It costs big bucks to keep the Texas Longhorns football team rolling.
Longtime Texas reporter Kirk Bohls published a column on Tuesday for the Houston Chronicle in which he discussed the Longhorns’ payroll. Bohls reports that Texas’ football team currently costs between $35-$40 million. Bohls says that figure includes $20.5 million in revenue sharing funds from the athletic department, combined with payouts through a Texas NIL collective.
The figure for Texas is pretty huge, especially when you consider it was just a few years ago that college sports were considered to be an amateur enterprise, and student-athletes were not allowed to make money on their name, image and likeness. Ohio State reportedly had spent over $20 million on their roster last year, and that paid off as they won the national championship.
Bohls also reported that Arch Manning makes the most money on the Texas team, which should not come as a surprise. However, the quarterback does not take any money from the school and instead makes his money through NIL deals independently arranged by his representatives.
At some point there will likely be regulations and legislation surrounding how much money schools can pay players. For now, matters are unregulated, which has led to effective free agency every year in college football, and several players commanding seven-figure deals. For a school like Texas that has made the College Football Playoff two years in a row and has a large group of wealthy boosters, the pay-for-play deals is not a problem.
