Resource valuation of non-profit organizations: the case of the intercollegiate athletics industry

Over the past decade, broadcast rights fees have been the source of much of the growth in revenues in the intercollegiate athletics industry. However, given that the industry is dominated by public and non-profit organizations such as the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), intercollegiate athletic conferences, postseason bowl games, and institutions of higher learning, empirical valuations of intercollegiate athletic programs have been sparse. Utilizing the lens of the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm, it is evident that athletic conferences view intercollegiate athletic programs as sources of competitive advantage, further illustrating the importance of developing strategies in which such non-profit organizations can be valued. Therefore, this study utilizes the fees paid by rights holders to broadcast intraconference football contests in an investigation of the factors that may be significant predictors of the value of individual football programs to athletic conferences. Results demonstrate that variables representing a program’s on-field performance, off-field prestige, and academic reputation are statistically significant predictors of its value in broadcast rights fees. The resulting model is then utilized to determine the most valuable college football programs in rights fees, as well as identify a number of programs that are currently under or over-valued based upon the share of rights fees earned from their conference’s current television contracts. In today’s landscape of conference realignment, this study’s results include several novel findings for the leaders of non-profit organizations, such as intercollegiate athletic administrators, seeking to maximize institutional and conference resources.