If Even the National Champion Is Losing $37 Million, What Exactly Are We Doing?
Louisville just said out loud what everyone knows: the system is broken — and the people with the power to fix it are choosing not to.
The University of Louisville’s athletic brass penned a letter to the college sports community today begging for action and help. The warning was clear: if we do not meet the moment with action, college sports as we know it will become unrecognizable.
That’s not hyperbole. That’s not fear-mongering.
That’s an athletic department staring at the current model and saying, this thing is headed for a wall.
And they didn’t deal in opinions. They dealt in numbers.
“The Ohio State athletic department won the College Football Playoff national championship in January 2025 and lost $37.7 million in the same fiscal year. Penn State is now the most leveraged public athletic program in the country, carrying $534 million in athletics-related debt. Rutgers has accumulated $516.9 million in total athletic losses since joining the Big Ten in 2014. And Louisville — a program that generates $1.28 billion annually in economic impact for our city and Commonwealth — is running a $12.5 million deficit with reserves drawn down from $34 million to $3.4 million.”
Read that again.
The national champion lost nearly $40 million.
The obsession to chase a title costs you a crazy amount of debt. What?
Half-billion-dollar debt loads are becoming normal.
Louisville has burned through roughly 90% of its reserves.
And they are crystal clear about what this means:
“These are not stories of mismanagement. They are symptoms of a structural crisis that no individual institution can fix on its own.”
That’s the ballgame.
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Fix it now, or something beautiful will die — sacrificed in the name of greed and short-term advantage. College sports are life-changing. Non-revenue sports create opportunities for kids who otherwise might never step foot on a campus. Entire communities orbit these programs.
And we are treating the whole enterprise like a leveraged hedge fund. It feels so souless, where the bar bones of what makes college sports special are so beautiful. I am so glad my Grandpa isn’t here to see the erosion of a collegiate landscape he once loved.
As we’ve documented ad nauseam, college sports are broken five ways from Sunday. NIL, collectives, and the transfer portal have created an unsustainable, chaotic model. Roster poaching is real. Tampering is real. The spending required just to keep up is absurd — and escalating.
Louisville isn’t asking for tweaks.
They’re asking for structural reform.
They are advocating for:
Federal NIL standards and antitrust protections
A unified governance structure with real enforcement authority
Responsible spending controls
Consolidation of media rights while preserving conference viability
A recommitment to academic and personal development
And they closed with this:
“The time for incremental tinkering has passed. College athletics needs structural reform, and it needs it now.”
That’s not subtle.
This isn’t “save Louisville.”
It’s save the ecosystem.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: they’re right.
The People With the Power
Let’s stop pretending nobody can do anything. We have to stop letting them off the hook, simply because it’s not their job. Well, I say it IS their job.
The SEC and the Big Ten control the gravity of this sport. Their commissioners — Greg Sankey and Tony Petitti — hold extraordinary leverage. Media rights. Playoff structure. Expansion influence. Political access.
Yes, their job descriptions say maximize revenue and protect their leagues.
They do that well. Exceptionally well.
But at some point, maximizing leverage stops being leadership and starts being extraction! Pure extraction! Almost sleazy. Not disnonest but sleazy.
The current incentive structure rewards consolidation over cooperation. Bigger slices for fewer schools. More control at the top. Expanding dominance.
That may be smart business.
But college sports are not supposed to be a quarterly earnings report. The fact that powerful men who wear suits and ties did this to all of us makes me beyond angry and frustrated.
It is Saturdays in the fall. It is March. It is identity. It is opportunity.
Moments like this define leaders. Some maximize advantage. Others preserve institutions.
History tends to remember the second group more kindly.
The Media Rights Excuse
The SEC and Big Ten commissioned a study examining whether pooling media rights — essentially negotiating more collectively like the NFL — would be workable.
The answer: not feasible. Too complex. Too many stakeholders. Too many existing contracts.
Of course it’s complicated.
So is everything worth doing.
The NFL shares revenue because it understands a simple truth: the health of the whole drives the value of the parts. If even national champions are losing tens of millions while carrying massive debt structures, the current trajectory is not sustainable.
Would consolidation of rights require sacrifice from the top two conferences?
Yes.
Would margins tighten slightly?
Probably.
But it could stabilize the middle class of college sports. It could preserve non-revenue opportunities. It could prevent an arms race that is burning through reserves across the country.
And if that sounds dramatic, Louisville addressed that too:
“If we fail to act, the enterprise that generates $1.28 billion a year for the Louisville economy, that provides life-changing opportunities for hundreds of young people, and that binds our community together will be diminished beyond recognition.”
Diminished beyond recognition.
That’s not coming from a fringe program. That’s coming from a Power Four athletic department staring at its books.
This Is Bigger Than One School
Louisville made something else clear:
“These are not stories of mismanagement. They are symptoms of a structural crisis that no individual institution can fix on its own.”
That means this isn’t about bad budgeting. It’s about a model that incentivizes everyone to spend aggressively, expand relentlessly, and chase short-term competitive advantage — even when the math doesn’t work. It is simply terrible business. The one that would cause a normal business like a restaurant or nightclub to close its doors pretty quickly.
And here’s the hard part:
The people with the most power benefit the most from the current structure.
Which is why real reform will require them to act against their immediate advantage. Sacrificing oneself for the greater good. That’s heroic.
That’s leadership.
College sports doesn’t need another task force. It doesn’t need another white paper. It doesn’t need another study explaining why fixing things is complicated.
It needs structural reform.
It needs federal clarity.
It needs spending guardrails.
It needs the conferences at the top to think beyond instant gratification and short-term mega payouts.
Because if even national champions are losing $37 million and half-billion-dollar debt loads are the new normal, this isn’t a Louisville problem.
It’s a system problem.
And systems don’t collapse all at once.
They erode. They hollow out. They normalize dysfunction.
Until one day everyone looks around and says:
How did we let this happen?
Louisville just rang the alarm.
The question is whether anyone with real power is actually listening.
The debt referenced for Penn State is entirely due to the $700 million renovation and expansion of Beaver Stadium - long term and "good" debt that appears on the balance sheet now but will in part covered by donations and bonds at very favorable interest rates that are ultimately paid off by increase revenues do the expansion. That debt is not due to mismanagement, NIL, or anything like that.
I think transferring should go back to the way it was. I always thought the transfer portal was and is the catalyst for the chaos. It’s the straw that broke the camel’s back. Sure, lots of good players come out of the portal and you win Championships (OHIO) with them but it’s not good for students long term. That’s not what college sports was meant to be. We can have NIL without the transfer portal. Instead, let’s have a pay structure and contracts. Eliminating the portal altogether would help limit debt, tampering and maybe even engender community, lifelong connection and loyalty in student athletes- you know, those intangible things you can’t buy with NIL money. Maybe then Ty Simpson and Quinn Ewers wouldn’t be looked upon as throwbacks because their schools meant something to them and they wanted their legacy to be with the Tide and the Longhorns instead of transferring to make more money. I so wish we didn’t live in a world where the answer is always money. But we do and it got us into the mess college sports has become. Hopefully, the people who do have the power to change it will step up for the greater good but I am not holding my breath.