$150 Million

The Wall Street Journal recently came out with an absolutely fascinating study on how much money had been earned cumulatively by each NCAA school based on the individual NBA salaries of players from that school since 1985.

When I first heard about the study I thought OSU might fall in the top 50 or so but I’m surprised to find that it very nearly sneaked into the top 40.

The top 10 includes usual suspects like Kansas, Carolina, Duke, UConn, Arizona, Michigan, and Georgia Tech.

Wait…Michigan and Georgia Tech?!?!

Well when Jamal Crawford (Michigan), Chris Webber (Michigan), and Chris Bosh (Georgia Tech) have combined for $312 million (not a typo), you can see why those schools rank amongst the richest.

The Cowboys check in at #42 having made about $154M, sandwiched between Indiana and Iowa State and three spots ahead of OU (although that’s about to change in a very drastic way when Caveblake cashes in his one discernable skill here in a few years).

Obviously the results are skewed to favor teams whose players have been successful in, say, the last five years (right now Cole Aldrich makes 6X what MJ did his rookie season).

OSU’s top five earners since 1985 look like this:

1. Country – $55.6M
2. Desmond – $37.6M
3. John Starks – $25.1M
4. Tony Allen – $12.7M
5. Joey Graham – $8.8M

Which goes to show you that it’s better to be good for two years in college (Country) than for seven or eight in the NBA (Desmond and Tony) if you want to get paid.

I mean it’s pretty crazy that Joey Graham, who has not had the best of NBA careers, is OSU’s 5th highest basketball wage-earner since 1985. I think it’ll be interesting to look back on this list in 10 years and see where James Anderson, John Lucas, and Le’Bryan Nash fall…

One last note: I was also pretty surprised that the following teams came in ahead of OSU (reason why in parentheses): DePaul (Q), Temple (Eddie Jones), LSU (Shaq), Bama (Spree), Louisiana Tech (Malone), and Rhode Island (Odom).

Source: Wall Street Journal

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