House of Cards

Greetings From Issue #1 of the NILnomics Newsletter!

Welcome to the first issue of NILnomics, your source for all college sports finance analysis, discussion, graphs, and memes. This newsletter is built around a simple goal: to surface insights and data you won’t find anywhere else. Why me? I bring two things to the table:

🏫 PhD in Higher Education where I researched NCAA scholarship policies

📊 Career in data analytics in both early and higher education

I hope you will find something of value in each of these newsletters. Each issue will contain original analysis of college sports finances, clear visuals that lead into key takeaways, downloadable datasets for your own use, a library of real documents from schools, and the actual code behind the charts and models. Whether you're a researcher, fan, journalist, administrator, or just NIL-curious — there’s something here for you.

So, why launch NILnomics today? Because history is being made. The House v. NCAA settlement is approaching approval. When the history of college sports is written, the House Settlement will have its own chapter. If you’re wondering why the House Settlement is so important, just consider:

🏟️ Schools will begin paying players directly

💰 Power 4 programs (Big Ten, SEC, ACC, Big 12) are required to adopt a $20.5 million salary cap for athletes

🔄 Other D1 schools can choose to “opt in” to the model

Already we’re seeing schools and conferences respond—setting minimum spending thresholds, adjusting budgets, and preparing for an entirely new era. College sports just became a whole lot more unpredictable.

Please click subscribe below to get NILnomics in your mailbox each and every week!

House and Roster Limits

One of the most significant — and often-discussed — components of the House Settlement is the introduction of new roster limits. As of this writing, the plaintiffs and defense counsels have just submitted 📤️ a revised settlement at Judge Claudia Wilken’s request. The final hurdle for this settlement is whether current student athletes will be grandfathered in to the new roster limit system.

What is the new roster limit system? Before the settlement, schools operated under a scholarship limit: they could divide a fixed number of scholarships among a number of student-athletes. Teams could then have as many non-scholarship athletes (i.e. walk-ons, red-shirts) as they liked. Post-House, that structure changes. Schools will now face hard roster caps — limiting not just how many scholarships can be awarded, but how many players can be on the team. This time though, every athlete on the roster will be eligible for a full scholarship.

Here’s the catch: these new roster limits are lower than the current roster sizes at many institutions. That means fewer athletes will have the opportunity to compete in college sports.

While this shift has been widely acknowledged in general terms, I haven’t seen anyone actually calculate how many student-athletes stand to lose their roster spots.

So, I did.

This chart shows the number of athletes losing roster spots from the P4 and G5 schools. The G5 institutions will, institution-by-institution, have to ‘opt-in’ to the House Settlement (roster limits) whereas the P4 will all implement them once the settlement is finalized. Roster/participation data comes from NCAA EADA FY 2023 reports:

Quick Takeaways:

• Football 🏈 is far and away losing the most spots. Though a lot has been said about non-revenue sport roster spots being lost, there’s a clear disparity between how many football players will be losing opportunities versus other sports.

• Overall, 4,413 (P4) and 1,978 (G5) roster spots are being removed.

• It’s no surprise that so many of the letters Judge Wilkens received during the settlement hearings were about the removing of roster spots.

While Title IX looms over the House Settlement and is intentionally not addressed in the case, little has been said about who is losing roster spots between men and women. With President Biden and President Trump flip-flopping the Department of Education’s position on NIL payments/revenue sharing and Title IX, a lawsuit to settle the issue is expected to occur quickly when the House Settlement is finalized.

Here’s what the data shows:

Quick Takeaways:

• Though both men and women are losing many athletic opportunities, men are losing 1,497 more roster spots than women.

• Given that football is losing the most roster spots by far, it’s not surprising men are losing the most athletic opportunities.

• It should be noted that baseball, a male only sport, is the 4th highest sport when it comes to losing roster spots.

Given the back-and-forth between the NCAA and the plaintiffs in the case and the current proposal in front of Judge Wilkens, one may wonder why it’s been so hard for institutions to just give current student athletes a blanket exception to the roster limits, allowing them to grandfather into the new roster limit system. I suspect that the NCAA recognizes the new roster limit system is a form of cost control for institutions. If schools aren’t allowed to stock up (and pay scholarships) for student-athletes, they’ll have reduced expenses.

Therefore, it’s worth investigating which institutions benefit the most from imposing roster limits. To be fair, I’m sure these schools may decry having to let so many student-athletes go, but their balance sheets will speak for themselves. Those savings will likely go straight to revenue sharing payments 💰️ with their current/future student-athletes, too.

Quick Takeaways:

• The top 10 is dominated by the SEC (2) and Big 10 (7), with one school (UNC) from the ACC.

• The top school (UNC) has nearly two-times as many athletes losing roster spots as the 25th/26th schools, South Carolina and Penn State.

• To be fair, it’s possible that all of these athletes being cut are tuition paying, non-scholarship players. The school will be losing the ability to have an excess of these walk-on, tuition paying players. In an era of increased enrollment concerns, schools may be legitimately alarmed at the change.

