Ohio State University Spends $100 million on Football

In the Wall Street Journal today there is an article called, "Inside College Sports Biggest Money Machine."

Even if you don't care about sports this article is for you. It's maybe the most fascinating thing I've read in a long time. Heres the lede:

At $109,382,222 for the current year, Ohio State's athletic budget is the largest in the nation and the biggest in the history of college sports. It allows the school to field 36 varsity teams in everything from baseball and soccer to riflery and synchronized swimming. The school spends about $110,000 on each of its 980 athletes, which is triple the amount the university spends per undergraduate on education.

There are all kinds of shocking numbers in there, too many to go over in this post, but the article is simultaneously sickening and refreshing. Football and basketball are the big money makers for the school, but they don't keep all the proceeds for themselves, they spread to the other "non-revenue generating" sports like the pistol team:

OSU's pistol team maintains a supply of about 30 firearms for the team's 11 members, and all shooters receive an array of free Nike gear, including polo shirts, a jacket and shoes. "We're a good-looking team," says James Sweeney, OSU's pistol coach since 1999. This year, for the first time ever, OSU's rifle and pistol teams received scholarship money to recruit top competitors.

Recruited to shoot guns? A bit odd.

If a team is able to make this kind of money, I'm not sure why they can't pay their athletes a proper wage. People seem to dismiss the notion out of hand, but I'm sure there is a way to peg the revenue and the players wages, or a NCAA revenue sharing scheme to take care of players.

If I was an athlete and saw this kind of decadence, I'd start taking cash anywhere I could.