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College Basketball's Most Valuable School - Its' a Tobacco Thing

By Mark

The North Carolina Tar Heels are undefeated and sitting atop both the AP and USA Today polls as the new year dawns and conference play opens in college basketball. The Heels are also atop another ranking of college basketball programs: Forbes list of the most valuable programs.

Forbes compiles this list based on four factors. These four are contributions made by the basketball program to four different areas. Those areas are: money generated by basketball that goes to the institution for academic purposes, including scholarship payments for basketball players; athletic department (the net profit generated by the basketball program retained by the department); conference (the distribution of tournament revenue); and local communities (incremental spending by visitors to the county during the regular season that's attributable to the program).

The top of the list shows the dominance of basketball in tobacco country as 4 of the top 5 are in North Carolina and Kentucky, with UNC at number 1 followed by Kentucky, Louisville and at number 5, Duke. UNC is valued at $26 million. Louisville is the most profitable, at $17.1 million, on $23 million in revenue. NC State is the poor cousin of tobacco road, coming in 13th on the list, valued at only $13.6 million.

Full post as published by Sports Biz on January 03, 2008 (boomark / email).