NCAA Football and Income Inequality

Recently, I have been researching NCAA bowl eligible football revenues, so given that  tonight is the start of the college football season for bowl eligible teams I thought that I would look at college football income inequality.  Specifically, I am using data from the Equity in Athletics database from 2007 to 2013 college football seasons.  (The 2014 season is not currently available).

Here I am going to report the team with the smallest amount of football revenue and the amount, the team with the largest amount of football revenue and the amount and the Gini coefficient for that season.  Please note that I have not adjusted for inflation in the revenue numbers presented below.  For comparison purposes, the Gini coefficient for the US in 2010 is 0.411 (or 41.1 for the Gini Index, which is the Gini coefficient multiplied by 100).  As you can see in the table below, NCAA football is slightly more unequal in terms of revenues than the US was in 2010.

Season		Team		Min. Revenue		Team		Max. Revenue		Gini
2007		Buffalo		$1,882,475		Texas		$72,952,397		0.4564
2008		Akron		$1,577,189		Texas		$87,583,986		0.4516
2009		Florida Atlantic		$2,280,834		Texas		$93,942,815		0.4515
2010		Louisiana-Monroe		$2,953,497		Texas		$95,749,684		0.4465
2011		Louisiana-Monroe		$3,588,964		Texas		$103,813,684		0.4381
2012		Louisiana-Monroe		$3,277,727		Texas		$109,400,688		0.4418
2013		Central Mich.		$3,899,929		Texas		$112,508,162		0.4448

We also notice that the University of Texas has the highest amount of revenue during this entire time period and that CUSA, Mid American or Sun Belt conference teams have had the lowest total football revenues during this time period.