≡Score for Score

Last week, Gymcastic aired a very interesting interview with Dr. David Berri, discussing a range of issues relating to college gymnastics. While I highly recommend listening to the interview in full, one number in particular stood out to me: $14,000.

That’s the dollar value that Dr. Berri assigns to each female NCAA gymnast. He uses a very straightforward back-of-the-envelope calculation to arrive at this number. Gymnastics teams took in $48 million dollars in revenue. In most professional sports, half of revenues go to players (and their agents). There were 1,745 gymnasts, so if you take half of that $48 million and divide it up equally among all the gymnasts, you get about $14,000 each.

I have enormous respect for athletes who manage to balance school with sport, and I don’t believe that a lower salary indicates less valuable work. With that said, I believe most NCAA gymnasts would be paid far less than $14,000 if there were anything resembling a true market for their labor.

First, we shouldn’t assume that half of revenues could go directly to gymnasts. In the NBA, 50% of revenues must go to athletes, and the NFL, it’s 47.5%. I can imagine how these sorts of profit-sharing agreements are negotiated in sports that are swimming with cash. But gymnastics is not such a sport — and there’s data to prove it.

I pulled the same 2018 Department of Eduction data on college sports that Dr. Berri used, and it turns out there’s information on costs as well as revenues. While the NCAA as a whole may be enormously profitable, many gymnastics teams are heavily subsidized. Across all gymnastics programs, costs exceed revenues by a whopping $38.8 million dollars. That means that current revenues only cover about 58% of the cost of having all these athletes compete at a high level, week in and week out. There is not currently extra money floating around in gymnastics programs that’s lining the pockets of NCAA bigwigs instead of hardworking athletes. Revenues are not profits.

It’s worth briefly reiterating the caveats about the quality of this data: all the numbers are self-reported, and they don’t align well with our expectations about which teams are big and successful. The data also appears to include acro and tumbling programs in addition to artistic gymnastics. Even so, the numbers reveal some interesting patterns. Most teams — 56% of them — just break even. And the big losses across the sport are driven by some of the most successful D-I programs: in order, the most heavily subsidized programs are LSU, Oklahoma, Auburn, Florida, UCLA, Michigan, and Utah. I put the relevant numbers in the table below.

But there’s another big reason to think that all the NCAA athletes aren’t really worth $14,000 each: competitive gymnasts outside the NCAA have a hard time making money today. The very best gymnasts in the world today struggle to capitalize on their success, with maybe two or three female US gymnasts able to earn a living through sponsorships each quad. Instead, most gymnasts competing outside of the NCAA system pay through the nose for coaching, equipment, travel, medical care, and more; stories abound of parents who mortgaged their house to help their daughter pursue her Olympic dreams. While more gymnasts would undoubtedly pursue sponsorship opportunities if it didn’t mean giving up a college scholarship, it’s far from obvious that there’s a big enough market to support all the current NCAA gymnasts.

The unfortunate truth is that, in all likelihood, far fewer gymnasts would be competing without the NCAA distorting (enlarging) the market. It’s possible that there would be a professional league: after all, college gymnastics teams do bring in revenue and, in theory, someone could capitalize on that opportunity were the NCAA not already doing so. But it seems more likely that gymnastics would end for most top-level athletes at the age of 18 instead of 22.

Figure skating provides a useful point of comparison: it is an Olympic sport dominated by younger athletes, but there is no NCAA program. As far as I’m aware, there are no professional competitive leagues that provide an alternative to pursing a limited number of slots in international competition through the route organized by US Figure Skating. There are other moneymaking opportunities that arise from performances adjacent to the sport, but these aren’t employing thousands of skaters. For example, just 81 athletes have toured with Stars on Ice in the show’s 34-year history. None of this suggests that it would be easy for many gymnasts to keep competing without the NCAA.

I strongly agree with Dr. Berri’s ultimate conclusion: it’s absurd to administer competitive athletics through the structure of the higher education system. But I’m not convinced that spotty NCAA data gives us any real insight into the market value of a female collegiate gymnast.

Note: The version of the DoE data that I pulled suggests that total gymnastics revenues are $52 million, not $48 million. I can’t explain this discrepancy between my numbers and Dr. Berri’s but I don’t think it materially effects either of our analyses.

Tags: NCAA Gymnastics