If you’re thinking about spending a Saturday this fall attending a college football game, make sure your debit card is loaded.
College football is one of the most popular sports in the United States, right behind, no shocker here, the NFL.
With college athletes now being paid directly by the schools, fans will soon see a growing cost to share those additional expenses by the individual schools.
Some examples: at Tennessee, the university is adding a 10 percent “talent fee” to the price of a ticket to attend a football, or men’s or women’s basketball contest.
Arkansas will have a surcharge of 3 percent at all concession stands for “talent fee”-related expenses.
At Michigan, the athletics department sent letters advising boosters that winning will cost a lot more in the future.
And those ridiculous student activity fees imposed by most schools on all students are about to get even more expensive.
Clemson, which has not had activity fees, will soon be adding athletic surcharges of $150 per semester for all students next semester.
The surcharge will raise approximately $8 million for the athletic budget in 2025-26.
That’s a clever way to raise the additional $21 million the Tigers need to find this season.
Make no mistake, winning in big-time college athletics has never been free, but in the new world order in which college players are now professional athletes, it’s the fans and students who will be asked to pick up a large part of the expense.
“College athletics hasn’t professionalized as much as I thought it was capable of,” said Nels Popp, a University of North Carolina sports-business professor.
Popp believes that most schools will rely on fans’ emotional, long-time bonds to the schools even more than marketing strategies to increase revenue.
“I think the increased demands on the schools are forcing them in this direction,” added Popp.
Popp can use his school, North Carolina, as an example: Oddspedia has UNC as the ninth-most expensive college gameday expense in the country. In 2024, the Tarheels were 56th.
The Bill Belichick era has arrived in Chapel Hill, and it’s going to cost plenty. Belichick’s salary of $10 million and the additional $21 million cost the UNC athletics department faces will result in a whopping 36 percent increase in the gameday experience at Kenan Stadium.
The most expensive gameday?
Surprisingly, the University of Colorado was highlighted as having the highest average cost for tickets, food, and drinks, with the average price of $228 for two tickets.
The cost of doing business in major college football is skyrocketing.
The Houston Chronicle reported that the University of Texas is expected to spend between $35 and $40 million on its football roster in the 2025-2026 season.
Currently, at some schools, the NIL packages rival professional rookie contracts.
While the investment may have some short-term success on the field, it’s pretty clear that schools will be asking more from their boosters in the long term to maintain sustainability.
Ultimately, boosters will soon realize the elephant in the room is that the current model is unsustainable and continuously giving more is having little or no impact on the schools’ performance.
Then what?
Schools that continue to opt into the new model will likely end up cutting sports that are not making money.
Translation: all sports except football, men’s basketball, and at some schools, women’s basketball and baseball.
Schools that opt out of revenue sharing will become irrelevant.
So, the burden again falls back on the boosters.
Open up your wallets even more, or you may not have a program to support at all.
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