIL collective governance and tax mechanics will be addressed in a dedicated companion piece, structured for the practitioner who advises collectives, athletes, and athletic departments on entity structure and tax treatment.
The intent, across the full College Sports Division, is not to compete with the fan-facing sports press. The intent is to occupy the practitioner seat — the money side of college football that requires financial literacy to cover competently and that the fan-facing press has neither the resources nor the incentive to serve. That seat is empty. This case study is the Institute's opening claim on it.
Primary financial data for this case study is drawn from publicly available sources: the University of Texas at Austin's annual NCAA Financial Report (filed under NCAA reporting requirements and available through open-records requests); the Longhorn Foundation's IRS Form 990 (annual filing, publicly available via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer and directly through the IRS); Texas Board of Regents meeting minutes and materials (publicly available at utsystem.edu); coach contract documents (publicly available under Texas open-records law); Sports Business Journal reporting; Sportico "The Business of College Sports"; USA Today college athletic department financial database; ESPN and SEC Network broadcast disclosures; and reported industry figures on media rights, sponsorship valuations, and collective spending from sources including On3, 247Sports, and specialist NIL trade press. Enterprise-value benchmarks and entertainment-industry multiples are drawn from the Institute's own case work and from public equity comparables in the parks, live entertainment, and integrated resort sectors. Legal and regulatory framing draws on the House v. NCAA settlement documents (Northern District of California), NCAA v. Alston (Supreme Court, 594 U.S. 69, 2021), and IRS guidance on NIL collectives (Chief Counsel memorandum, mid-2023).
The Baratelli Institute is a publisher. Nothing in this case study is investment advice, and nothing here constitutes a recommendation with respect to any organization or entity discussed. Analytical framing, valuation ranges, and interpretive conclusions are the Institute's own.
— The Baratelli Institute, College Sports Division, Case No. CS-CF-01
The complete Institute case study is delivered as a print-ready PDF with Institute cover, table of contents, and shareable formatting. Use it in advisor decks, in donor-committee briefings, in family-office capital-allocation reviews.
Download Texas_Longhorns_Football_Enterprise_CS-CF-01.pdf →