Despite college football’s new pay-to-play (NIL) rules and the new transfer portals allowing players to sell their services to the highest bidding at the end of each season for millions of dollars, the game is popular as ever.

The 2025 season has been one of the most unpredictable in recent memory with upstart teams like the Indiana Hoosiers now ranked #1 with a legitimate shot at the national championship. (Don’t get us started on the preposterous injustice of allowing a mediocre Alabama team with three losses into the playoffs over Notre Dame.)

But college football is BIG money and BIG business with TV rights in the billions of dollars.

Remember, the NCAA and the hundred or so schools are technically “nonprofit” organizations. Really? They are about as nonprofit as ExxonMobil, as the chart below shows.

To bring some order to the chaos, Republicans in Congress, led by House majority leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana have proposed the SCORE Act, which they claim is “the free market fix” to college athletics.

It’s far from perfect, but it does protect the players from being required to join a union and pay union dues. It also prevents trial lawyers from suing the schools under archaic antitrust laws.

With college football so profitable, every interest group in Washington (from the unions to the lawyers to the lobbyists) want a piece of the pie. The money should go to the amazing athletes and the schools who recruit and now pay them, not the economic parasites in Washington who want to ruin this great game.

Here are the top 10 college football franchise values based on comparable pro team financials, as calculated by The Athletic: