The most prominent college sports teams have sponsorships from national corporations, gargantuan stadiums that can seat upward of 100,000 fans and millionaire coaches.
But only an elite few colleges make money off sports. To support their teams, most schools rely on athletic fees that every student must pay when they enroll. With the high cost of gas and equipment, they end up losing money.
“It’s a great thing to do, but it’s sort of a misconception the public has that there’s a lot of money to be made,” said Charles Brown, athletic director at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “It’s not as much as you’d think at most schools.”
In Division I sports, only about 10 percent of schools make a profit, said Derrick Ramsey, athletic director at Coppin State University, and in Maryland, the flagship school, the University of Maryland, College Park, is considered the only powerhouse.
Men’s basketball and football are generally the only programs that make money at any school. The University System of Maryland Board of Regents, which oversees 11 state schools, discussed at its meeting last October how Coppin, UMBC and Bowie State University can try to turn their athletics into programs that make profits.
“We’ve just got to figure out how to do it smartly,” said Ramsey, who has been head of athletics at Coppin for about five months.
UMBC sports are in their sixth year in the American East Conference after changing from the Northeast Conference. The move brought them competition with larger, higher-profile schools, but it cost $250,000. The school only recently balanced its athletic budget of about $10 million, and the Retrievers last year actually turned a slight profit.
It was the first season the men’s basketball team made the NCAA tournament. In doing so, the team earned a $25,000 bonus, but it had to be spread among all nine teams in the conference, and the school ended up losing money because of the T-shirts and pep rallies that celebrated the tournament berth.
To make money, lower-profile schools may get paid to travel to a larger school. UMBC’s basketball team, for instance, traveled to the University of Nebraska earlier this season for $70,000, Brown said. Nebraska, which had won 31 consecutive games at home against nonconference teams, surely expected to win while attracting a large crowd, but the Retrievers pulled off the upset.
“If you’re at Penn State or you’re at North Carolina, you have a spirit that’s almost unmatched, and a lot of it comes from their athletic prowess,” Brown said. “We don’t make money on the teams, but the university benefits in many different ways.”
