The giants of college football can rake in bushels of money, year after year, by earning invitations to prestigious bowl games. But even during down years, those teams can be plenty profitable—thanks to patrons like Electronic Arts, the popular video-game manufacturer.
NCAA Football, one of the company’s best-selling sports titles, has become such a juggernaut that EA gives royalties to all the college teams whose names and logos appear in the game. Minor football squads—Wofford College’s Terriers, say, or the University of Richmond’s Spiders—may not make too much cash from the game. But the sport’s most vaunted programs do pretty well for themselves: Florida State University earned $130,000 from last year’s game, according to The Orlando Sentinel, while the eventual national champions from the University of Texas at Austin netted $110,000. —Brock Read
