College Conferences, PWHL Salaries & Pickleball's

The college conference revenue numbers that USA Today published for fiscal year 2025 are, on their face, a story about growth. Every Power Four conference posted gains. The ACC grew 16% year-over-year. The Big 12 added $118 million. By almost any conventional measure, these are healthy organizations expanding their balance sheets.

The less comfortable story, the one that matters more for the next decade of collegiate athletics, lives in the rate differentials.

The Big Ten brought in $1.4 billion — a 55% jump from the prior year, driven by conference expansion and a media rights structure that continues to compound. The SEC followed at $1.1 billion, up more than 30%, with Oklahoma and Texas now counting toward the conference's revenue pool alongside a renegotiated ESPN deal. Those two numbers belong in a different sentence from the ACC's $826 million and the Big 12's $611 million — not because the latter two are failing, but because the gap is widening faster than any strategic response can close it.

SBJ's Abe Madkour put it plainly on the May 27th Buzzcast: "They can't keep up with the bigger conferences. The delta continues to grow between the Big Ten, the SEC, and the others."

That delta is not merely a prestige problem. It is a recruiting problem, a facilities problem, a coaching market problem, and eventually — if the trajectory holds — a competitive relevance problem. The ACC and Big 12 are both pursuing revenue aggressively through various means, but the math is brutal when your competitor's baseline grows by half a billion dollars in a single fiscal year. Percentage growth is only a consolation prize when the absolute figures are this far apart.

Indianapolis and the Sports Anchor Theory

Two separate developments in Indianapolis this week illustrate something the city has been quietly assembling for years: a coherent theory of sports-anchored urban investment.

Pacer Sports and Entertainment, under owner Herb Simon, is building out a 60-acre mixed-use Fieldhouse District in downtown Indianapolis. The project includes a 15-story Ritz Carlton scheduled for 2028, a Live Nation music venue, and a Blake Shelton-branded bar concept called Old Red set to open next year. These are not sports facilities. They are hospitality, entertainment, and real estate assets being drawn into orbit by the sports anchor — the Pacers' arena — at the center.

Separately, Penske Entertainment is eyeing a similar model for Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which sits on roughly 1,000 acres. An entertainment district is described as the most logical next step for that campus. The details remain thin, but 1,000 acres of developable land adjacent to one of the most recognizable motorsports venues in the world is a canvas that commands attention.

What Indianapolis is demonstrating is the maturation of a development thesis that major markets have been testing for years: the arena or stadium as the gravitational center of a broader real estate and entertainment ecosystem. The risk, as other cities have discovered, is that the public financing structures underpinning these districts can quietly shift subsidy burdens onto municipalities even when the development is nominally private. That tension is worth watching as both projects advance.

The PWHL Opens Its Books — Strategically

The Professional Women's Hockey League published player salary data for the first time in its three-year history this week, and the figures are worth sitting with for a moment.

The league minimum for the 2025-26 season was just over $37,000 — up from $35,000 in 2024, with a 3% annual escalator built into the current CBA. Forty-five of approximately 180 active players earned less than $40,000. Ten players cleared $100,000. The highest-paid player in the league, Ottawa's Emily Clark, earned just over $126,000.

There are no salary maximums in the current agreement.

The PWHL is a young league doing a number of things right — methodical expansion to 12 teams including Detroit, Las Vegas, Hamilton, and San Jose, and a willingness to build infrastructure before chasing scale. The salary disclosure fits that pattern, but it also carries a specific strategic logic. The current CBA runs through 2031, which means the players' association has years to build a public record before the next negotiation. Publishing these numbers now is less about transparency for its own sake and more about establishing a baseline that future bargaining can push against.

Madkour characterized it directly: the players association is "obviously trying to plant the seeds for growing salaries in the next CBA negotiation, which will be in 2031."

Whether the league's revenue trajectory by 2031 will support significantly higher minimums depends entirely on how the expansion franchises perform, what media rights look like, and whether the PWHL can convert its dedicated fanbase into a deal that reflects that value. The salary data is the opening paragraph of a negotiation that won't conclude for five years.

A Governor's Regret, and What It Reveals

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, with roughly 200 days remaining in office, offered a candid assessment of his tenure's biggest mistake: signing the sports betting legalization bill in December 2021. His stated reasons — advertising saturation, more Ohioans gambling and losing money, athletes being harassed online by bettors with a financial stake in their performance — are not novel concerns. They have been raised in essentially every state that has moved through legalization.

What makes DeWine's remarks worth noting is not the substance of the critique but the rarity of a sitting executive volunteering it. Sports betting has generated significant tax revenue for Ohio and has been welcomed by leagues that once opposed it as a threat to competitive integrity. DeWine's reflections don't overturn that calculus, but they do surface a question that the industry's boosterism tends to paper over: who actually bears the cost when advertising volume exceeds what a regulated market can absorb responsibly?

The Governor's comments land in a regulatory environment that remains largely permissive. Whether they represent a leading indicator of legislative pushback or simply the reflections of one official on his way out is genuinely unclear.

NHL Social Media and What $360 Million Actually Measures

The Vegas Golden Knights are returning to the Stanley Cup Final for the third time in nine franchise years, which is an organizational achievement that ownership under Bill Foley has earned. The hockey story is real. But the adjacent business story — NHL clubs generating more than $360 million in aggregate social media value during the 2025-26 regular season, per research from Zoom and STN Digital — deserves its own read.

The Colorado Avalanche led the league at $27 million in social media value despite being eliminated in the playoffs. The Bruins, Penguins, and Canadiens each cleared $20 million. Facebook, notably, accounted for roughly a third of total value across all platforms — a figure that might surprise observers who have written the platform off as a youth-engagement vehicle.

The methodological question worth asking about any "social media value" metric is what the denominator is — how these figures are calculated, and whether they translate into revenue that actually lands on a team's income statement. Social media value as a category measures attention and exposure, which is meaningful but not identical to monetization. The NHL's league-of-the-year recognition at the Sports Business Awards suggests the broader industry finds the trajectory credible. Whether the social numbers represent a leading indicator of deeper fan monetization or simply a well-managed content operation is the more interesting question for the next rights cycle.

Pickleball court construction across the 100 largest U.S. cities grew 4% over the past year, compared to 13% in 2025 and 14% in 2024. Courts are still being added — the infrastructure build-out is not reversing — but the rate of expansion has compressed sharply. Whether that signals a sport finding its natural footprint or a fad decelerating toward its ceiling is the question that investors in dedicated pickleball facilities, and the operators who signed long-term leases on converted spaces, will be answering with their balance sheets over the next few years.

By Marcus Tate, Sports Desk Editor