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College baseball, venture capital, and the long maybe
- jgalt212 1y ago> but for the revenue sports (football, basketball, hockey, baseball) I think that list is two items too long.
- dustincoates 1y agoHere are more details on this: https://augustafreepress.com/news/public-records-request-is-uva-baseball-a-revenue-sport-not-even-close/ 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 1y agoAdding 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-programs-by-revenue/ https://www.2adays.com/blog/top-10-division-i-basketball-pro...
- ghaff 1y agoAs 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 1y agoThere 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoYeah 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 1y ago> 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- PaulHoule 1y agoMy 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 1y agoLet’s go red :)
- monster_truck 1y agoCollege baseball and hockey are 'only' good for a couple million a year in the best cases, but it's still revenue.
- CivBase 1y agoAgreed. 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoThe description of VC fundraising has a similar energy.
- pgwhalen 1y agoYeah, less than half a dozen schools in the second two categories can consider them revenue sports. However they’re at least distinguished from all the other sports that truly don’t ever generate revenue.
- alexpotato 1y agoThere 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 1y agoUniversities 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-administrator-investment-manager-compensation https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/05/harvard-salaries-top...
- vonneumannstan 1y agoIs there any evidence that universities with large endowments are paying coaches with them?
- Raidion 1y agoMoney is fungible, doesn't really matter what source the money comes from other than optics.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Kevin_S 1y agoThis 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 1y ago
- petethepig 1y agoNot 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 1y agoI was surprised at how much sense this made
- josu 1y agoThis reads as if it were written by a LLM.
- _zagj 1y agoThe author is Bryan Cantrill (bcantrill on HN), Sun (and Joyent) alumnus, kernel hacker, principal architect of dTrace, and a major contributor to ZFS. I doubt he uses LLMs to write his blogposts. Go watch any of his talks: he seems to have boundless energy. Seriously, if you've ever thought Musk came across as an Adderall tweaker, go watch some Bryan Cantrill. He's probably popping more Adderall (or Dexedrine, Vyvance, Ritalin?) than anyone else on HN.
- bcantrill 1y agoThanks for the kind words (I think?), and you're right that I don't use LLMs to write. (I do use them to read near-final drafts -- the most substantive result in this case was the deletion of a paragraph.) As for the substance abuse allegations: sorry to be boring, but just coffee and Diet Coke, I'm afraid.
- josu 1y agoSorry about my comment, it didn't add anything to the conversation.
- josu 1y agoHa, thanks for making the most of a bad comment.
- apples_oranges 1y agoYou 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.. :)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- btrautsc 1y agoI thoroughly enjoyed this read
- system7rocks 1y agoA 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 1y agoHave you heard of CTE? https://www.bu.edu/articles/2017/cte-former-nfl-players/ https://www.bu.edu/articles/2017/cte-former-nfl-players/
- WalterBright 1y agoI've always suspected that to be true, even as a kid. I wonder about the soccer players "heading" the ball. No thanks.
- anthomtb 1y agoThe 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-soccer-is-it-safe 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.
- overfeed 1y ago> You also don't see players obviously dazed or knocked out after heading the ball. That depends a lot on the relative speed, and some kids can kick the ball pretty damn hard. I had an incident where I headed the ball, and had no other memory formed for the rest of that day. I don't recall the rest of the match, the final score, or how I got home.
- g0xA52A2A 1y agoThe latest Oxide and Friends podcast episode is - as one may expect - a great pairing if you enjoyed reading this. https://youtu.be/3z_TQxe9jx4 https://youtu.be/3z_TQxe9jx4
- ungreased0675 1y agoI’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 1y agoI 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoThat'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.
- dmurray 1y agoWhat's the rationale for funding those niche sports? Mostly if a university gets some extra no-strings-attached funding it will set up a new research lab or endow a new chair or build new buildings or perhaps just stick it in the bank or give all the senior administrators a raise. They could get this windfall money by cutting funding to rowing, but they don't. Is it somehow advantageous to invest sports money back into sports? I know there's a mandate through Title IX to fund women's sports, and sometimes they have to be pretty creative to find "sports" they can spend enough money on that engage the women students, but that doesn't explain what I'm asking about.
- zemvpferreira 1y agoI 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.
- lazyant 1y agoyes, and my pet theory is that the power law for creative professions (and others like realtors) come from low barriers of entry.
- rcxdude 1y agoNah, it existed when barrier to entry was much, much higher. What causes it is the fact that with recording and copying technology, creative work scales extremely well, especially with positive feedback effects of popularity and marketing. This is what creates the very small number of very high earners. If anything, the lower barriers to entry (especially with regards to being able to distribute your work) have flattened the curve a little bit, as the long tail of obscure artists is longer and thicker than ever (and the shape is the same: each obscure genre/subculture has a few artists doing very compared to the others, though it also flattens off once you're looking at artists who primarily make money from commission work, as that doesn't scale nearly as much).
- ghaff 1y agoThere's probably some truth to that. You either have gatekeepers or a huge number of people just fail. (Even with gatekeepers a lot of people just fail anyway but but of people just don't get the opportunity to participate--which may or may not be efficient.)
- ghiculescu 1y agoI’m not a college sport expert, but it seems like the most obvious difference is that it’s much more unlikely that skipping college will lead to a successful pro outcome.
- danielmarkbruce 1y agoIt depends on the sport. Baseball you can go straight into the minor leagues, golf you can go pro right away, tennis you can go pro right away. Football/basketball you have about zero chance to skip college now.
- steveBK123 1y agoI think the unsaid part is the downside of failing in the HS->College->Pro sports pipeline is worse than in the VC backed startup pipeline. If your startup fails, you probably have technical skills to either try again (and again and again) or take a good paying SWE job somewhere else. If you fail in the sports pipeline, you kind of have one shot (you can't play college ball at 25), you may end up with some non-transferable skills (throwing a ball) and may end without a good education to get a good job. That is - the downside of your first startup failing is not working at McDonalds, but failing as a ball player can be.
- bcantrill 1y agoA postscript on this piece: unsurprisingly, the piece has especially resonated with parents of NCAA athletes, and I have since heard from parents in a wide range of sports (lacrosse, soccer, gymnastics) saying that the piece reflected their own experiences. It also resonated with athletes themselves, and anyone who liked the piece should check out the discussion that we had about it with a former colleague of mine, Robert Bogart, who also happens to have been an NCAA champion swimmer.[0] [0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/diving-in-with-robert-bogart https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/diving-in-w...