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Comment by jgalt212 | Hacker News Reader

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jgalt212

> but for the revenue sports (football, basketball, hockey, baseball)

I think that list is two items too long.

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> I think that list is two items too long.

This was my thought as well, at least for college sports.

That said, based on the article, I imagine that the author is referring to the big revenue professional sports (“the IPO” outcome). Assuming that’s the case, these four are definitely the largest in the US by a lot.

My understanding is the baseball program at my Uni is carried by a single rich donor. I used to have a view of the baseball field out my office window but it got evicted to build a computer science building which is almost done. The new field is off campus and beautiful and fan friendly. It had one small set of bleachers before but now they fill the parking lot and set up a shuttle bus to ferry people in from a nearby shopping center.

Most of our sports teams play teams that are a bus ride away, but the baseball season starts early when it is too cold to play or spectate in upstate NY so they spend a lot on airplane tickets to play teams down south.

Let’s go red :)

Here are more details on this: https://augustafreepress.com/news/public-records-request-is-...

UVA baseball lost >$3 million in 2023 off of $1.7 million revenue. UVA football (a middling program) meanwhile is making a profit of over $20 million.

Baseball is nowhere close to football. I'd be surprised if college baseball was making more revenue than minor league baseball.

Adding the college men's basketball numbers, from [1]:

1. Duke University $45.1M

2. Syracuse University $34.2M

3. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill $32.0M

[1] https://www.2adays.com/blog/top-10-division-i-basketball-pro...

As far as I know US collegiate baseball may be bigger at some schools but is mostly a marginal spectator thing overall. Hockey is certainly very regional but, in my experience, is a fairly big thing in the North especially at schools with good teams. In fact, I went to a school where hockey almost certainly had larger paid crowds than basketball.

There are 4x as many teams in the NCAA Div I national championships for basketball than there are for hockey.

That being said, hockey is extremely popular at some schools; Gopher hockey is more popular (with both students and alumni) than Gopher basketball at the University of Minnesota.

I always went to northern schools so my perception is probably skewed. Played intramurals in grad school with someone who went to Minnesota. I've just never gone anywhere that basketball was a particularly big deal (and was never into it myself). Hockey was the thing for my grad school crowds. But obviously college basketball is a big deal more broadly. Final four and all that.

Yeah I’m from MN so my perspective is skewed too.

6 of the 64 schools with Div I NCAA hockey teams are located in my state, and 5 of them are small state or private schools. Massachusetts has 10, New York has 11, Michigan has 7.

Over half of the Div I hockey teams are in the four states mentioned above.

Agreed. The tiny amount of revenue from college hockey and baseball is insignificant compared to the cost of opperation - especially with how far teams often need to travel now thanks to conference realignments.

I think it depends a lot on the school.

Hockey is very popular at some universities and probably makes at least some profit for the school. (I'm thinking University of Michigan as an example.)

Yeah, less than half a dozen schools in the second two categories can consider them revenue sports. However they’re at least distinguished from all the other sports that truly don’t ever generate revenue.

College baseball and hockey are 'only' good for a couple million a year in the best cases, but it's still revenue.

The description of VC fundraising has a similar energy.

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