Oklahoma State Football Valued at $209 Million

Photo Attribution: US Presswire

The Wall Street Journal published a report on Monday valuing Oklahoma State’s football program (not athletic department, but football program) at $209 million.

$209 million!

For Oklahoma State football!

That’s a higher value than USC ($197 million), Florida State ($159 million), and Stanford ($148 million).

Here’s the full list…

Here are the factors that went into the valuation:

• Revenues and expenses
• Cash-flow adjustments
• Risk assessments
• Growth projections

According to the article:

The resulting figures represent what the teams might fetch if they could be bought and sold like pro franchises. As a point of reference, the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars sold in late 2011 for about $760 million.

I know a lot of you guys (and girls) are in corporate jobs so I thought you might find this interesting.

Frankly, I’m shocked OSU is valued higher than Southern Cal and lower than Texas Tech. I don’t know which factor we could have scored higher than SC in other than potentially growth projection¹.

Oklahoma State was valued at $207 million this time last year (25th in the country). This is interesting to me because, even though I don’t have football-specific numbers, OSU’s overall revenue generated has dropped over the last few years after peaking at $106 million (!) in 2010.

The funniest part about all of this² is that we continue to operate these things under the guise of “amateurism.”