If College Football Teams Were For Sale, Tennessee Would Sell For A Lot

Image: Tennessee Athletics

By Cody McClure

The Athletic has put together a list of college football’s most valuable teams.

They’ve done so in a unique way, comparing teams to professional franchises and using multiple factors in weighing their worth.

The question posed: what would your favorite college football team sell for if it were able to be sold?

For Tennessee, that number would be roughly $1.37 billion. UT has an average football revenue of $124.9 million.

From The Athletic write-up:

“Texas, Notre Dame and Michigan are the only programs that reported more football revenue than Tennessee in the last fiscal year. The Volunteers, however, were outside the top 12 in some pre-pandemic accounting and have a recent history that we can politely call “volatile.”

This price puts them slightly behind the 2023 valuation of the NHL’s Tampa Bay Lightning.”

So Vol Football is about as valuable as an organization that has won two Stanley Cup trophies this decade. That’s pretty cool.

Tennessee ranked No. 9 on the list and fifth among SEC programs — behind Texas, Georgia, Alabama, and Oklahoma.

So third among traditional SEC powers, if you want to look at it that way.

Clearly, UT football is still quite valuable despite a decade-and-a-half of futility.

Table: The Athletic