Virginia Tech’s football team is worth more than some major league sports franchises, report says 19%
By Dwayne Yancey29%
7/31/2026, 1:15:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 25 faulty reasoning types, including Post Hoc (False Cause), Hasty Generalization, and Ambiguity (Equivocation), with Appeal to Authority as the most egregious example at 18.4% saturation with 363 hits. Analysis detected 2,162 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,971 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 29% and a BS Rank of 19% (20,690 of 25,290 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 81.80% of the article peer group.
If you were to root around and find $520 million under the seat cushions, you could do something exciting with it — such as buying a professional sports franchise.
You wouldn’t have nearly enough to buy a team in one of the big four leagues — for football, baseball, basketball and hockey — but you could afford a club in some other league.
Unfortunately, if you wanted to buy a WNBA team, you’d still be short of enough cash to buy the Indiana Fever and have Caitlin Clark on your roster.
However, you could afford to buy 10 other WNBA teams.
You could also afford to buy six of the lower-ranked Major League Soccer teams.
Or, perhaps you could buy the Virginia Tech football team.
OK, Tech fans, calm down.
The Hokies aren’t for sale.
However, if they were — if college teams could be bought and sold like professional sports teams — that’s what they would be worth: $520 million.
That’s according to the sports news site The Athletic, which this week published its annual valuation of college football teams.
This was a hypothetical exercise, although The Athletic writes that “buying a college football team seems less far-fetched now” than when the site first crunched numbers a year ago.
We are now seeing private equity firms move into college sports.
In December, the University of Utah became the first school to make a deal with a private equity firm, signing on with the New York-based Otro Capital.
Yahoo!
Sports has reported that the deal will provide Utah with $500 million in additional revenue for its sports programs.
The exact details remain unclear, but essentially Otro Capital and the University of Utah are creating a private company — Crimson Brand Partners — that will market the university’s sports programs with a goal of driving more revenue for the school (and, of course, more revenue for the investors).
That’s not quite the same as putting the school’s athletic program up for sale the way professional sports teams sometimes are but it’s closer to that than anything we’ve ever seen in the past.
Utah may have been the first, but no one doubts it will be the only school to do this.
Florida State has also looked into private equity financing for college sports.
In April, the Big 12 conference entered into a private equity deal aimed at increasing league revenue without encumbering its member schools, although that line of separation might be a fine one.
Under the deal, the New York-based RedBird Capital Partners will provide the league with $125 million — and each of the 16 schools could borrow up to $30 million, “a line of credit that would have to be paid back with a double-digit interest rate over time,” ESPN reports.
Other conferences, and other schools, are taking their own actions — short of attracting private investment — to increase revenue.
Earlier this summer, the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors moved to create a nonprofit, Hokie Ventures, that will operate as a business wing of the athletic department.
Its directive: Create more revenue for the sports programs.
“We’re throwing out the old idea that college sports is about college students playing football as an extracurricular and moving toward more commercialization,” Andrew Zimbalist, an economist at Smith College who is considered an expert on the economics of sports, said in a recent interview with Cardinal News.
Of course, college sports have been moving away from the extracurricular model for a long time.
What’s driven this current burst of activity are three things: First, we’ve seen some big-name schools switch conferences in search of higher revenues; the once-mighty Pac-12 conference essentially imploded when 10 of its schools left.
Second, the expiration of some conferences’ TV contracts is drawing closer, and that’s expected to set off another round of realignment as some schools look for more revenue and some conferences look for additional TV markets.
“A year ago, the final accelerant was added to the bonfire of unrestrained spending when the House vs.
NCAA settlement led to a massive wealth transfer from schools to athletes,” CNN reports.
That was the court case that opened the way for schools to pay their athletes.
Baseball fans are familiar with how big-market teams have far more money to spend than small-market teams, which explains why so many stars wind up sooner or later playing in New York or Los Angeles.
The same thing is now happening in college sports, only with more ruthless efficiency.
Once there was relative parity among the top conferences.
Now there’s not.
The Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference are pulling away — that caused the Pac-12 to lose most of its teams and has raised questions about whether the Atlantic Coast Conference (in which Virginia Tech and Virginia play) can survive.
It’s notable that the conference that became the first league to cut a private equity deal wasn’t one of the big ones, except in name: The Big 12 conference wants to make sure it can continue to compete at the highest levels when it doesn’t have the TV money that the Big 10 and SEC do.
In European soccer, poor-performing teams face “relegation” to a lower league.
The same thing is happening in American college sports, just in a different way: When 10 of those Pac-12 schools left, the league reconstituted itself with less marketable members — essentially the whole league got relegated.
“It’s just a time of turmoil,” said Patrick Rishe, director of the Sports Business Program at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St.
Louis, in an interview with Cardinal News.
