We have movement in the college sports world.
It’s not the movement we’ve been watching for — pending congressional action on a massive bill to regulate intercollegiate athletics — but it’s movement with a political dimension nonetheless.
James Madison University announced Monday that its governing board had approved a move from its current home in the Sun Belt Conference to the American Conference.
USA Today was among the news sites that championed this move as good for both the school and its new conference: “Trading the Sun Belt for the American puts the Dukes on firmer conference footing and brings the school one step closer to a place in the Power Four, should the future bring another round of expansion and realignment.”
For the non-sports fans among us, the Power Four refers to the four top college sports conferences: the Big Ten, the Southeastern Conference, the Big 12 and the Atlantic Coast Conference, where Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia play. There’s a gap widening among those four, and when their TV contracts start expiring after the 2029 football season (the Big Ten’s is the first to run out), there’s widely expected to be another game of conference musical chairs.
Sports fans will weigh in on things like strength of schedule, recruiting territories and how JMU matches up against these other schools. Here’s what really matters, though: money. And that’s what eventually leads us to the politics, because most of the money that is paying for JMU’s sports programs comes from the pockets of its students, which is not usually the case at other schools.
JMU is trying to build a nationally recognized sports program and is succeeding — last year its football team was one of just 12 that qualified for the College Football Playoffs. It’s also doing so without the financial backing that other schools generally have.
JMU has a relatively small donor base and a relatively small revenue stream from broadcast rights. Instead, it requires students each year to pay $3,036 in “mandatory student fees” to support intercollegiate sports. The fee itself is not unusual; all state-supported schools in Virginia charge these fees. So do many other schools across the country. What is unusual in JMU’s case is the size of that sports fee and the degree to which the school relies on students to fund its sports ambitions. At Virginia Tech that fee is $732 a year — because Tech has deeper-pocketed donors and a more lucrative broadcast deal.
The philosophical question is whether students should be required to pay for intercollegiate sports at all in an era when players in the top programs are getting paid, often, six figures or more. As I pointed out in a column earlier this season: If a student entered James Madison University in 2022 and graduated on time in 2026, that student would have paid $11,689 in mandatory student fees to pay for the school’s intercollegiate athletics programs. This also means that some students — at JMU, the figure is 36% — are incurring some debt so that a relatively small number of their fellow students can play a sport and get paid for it.
This year’s General Assembly set in motion a study of how sports programs at Virginia’s state schools are financed. The report is due Nov. 1, 2028, and could either get ignored — or reshape how Virginia regulates how much schools can rely on student fees to fund their sports programs (generally speaking, quite lightly, given the figures you’re about to see).
The Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database (maintained by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University) says that in 2025 JMU spent $78.46 million on its sports programs. Of that, $58.14 million came from student fees — far more than any other Division I school in the country. Here’s how much JMU stands out for the amount of money it collects from student fees:
Meanwhile, JMU last year brought in just $4.13 million in broadcast rights. Of the 14 football-playing schools in the Sun Belt Conference, only one made more broadcast money: Louisiana-Lafayette brought in $4.79 million. By contrast, Virginia Tech brought in $48.07 million and the University of Virginia $47.53 million. Ohio State collected the most of any college: $97.84 million.
JMU’s not going to be close to those Power 4 numbers anytime soon but might be able to triple its current amount in the American Conference. The conference has 14 football-playing schools. Some are private schools that don’t disclose such data. Among the 10 American Conference schools that do, all of them brought in more broadcast money than JMU is making now. Knight-Newhouse says North Texas brought in the least, at $5.95 million. But five schools brought in $12 million or more, with South Florida at the top with $13.51 million in conference-related media rights.
Revenue-wise (again, bolstered by all that student money), JMU matches up quite well against its new rivals. Only one school — South Florida — spent more last year, so JMU will enter the conference on more-than-equal footing with other programs. Once JMU gets cut in on a full share of American Conference revenue (it’s unclear when that will be, although typically that doesn’t happen right away), it should be able to generate millions more on broadcast revenue than it is now.
Will that mean JMU can reduce what it’s making students pay to fund its ambitions to be a national sports powerhouse? That’s the political question for Virginia legislators.
I don’t usually write about sports but when I do it’s about the intersection of sports, politics and economics. For more political news of a more conventional variety, sign up for West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter.
