Buying Wins — The Moneyball Case for Women's College Sports

The Price of a Win

Here's what football costs, per win, at seven schools with FOIA-verified NIL allocations:

The range runs from $1.08 million per win (Ohio State, 12-2) to $3.25 million per win (UNC, 4-8). The average across these seven programs is roughly $2 million per football win. And more money doesn't necessarily buy more wins — Missouri spent $20.4 million and went 8-5, while NC State spent $13.5 million and also went 8-5 with $7 million less.

Now the same calculation for women's basketball:

The range: $10,000 per win (Penn State, 11-18) to $69,000 per win (LSU, 29-6). The average is roughly $42,000 per WBB win. Football is about 50 times more expensive per win than women's basketball.

Then there's Nebraska volleyball: $1.23 million in NIL, a 33-1 record, $37,000 per win. Nebraska volleyball is also one of the few profitable women's programs in the country — $7.1 million in revenue against $5.8 million in expenses per 2023-24 EADA data, with seven consecutive years of profitability behind it.

One UNC football win costs $3.25 million. At Nebraska volleyball's rate, that same money buys 88 wins.

What $1 Million Buys

Reframing the data as a purchasing question makes the disparity concrete.

$1 million in footballbuys 0.3 to 0.9 wins, depending on program efficiency. At Missouri's rate ($2.55M/win), a million dollars gets you less than half a victory. Even at Ohio State's league-best rate, it's still under one win.

$1 million in women's basketballbuys 14 to 100 wins, depending on baseline spending. At LSU's rate ($69K/win), it's 14 wins. At Penn State's rate ($10K/win), the math says 100 — though that obviously breaks down at scale, since no team plays 100 games. The point is the order of magnitude.

$1 million in volleyballbuys 27 wins at Nebraska's rate.

Here's the thought experiment: take $3 million from UNC's football allocation, dropping it from $13 million to $10 million — still above the Power 4 average of $8-9 million. Redirect that to three women's sports at $1 million each. You'd likely lose one or two football wins. But you could fund three entire competitive women's programs at investment levels that only NC State currently matches.

This math is intentionally simplified. Wins aren't linear purchases. Roster construction, coaching, facilities, and recruiting pipelines all matter independently of NIL spending. But the order-of-magnitude gap is real, and it's not an artifact of the math — it reflects the actual competitive landscape of these sports.

NC State: The Closest Thing to a Test Case

NC State is the only school in our dataset that allocates NIL across 18 sports, according to public financial disclosures. It's the closest thing we have to a natural experiment in broad-based NIL investment.

The results, in a single season:

• WBB: $1 million, 21-11 record
• Football: $13.5 million, 8-5 record
• Softball: $726,000
• Women's soccer: $660,000
• Volleyball: $528,000
• Gymnastics: $508,000, ranked #24 nationally

NC State's total “other sports” allocation runs to roughly $4.5 million across 12+ women's and Olympic sports. Compare that to Penn State, where women's basketball got $110,000 and went 11-18, while volleyball got $10,000 and wrestling got $1.45 million.

NC State didn't sacrifice football competitiveness to do this. Their 8-5 football record matches Missouri's — a program that spent $20.4 million, or $7 million more. The football spending was roughly equivalent to Ohio State's and Penn State's.

The honest caveat: this is one year of data. NC State's football was competitive before NIL existed. WBB results correlate with spending, but we can't prove causation. Recruiting class quality — which predates and partially drives NIL allocation decisions — is likely the bigger factor in year-to-year record. The pipeline that produces a 21-11 WBB season was built over several recruiting cycles, not purchased in a single budget line.

But the point stands: NC State funded women's sports meaningfully and didn't lose football ground doing it. That's at minimum a proof of concept that broad allocation is survivable.

The Counter-Arguments

There are real reasons schools don't adopt this approach, and they're worth taking seriously.

Football wins have outsized brand impact. Football drives conference TV deals worth billions — the Big Ten's seven-year, $7.94 billion media deal is underwritten almost entirely by football viewership. A bad football season doesn't just lose games; it can cost a school its position in conference realignment, which has existential financial consequences. No volleyball season, however dominant, carries that weight.

The talent pool is still developing.LSU gymnastics is ranked #2 on roughly $500,000 in NIL. NC State gymnastics is #24 on $508,000. Same money, vastly different results. The recruiting pipelines in women's sports are thinner and more uneven than in football, where 130 programs compete for a deep national talent base. In women's gymnastics, a handful of programs — LSU, Oklahoma, Florida, Utah — have decades-long recruiting advantages that money alone won't replicate overnight.

ADs get fired over football.The incentive structure in college athletics is clear: athletic directors are evaluated primarily on football performance, secondarily on men's basketball, and rarely on anything else. No AD has been fired for a bad volleyball season. Until the incentive structure changes, rational actors will keep over-indexing on football.

Title IX cuts both ways. Redirecting NIL money from men's to women's sports could trigger legal challenges from male athletes, particularly under the current House settlement framework. The legal landscape around revenue sharing and gender equity is actively being litigated, and any school that moved aggressively might find itself as a test case in either direction.

What the Data Suggests

The data in this article doesn't say “stop funding football.” Football's economic role in college athletics is structural, and the schools in our sample that spent heavily on football mostly got competitive results.

What the data does say is that the marginal dollar in women's sports buys dramatically more competitive output than the marginal dollar in football. A million dollars in football is noise — less than one win. A million dollars in women's basketball, volleyball, or softball is transformational — it's the difference between NC State's investment level and Penn State's.

The schools in our dataset are all operating under the same $20.5 million cap. They're all spending $12-14 million on football (with Missouri as the outlier at $20.4 million). The real variation is in what they do with the remaining $6-8 million. Most schools concentrate that remainder on men's basketball and a favored Olympic sport or two. NC State spreads it across 18 sports. Penn State gives wrestling $1.45 million and women's volleyball $10,000.

The first school to systematically invest at the $1-2 million level across multiple women's sports — volleyball, softball, gymnastics, soccer — could build something that takes a decade to replicate. Nebraska volleyball is proof the model works at scale in a single sport. The question is whether any athletic director is willing to try it broadly.

Right now, every school is bidding against 130 other programs for the same football recruits. The women's side of the ledger is almost empty.