What we’re seeing, he says, is the official confirmation of what we’ve known for some time: College sports is a business and running a college sports program is akin to running a professional sports franchise.
That’s why he says that we’re seeing a lot of turnover in the ranks of college sports administrators.
“The professionalization of college sports is weeding out some of the old-school college sports administrators” who would not be comfortable in this new environment, he said.
The Athletic’s number-crunching to put a dollar figure on the value of college football programs shows just how professional these teams are — at least in market value.
It’s estimated that the most valuable college football program in the country belongs to the University of Texas; the Longhorns were valued at $2.46 billion.
That’s not on the level of the NFL, where CNBC says the most valuable team is the Dallas Cowboys (valued at $12.5 billion) and the least valuable is the Arizona Cardinals ($5.9 billion).
It is, though, in line with Major League Baseball teams, where the average value is estimated to be $2.95 billion — a figure pulled up by the $9 billion New York Yankees, while other teams are more similar to the cross-team Mets, who were sold five years ago for $2.42 billion, a record sum at the time; the Miami Marlins hold down the financial cellar at $1.2 billion.
For comparison purposes, CNBC says the Memphis Grizzlies are the least valuable NBA team at $3.75 billion while the Columbus Blue Jackets are the least valuable NHL team at $1.4 billion.
For college football teams, The Athletic ranked Ohio State second at $2.3 billion, Notre Dame third at $2.1 billion, Michigan fourth at $2 billion and Georgia fifth at $1.95 billion.
You’ll notice that a lot of these valuations depend more on a team’s “brand” and fan following than its on-field performance; the Dallas Cowboys may be America’s most valuable sports franchise but the team hasn’t won a Super Bowl since 1996.
Here’s the financial disparity in college sports, just viewed through a different lens than the usual models of revenues: Of the 10 most valuable teams, nine are in either the Big 10 or the SEC; the independent Notre Dame is the exception.
Of the 25 most valuable teams, 21 are in the Big 10 and SEC.
After Notre Dame, the only three exceptions are Miami (18), Florida State (20) and Clemson (25) near the end of the line.
Those three are members of the ACC.
They’re also the three ACC schools usually considered most likely to leave for a better-paying conference if they could (and if that better-paying conference thought the addition of those schools would increase their revenue pie, not split it more).
Virginia Tech comes in at No. 33, between Texas Tech and Brigham Young University.
Virginia comes in at No. 57, valued at $263 million.
The Athletic only ranked schools in what are now considered the Power 4 conferences — the Big 10, the SEC, the ACC and the Big 12 — so other Virginia schools weren’t evaluated.
However, the metrics The Athletic used put a premium on conference membership and revenues.
That formula definitely hurts my alma mater, James Madison University, which is in the Sun Belt Conference and depends on mandatory student fees for most of its sports revenue.
If you’re looking for the line to distinguish a professional sports program from a regular college program, here’s a suggestion.
Of our six main professional leagues — the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, MLB, MLS and the WNBA — the least valuable franchise is said to be the Toronto Tempo, a first-year team in the WNBA.
Its value is rated at $325 million in American dollars.
That would be just below the presumed value of the Syracuse University football team, at $328 million, which is tied for 49 th on The Athletic’s list.
By that measure we have 49 college football programs that are considered as valuable as a professional sports franchise in at least one major league — and Virginia Tech is one of them.
Virginia Tech’s opponents, ranked by market value
Here’s another way to measure the challenge that schools face.
This is Virginia Tech’s 2026 football schedule.
However, instead of listing last year’s won-lost record for the Hokies’ opponent, here are the team’s market values:
Sept.
5: Virginia Military Institute (not ranked)
Sept.
12: Old Dominion University (not ranked)
Sept.
19: Maryland (No. 46, $359 million)
Sept.
26: Boston College (No. 63, $185 million)
Oct.
2: Pittsburgh (No. 53, $323 million)
Oct.
10: California (No. 64, $183 million)
Oct.
17: Georgia Tech (No. 41, $398 million)
Oct.
24: Clemson (No. 25, $665 million)
Nov.
6: Southern Methodist (No. 58, $251 million)
Nov.
14: Stanford (No. 65, $182 million)
Nov.
21: Miami (No. 18, $604 million)
Nov.
28: Virginia (No. 57, $263 million)
By this measure, Virginia Tech should be 10-2 this year, because only twice will it play more valuable opponents.
In the ACC, Virginia Tech is competitive in terms of market value, outranked only by Miami, Florida State, Clemson and North Carolina, in that order (although North Carolina isn’t that far ahead).
However, if the ACC should ever fly apart and Virginia Tech needed to seek a new home, here’s why the SEC and Big Ten might be unlikely: In those conferences, Tech would be one of the least valuable programs, which raises the question of why those leagues would want to take Tech in.
I’ll deal with that in a future column.
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