Quote Originally Posted by FUBeAR View Post
Fair wages?

If we assume this is a true statement: “The Ivy League college also said its men’s basketball program operates in the red, costing it hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.”

AND if we take that at its minimum ($200,000) and divide that amount among the 15 Players on the Dartmouth roster and divide their wages across 27 games, then their “fair wages” would be…

-$493.83 per game.

So, Players would be required to PAY at least ~$500 / game to be on the Team.

Or…one could suppose they could pay more for more playing time. There are 200 Player/Minutes per game available, so they could (fairly) ‘pay-to-play’ @ ~$37.00 / minute (minimum).

Seems FAIR
As DFW Hoya pointed out, unions don't care whether their employers are profitable or not (look at the MTA in New York City!!). However, this is a great prospective when you compare it to how labor negotiations are done in the NBA. Since the NBA has a salary cap, the collective bargaining agreement always starts with what % of total revenue goes to the players. It is REVENUE they go off of, not PROFIT, of course, since it's not the union members' (the players) responsibility to manage the business side of the league.

At Dartmouth, the revenue would consist of ticket sales and concessions at home games + guarantee game paychecks + NCAA Tournament shares + the school's cut of whatever Ivy League TV contracts bring in.

Ticket & Concessions -- I'm going to estimate 500 PAID ticket sales per game and average attendance of 800. If every paid ticket sells for let's say an average of $20, that's $10,000 in revenue per home game in ticket sales. If every attendee, paid or unpaid, spends an average of $10 on concessions, that's $8,000 per game. Let's assume they kept ALL gate revenue from each home game and didn't write checks to cover the travel costs of the 3 non-DI teams they hosted. That's $18,000 in revenue multiplied by 13 home games. That's an estimated $234,000 in total revenue from home games in Hanover.

Buy Games -- Really good buy games in Men's Basketball pay between $90,000 and $100,000. This year, Dartmouth secured road dates with Duke, St. Louis and Vanderbilt. I'm assuming these are all pure buy games and not home-and-home deals. Let's generously estimate Dartmouth got paid an average of $80,000 for those three games. That's $240,000 in revenue from buy games.

NCAA Share -- An NCAA share is $2 million distributed to each conference based on how many appearances the conference has. For example, last year Princeton made it to the Sweet 16. That's 3 appearances, so $6 million to the Ivy split throughout the league. Let's be somewhat generous again and assume the Ivy averages TWO appearances annually. That's $4 million divided by 8 schools so about $500,000 for Dartmouth.

TV Contract -- Tough to estimate this because I can't find any data about the actual $$$ amount of the Ivy League multi-year ESPN deal. Plus, it's multi-sport and I'm not sure you could isolate a dollar amount per program. So going to leave this out of the calculation. I'm guessing the per-school revenue generated in the Ivy League specific to basketball is probably not much on an annualized basis. $25K tops?

So total REVENUE generated by Dartmouth basketball team is estimated by my count to be about $974,000. And that's being generous. Most years, the Ivy doesn't see multiple NCAA appearances, and Dartmouth probably doesn't get 3 buy games every year if I had to guess. I also am probably a little high on the ticket revenue. I quick search also didn't yield specific data for Dartmouth MBB operating expenses but I'll use Princeton as a benchmark. Princeton spends $1.7 million so I'll estimate Dartmouth at $1.1 million. So I would OPINE that Dartmouth hoops loses AT LEAST $130,000 each year but the typical number is probably close to $250,000, if not $300,000.