A Den Well-Deserved

It has come to my attention that some people are up in arms about the LSU Tigers football team’s new locker room. Some have suggested that so much money should not have been spent on a locker room at an institution of higher learning. While I do understand the other side of this argument, I will have to disagree on the notion of deservedness. If anyone deserves a new locker room of this magnitude down in Baton Rouge, its the team that plays it home games in a home stadium affectionately known as “Death Valley.”

The LSU football team, while not usually at the top in revenue generated in its own conference, it is often planted firmly in the top 10 of football programs in the country (Forbes). However, that’s not the end of it. There is generating revenue, and then there is turning a profit, and the football program consistently knows about that as well. In the 2016–2017 academic year there were only three of the seventeen athletic programs at LSU that turned a profit that totaled just shy of $60 million (football, basketball, and baseball)…the football program accounted for $56 million. When you see the chart below, you will see that the football program generated enough to cover the losses of the other programs with money to spare.