Move Over, Miata: Saving College Sports Is the New Midlife Crisis

There was a time when a midlife crisis came with a red convertible and a quiet sense of embarrassment. Now it comes with a seat at the table and a belief that you’re helping “save college sports.”

That evolution would be harmless if it weren’t being financed like a personal indulgence with a university credit card. We’re handing the keys to people who don’t know how to drive a stick shift and don’t want lessons from anyone who does.

Because, underneath the spectacle—where governors are inserting themselves into coaching decisions, White House roundtables are generating more headlines than solutions, boosters are making bad offers to recruits and presidents and chancellors are openly acknowledging the need to “spend to compete”—there’s a more uncomfortable truth.

This isn’t a chaotic moment. It’s an unsustainable model.

The Illusion of Control

Spend enough time with college athletics CFOs and a pattern emerges. Different institutions, different conferences, different pressures… but the same language:

• We’re benchmarking against peers.
• We’re focused on cost containment.
• We’re driving operational efficiency.

It sounds disciplined and responsible. It is also, increasingly, ineffective.

Because benchmarking in college athletics is aspirational. You’re not comparing against a stable baseline; you’re comparing against institutions with different revenue engines, different donor ecosystems and different appetites for risk. This is when “best practice” becomes “keep up,” and “keep up” becomes “spend more.”

Cost containment, meanwhile, has a shelf life of about one losing season.

The moment competitive pressure shows up (whether on the field, in recruiting or in donor conversations), discipline gets reframed as disadvantage. And suddenly, the same institutions that were focused on efficiency are authorizing incremental spend in the name of competitiveness,  because the system rewards it.

The Math Isn’t Even Close

The University of Louisville’s white paper, College Athletics is Running Out of Time, is one of the clearest public acknowledgements of what many finance leaders are already saying privately. The numbers don’t work.

Not “they’re tight.” Not “we need to optimize.” They don’t work.

The paper lays out an athletics program operating at a structural deficit, with reserves nearly depleted and the gap increasingly filled by subsidies, student fees and borrowed money. Layer on top of that the new reality of revenue sharing, and the pressure compounds.

This isn’t just a Louisville problem. At the national level, the trend lines tell the same story. Expenses are growing faster than revenue, deficits are becoming normalized and only a small fraction of programs are actually generating positive net revenue.

In most industries, that triggers a reset. In college athletics, it triggers justification — more interpretation, more disputes, more litigation… and ultimately, more spending.

When Escalation Becomes Strategy

The core issue is that escalation has been rebranded as strategy.

• Spend more on coaches and athletes → stay competitive
• Invest in facilities → stay relevant
• Expand infrastructure → manage complexity

Individually, each decision can be defended. Collectively, they form a system where the only path forward is…more.

More spending.

More pressure.

More risk.

It’s all under the assumption that scale, visibility or future media revenue will eventually produce a return. Sometimes it does; most of the time, it doesn’t. Or it’s not in a way that offsets the cost structure required to chase it.

Governance Isn’t Keeping Up

If the financial model is strained, the governance isn’t helping.

Right now, the system is fragmented:

• Conferences making independent decisions
• States introducing their own rules
• Institutions interpreting gray areas differently
• Oversight bodies focused more on enforcement and shielding litigation than coordination

This is a recognition of flawed or outdated design. You can’t enforce your way out of structural misalignment.

The Midlife Crisis Metaphor Isn’t a Joke

College athletics has become a place where influence, identity and urgency come together:

• Political figures want visibility and cultural relevance
• Donors want impact and proximity to success
• Board members want preferential football scheduling
• Attorneys want litigation (it pays well)
• Athletic directors want their legacy to remain intact
• Presidents want unicorn hires to professionalize the panic

None of those motivations are inherently wrong. But when they converge inside a model that already struggles to break even, they create a system that confuses activity with progress.

While the midlife crisis framing is funny, it’s also accurate. But buying a Miata is a personal decision with a temporary financial impact. What’s happening now in college sports is behavior with real financial consequences.

What Sustainability Actually Requires

If the current playbook isn’t working, what does? Not more benchmarking or another round of cost containment exercises or incremental policy tweaks.

Sustainability requires structural change.

• Clear, enforceable spending parameters that apply across the system
• Aligned governance with actual authority, not just guidance
• Defined economic models that don’t rely on continuous escalation
• Willingness to say no, even when competitive pressure says otherwise

That last one is the hardest. Because right now, the system doesn’t reward restraint. It rewards participation in the arms race and punishes those who opt out.

The Clock Is Ticking

The Louisville paper got the title right. The runway is shortening, reserves are shrinking, subsidies are growing and expectations are rising.

And yet the cost structure isn’t stabilizing. At some point, the gap between what institutions say they are managing and what they are actually sustaining becomes too wide to ignore. When that happens, the conversation changes from Hhow do we compete?” to “What are we trying to sustain?”

Final Thoughts

College athletics has done more than evolve. It has scaled financially, politically and operationally without a model built to support that scale. Now we’re treating the symptoms with strategies designed for a different version of the problem.

But here’s the part that should give leaders pause (and a reason for optimism).

For all the dysfunction, the value of college athletics hasn’t eroded. If anything, it has proven remarkably stable. Ask a Wall Street investor where they’d place a bet — real estate, tech, or college athletics — and one of those carries what can only be described as a remarkably resilient bubble that refuses to pop. The demand doesn’t disappear, and the audience doesn’t walk away.

That’s what makes this moment different. While the system is mismanaged, it hasn’t collapsed. But unlike traditional markets, you’re not dealing with shareholders and optionality. You’re dealing with public trust, institutional identity and a level of emotional investment that most markets would envy. Handled correctly, that’s an advantage, not a liability.

But it requires moving past the noise and managing it with the same discipline its value deserves. The opportunity isn’t to save college sports. It’s to finally manage it like something worth sustaining.

We can start by bringing financial voices to the table early. Right now, too many decisions are being made in real time, without the benefit of perspective from those who can see where this leads.

If you’re ready to move beyond benchmarking, cost containment and incremental fixes — and toward a model that could actually work — James Moore’s collegiate athletics CPAs and consultants can help you think through what that looks like.

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