Dollars and sense

Interesting blog post from Neil Greenberg trying to quantify what a men's basketball player is actually worth to his school.  He readily admits this probably isn't the true fair value, but the goal is simply to find a calculation and see how close it is to the $20,000 over 4 years that an athlete could be paid under the system suggested by Judge Wilken.

Greenberg methodology is simple.  He peeks into a basketball program's revenues and expenses to figure out net revenue.  He then divides that revenue by the team's 2013-14 wins to arrive at a "cost per win" figure.  Finally, he takes each player's Win Shares - as determined by Basketball-Reference.com - and slices up the pie accordingly.

Doing this, he arrives at some fairly eye-popping numbers for guys like Julius Randle ($1,535,888) and Andrew Wiggins($904,205).

So let's run the math for Georgia and see what we come up with.

The most recent numbers I can find on http://ope.ed.gov/ for the University of Georgia are for the 2012-13 season.  The basketball team racked up $5,953,014 in expenses and took in $8,469,928 in revenue.  In 2014 dollars, that equates to a healthy net revenue of $2,575,105.  Georgia won 22 games last season, so assuming a similar revenue figure in 2014, every win was worth about $117,050.

Using the Win Shares totals, we get the following results:

So, are you surprised?

Remember, Georgia isn't even a basketball school, right?

h/t Neil Greenberg