So what’ s the going rate for one of these games?
"It depends on the sport, but also geography, who is doing the buying, when the game is happening, and many other factors.
Based on the contracts we currently have in EPL, here are what those ranges look like:
Men’s Basketball: $1,000-$250,000, (most common range: $50,000-$110,000)
Women’s Basketball: $1,000-$45,000
Football: $100,000 - $2,700,000
Baseball: $0-$25,000
Softball: $0-$7,500"
“These fees can represent significant revenue streams for low and mid-major athletic departments. Across all sports, a G5 program could potentially earn north of $3 million a year in just game guarantees. In FY25, for example, Kent State University earned more than $4.2 million across all sports in guarantees. Western Michigan, Akron, Fresno State, UTEP, UTSA and Bowling Green all reported earning more than $3 million.”
As I’ve said before, Miami is admirable for doing what every public university should do at the bare minimum (and its rare), which is setup a simple site with all the game contracts. The guys at Extra Points are doing yeoman’s work to get their database full, but they shouldn’t have to.
Pitt is paying up 1.1m and Purdue and Nebraska 1.4m and 1.6m the year after, we are paying Holy Cross 320k, UC is still on a huge multi-year contract but is basically a wash, UConn appears to be $0 home and home.
People often grumble about our home slate in football, but getting paid 1m-1.6m and then being able to match that up by bringing in an FCS for 300k goes a long way to funding the team.
Same with basketball and the 1-2 NAIA games (3 was an aberration). Getting paid 100k from IU than paying Spalding 3500 or Defiance 4500 keeps the lights on. Basically lets us try to turn one away buy game in 2-3 home buy games with a D1 and two NAIA. Interesting on the MTE front: Fort Myers paid us 60k to go play at Michigan (under market rate) and then paid for 18 hotel rooms for the team down in Florida. That’s it. We had to cover getting down to Fort Myers and any costs associated once down there other than transportation around Fort Myers. Seems like a good deal for those events providers as they know they have schools like us desperate for neutral games against anyone.
Looks like last year we brought in 2.3m in guarantees across all sports and paid out 330k, so I think we are trying to split the baby as well as we can between desperately needing revenue and games that build the program.
Does that mean Michigan paid us for that baseball game? 25k and an W is a profitable 3-4 hours
It was in Oxford so unlikely, Yellow. (although I suspect you said that in jest!)
Half jest. Does anyone make anything? What about UD when they got cancelled. Maybe it’s martial law in baseball because they play so many games and many get missed because of weather related issues.
Getting the win was “oh so sweet” after they tried to use us to “game” their RPI rating!
The game helped Miami’s RPI, I doubt Michigan came up with this idea all on their own.
Anytime Michigan wants to visit Oxford for a game in any sport I am supportive. It was our largest crowd ever by 39%.
I would think that a stadium literally in the heart of campus with a team that’s ranked top 80 in the country could draw. Maybe they need to make it more of a party. If I had my way, baseball would be a consistent draw. You can’t make a ton as there aren’t a lot of seats, but you could make it an experience. Which might be worth money to campus life in general.
The Black Angus Cheeseburgers at Miami’s home baseball games are fabulous!
The greatest difficulty I see in making home baseball games into “party events” is that the field sits in the middle of an academic/residential quad where we get regular requests to “turn down the sound!” Even the Oxford community neighbors turn up at the press box to complain (similarly, the music at field hockey apparently irritates the local neighbors). Night games would be a good answer for most of the issues from professors, but the current lighting stanchions are now considered too low, thus where we had regularly scheduled evening games a decade ago, there are none today. It just seems like everywhere you turn there’s considerable push-back against making baseball games an “event”. Sad.
I’m bummed to read that. It’s only during spring and it’s only for 20 games. Not a huge disruption.
I hate the fun police.