The NCAA's Multi-Million-Dollar Baseball Tournament
The NCAA's Multi-Million-Dollar Baseball Tournament
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Hey Friends,
The Men’s College World Series is one of my favorite sporting events. The atmosphere is incredible, and the tournament has been hosted in the same city, Omaha, Nebraska, for 75 straight years — it’s baseball’s version of March Madness.
Fun Fact: The “World Series” name is derived from Major League Baseball’s World Series Championship and is currently an MLB trademark licensed to the NCAA for annual use.
Here’s how it works: The men’s Division I NCAA baseball tournament starts with 64 teams, which is reduced to 8 teams via regional and super regional double-elimination tournaments. Those final 8 teams then head to Omaha, Nebraska, where they compete in the College World Series, a 10-day, double-elimination tournament to crown the NCAA Division I College Baseball National Champion.
And with super regional play wrapping up last night and the College World Series set to kick off on Thursday, the field has been set: Arkansas, Auburn, Notre Dame, Oklahoma, Ole Miss, Stanford, Texas, and Texas A&M, will all compete this year.
But the financial figures behind the Men’s College World Series are also fascinating.
This is the 75th anniversary of the tournament in Omaha, Nebraska. But after being held at Rosenblatt Stadium from 1950 to 2010—a 20,000-seat stadium located on the south side of Omaha—the tournament moved to TD Ameritrade Park (now named Charles Schwab Field Omaha) in 2011, a newer, larger stadium just 3 miles north.
Opened in 2011
$150 million in construction costs
Seats about 25,000 fans with the ability to expand to 35,000
And as part of the new stadium agreement, the NCAA and College World Series of Omaha, Inc.—the non-profit group that organizes the event—agreed to a new 25-year contract extension, keeping the College World Series in Omaha through at least 2035.
And while the new stadium is shiny and luxurious, The College World Series of Omaha released a study in 2019 that detailed the tournament’s economic impact.
Here are the highlights:
The CWS attracted 361,711 in-person spectators in 2021, a new record, and more than 70% of the attendees come from outside of Omaha in a typical year.
The economic impact of the College World Series in Omaha was determined to be $88.3 million annually, a nearly 40% increase from $63.7 million in 2014.
The 2019 College World Series generated $8.7 million in local and state tax revenue: $5.2 million in local tax revenue and $3.5 million in state tax revenue.
The College World Series also supports more than 1,100 year-round jobs in Omaha—up from 850 in 2014—that are worth a collective $29 million in wages and salaries.
But the biggest beneficiary of the tournament might be local hotels. Because according to the same economic study, the 2019 College World Series, and the youth tournaments it brings to Omaha, add up to a total of 41,430 hotel nights each year.
“The two weeks of the College World Series are by far the best two weeks of the year,” says local Marriott Hotel GM Steve Hilton.
And last but not least, of course, the NCAA benefits also.
In 2011, the NCAA included the College World Series as part of a $500 million television deal with ESPN for 24 sports championships through 2023-2024.
And the tournament’s final 3 games in 2019 averaged ~2 million viewers on ESPN. Not only was that higher than the 1.6 million viewers ESPN averaged for Sunday Night Baseball, but the 2019 championship game between Vanderbilt and Michigan was the most-watched baseball game on ESPN for the entire year, including MLB games.
So many people know that March Madness brings in ~80% of the NCAA’s annual revenue, but the Men’s College World Series certainly isn’t financially irrelevant.
Have a great day. I’ll talk to everyone tomorrow.
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