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CNBC ranks Wisconsin Badgers as Top 20 most valuable college sports program

The Wisconsin Badgers brand remains strong, even as their success has come from the less popular sports while the football team struggles.
Lorin Cox|
Wisconsin athletic director Chris McIntosh is shown during a program recognizing donors for the Kellner Athletic Center Thursday, August 28, 2025 at UW-Madison in Madison, Wisconsin.
Wisconsin athletic director Chris McIntosh is shown during a program recognizing donors for the Kellner Athletic Center Thursday, August 28, 2025 at UW-Madison in Madison, Wisconsin. | Mark Hoffman/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

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Wisconsin Badgers

The Wisconsin Badgers brand remains strong, even as their success has come from the less popular sports while the football team struggles.

CNBC released new financial valuations of all of the top college sports programs, and Wisconsin continued to grow as one of the Top 20 programs in the country.

They pulled data from the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database at Syracuse University and the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity in Athletics Data Analysis to determine every program's revenue and overall valuation.

Wisconsin's athletic programs are worth a combined $875 million, which ranked 17th in the country.

That valuation was good for seventh in the Big Ten, ranking one spot behind Oregon and two spots ahead of Iowa and Illinois.

The Badgers' value is up four percent from last year, but that growth rate is smaller than many other schools, so they actually fell two spots in the ranking. It ranked 15th in 2024.

UW athletics also saw its revenues decline four percent for 2024, down to $191 million.

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It helps that Wisconsin has been investing in facilities upgrades in recent years, with construction currently underway on a new Kellner Family Athletic Center to expand the football team's indoor practice space.

As athletic director Chris McIntosh promises more financial investment into Luke Fickell and the football program, those numbers could continue to go up year over year.

Winning more on the field and the basketball court could also go a long way toward raising revenues and that valuation even higher.

For now, the program appears to be in a healthy spot financially, among the biggest and best in the country.

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Lorin Cox
LORIN COX

Lorin Cox is the managing editor of Wisconsin Badgers on SI. He has been covering Badgers sports since 2014, when he was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin. He previously wrote for the Wisconsin State Journal, NBC Sports Chicago and USA Today Sports Media Group, and he is a former analyst for Pro Football Focus.

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