From the Top Looking Down

For those not in the weeds of college athletics, here's a bird’s eye view of the current state of college sports finances. The top revenue 💵 earners who draw the biggest dollars in college sports are all in the Power Four conferences. Football 🏈 is king, and the schools with the most lucrative TV contracts, licensing, and ticket sales sit comfortably at the top.

Here’s a look at the 10 highest-earning athletic departments:

Quick Takeaways:

• The SEC and Big Ten dominate the revenue rankings, thanks in part to blockbuster 📺️ media deals. Notre Dame and Kansas are the only non-SEC/Big Ten school on the list.

• Just within the top ten there is a $64+ million disparity. While this may be the 1% of all athletic programs, there is a 1% of the 1% (looking at you Texas and Ohio State, both with over $240 million in annual revenue).

• Consider all the talk over the summer of Florida State and Clemson trying to leave the ACC - they still can’t crack the top 10 revenue producing programs.

College Hockey - The Haves and Have Nots

Putting my personal bias on the table here - I love hockey. And college hockey is way more exciting than anyone gives it credit. For the last visual of the week, inspired by a similar graphic by Sportico on women’s basketball, is a look at this year’s Men’s Hockey season and the relationship between regular season success and appearing in the Frozen Four. Oh, and by how much revenue each team generates:

Quick Takeaways:

• No surprise here — there’s a clear linear relationship between regular season success and making the Frozen Four. Winning still matters.

• The connection between hockey revenue and Frozen Four appearances? A bit murkier. For example, North Dakota generated significantly more revenue than any other program… and still didn’t make the tournament. ❌🏒

• That said, there’s a cluster of programs in the top right corner (Penn, Minnesota, Maine, Michigan State) — those with both high revenue and strong performance — who are consistently reaching the Frozen Four.

• But don’t count out the underdogs. Programs like Western Michigan, UConn, and Ohio State are proving that scrappy teams with smaller budgets can still crash the party. March Madness indeed.

• And the ultimate proof of college hockey’s parity and unpredictability? Western Michigan — a team with one of the lowest budgets in the dataset and $0 spent on NIL — just won the National Championship. 🏆🔥

Where This Data Comes From

Getting these numbers isn’t as simple as visiting a school’s website 💻️ or pulling from an NCAA database. Most athletic departments don’t freely share their financial data (though a few do — hats off to Kansas State, Kansas, LSU, Georgia, Utah, and others).

To build this dataset, I submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to public institutions across the country. Once I received the reports — often in PDF format — I had to scrape, clean, and structure the data to make it usable.

Of course, there are some important caveats:

🚨 Private schools (like Notre Dame and USC) aren’t legally required to disclose financial data, so they’re not included.

😠 Some public schools didn’t respond to FOIA requests — their data is missing too.

💸 Others charge fees — some reasonable, some excessive — which I’ve chosen not to pay (for now).

😭 A few submissions arrived in unusable formats. I’m going to have to type in all their data manually at some point.

🇺🇸 Certain states require FOIA requesters to be residents. This includes states like Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. If you live in one of these states and are open to helping, I’d love to hear from you!

While some companies charge athletic departments thousands of dollars for this kind of data, I believe in a more open model. All the datasets I build from annual financial reports are available for free on my Kaggle page. Subscribers to the newsletter also get access to:

• All the other raw data used in the newsletter

• The R code used to clean/analyze the data then produce the graphs

• A growing library of over 7,000 documents from FOIA requests — including financial reports, coach and apparel contracts, game guarantees, salary info, and more

This project is built to make college sports finance more transparent, accessible, and understandable for everyone — fans, researchers, and professionals alike.

📖 What I’m Reading/Listening To 🔉 

I want a space each week to share other college sports finance related content I think readers may be interested in. Here’s this weeks:

• NIL Clubhouse is a great podcast that has a more academic, marketing focused approach to college sports and NIL related topics. I loved this chat with NIL entrepreneur Rachel Brown.

• If you (like me) have someone in your life (my wife) who listens to you prattle on about college sports but may be unfamiliar with the House settlement, there’s no better layman’s explanation than I heard in this recent episode of the Indiana Business Journal podcast episode that you could point them to.

• Ross Dellenger. Just turn on notifications and you’ll always be up to date.

• Dropback, a front-office software company, has started an interesting podcast featuring interviews with industry insiders. Worth a listen.

• The NIL Newstand has great daily content to stay current on NIL news.

• College AD also has daily updates on college athletics finance and staffing.

• The Highway to NIL podcast is the best legal analysis I’ve found surrounding NCAA. Worth your time.

Final Thoughts

Thanks for reading.

College sports are entering a new era — and with the House Settlement becoming finalized soon, things are about to get even more unpredictable. Making sense of it all requires a perspective grounded in data - and that’s what I aim to provide with NILnomics.

Whether it’s access to the FOIA document library, cleaned datasets, or the analysis code behind the visuals, I hope these tools help support your own work, spark curiosity, and deepen your understanding of the ever-changing economics of college athletics.

If you’ve made it this far, I’d love to hear from you. Your thoughts, questions, and feedback help shape the direction of this newsletter — so don’t hesitate to reach out.

Until next time,

Greg Chick, PhD

Data Analyst