Greg Chick, PhD
Happy Wednesday,
This week, Jake and I tackled the messiest economy in sports: college sports. Luckily, we enlisted the help of PhD Greg Chick (the researcher behind NILnomics and a friend of the show)!
Greg has spent more than a decade studying college athletics finances, and he’s filed thousands of public records requests to get the real and raw numbers. So today, we get into where the money comes from, why athletic departments lose money year after year, who’s accountable when things go wrong, and whether or not college football should just break away.
Fair warning: I left with about eighteen million more questions, so we’ll definitely be talking to Greg again.
It’s funny to think that ten years ago, just two or three thousand dollars was projected to be the end of college sports.
How Greg Got Here
The plan: Greg was a higher ed administrator who wanted to climb the ladder to vice president of enrollment management, which required a PhD.
2016: He starts his PhD program. When it’s time to choose a dissertation topic, he finds a paper about a 2016 policy change that let schools pay college athletes a stipend of a few thousand dollars. At the time, that was a big deal.
The research: He follows the paper’s breadcrumbs and expands the scope to include the Group of Six schools, then follows up on the Power Five and what the policy meant for student loan debt.
The result: A PhD, a dissertation, and more than ten years studying college sports finances.
Today: Greg writes the NILnomics newsletter weekly, consults with agents and sports tech companies, and has had his work published in several places. He’s a pro sports guy from the Boston area who went to Bowling Green for his master’s, and he says the donation culture in college sports still fascinates him.
The Big Idea: Costs Didn’t Start Spiraling When Players Started Getting Paid
Greg’s central argument from our conversation is a simple household analogy. Picture a family where dad drinks too much, gambles his way into debt, buys a house they can’t afford, and then leases an expensive car. You wouldn’t blame the car lease for the family’s financial problems, and you wouldn’t fix things by addressing only that.
In college athletics, he says the big cost drivers are coaching contracts and buyouts, NFL-sized stadiums and facilities, and now player compensation. By his numbers, about 92% of athletic departments don’t turn a profit, and that’s always been true. In his view, legislation like the Protect College Sports Act targets player compensation while leaving coaching pay and facilities mostly untouched, which he calls unfair.
Greg also gave the other side its due: supporters of that legislation want to make sure schools keep their current number of sports and the subsidies behind them. Football and basketball revenue effectively funds the country’s Olympic sports pipeline, and Greg says it’s hard to reconcile paying revenue-generating players more with protecting those non-revenue sports.
He believes players should have a seat at the table, and that conference-level negotiations seem like the most realistic path. He noted that the Big Ten is reportedly preparing a conference-wide salary cap of about $50 million.
5 Tactical Takeaways
Read the fine print on “revenue.” Before comparing a college athletic department to a pro team, check whether donations, student fees, and school subsidies are in the number. They change the story.
Be wary of one-cause explanations. When someone says costs are out of control because of one thing, ask what else is driving them. Greg’s point is that coaching buyouts and facilities have been climbing for years, long before players started getting paid.
Use public records. Public universities are one of the best data sources in sports business. Greg’s analyses rest on thousands of records requests. The numbers are often available if you ask.
Treat opaque data as a red flag. Greg says that without clear numbers on what players earn, people risk overpaying and underpaying. The first official reports on how schools allocate revenue-share funds are expected in January.
Look for the one-offs. Revenue is concentrated in football and basketball, but surprises remain. Greg cited college wrestling, where some wrestlers are reportedly earning six figures thanks to passionate alumni bases, plus Nebraska volleyball and strong SEC softball programs.
Why It Matters
If I had to describe the college sports economy in one word, I’d borrow Jake’s: churn. Coaches, players, athletic directors, and staff are all moving, and the NCAA is asleep at the wheel. And yet the lights stay on, the games get played, and viewership hasn’t dropped. It’s almost impressive how well college football has done despite all the chaos.
Imagine how it might work if the rules were clear, enforceable, and fair. Now, personally, I’m not sure the federal government should be the one setting them, and Jake’s point is that so many stakeholders have jobs at stake that real change is painfully slow. It may end up being a death by a million paper cuts instead of a clean reset. I also wonder what happens if the higher education model itself starts to topple under rising tuition.
That might be a conversation for the next time Greg joins us…
📩 And don’t forget: Bottom of the Ninth is back this Friday with the top three stories in sports and business from the week.
See you then,
Tyler & Jake
