Wall Street Journal: Study Values Razorback Football At $332 Million

University of Arkansas football has been described as the closest thing to professional sports that the state of Arkansas has.

What sort of value would Razorback football have if the program could be bought and sold like a pro franchise? We now have an idea thanks to a study published in the Wall Street Journal and conducted by Ryan Brewer, an assistant professor of finance at Indiana University-Purdue University Columbus.

Brewer assigned values to major conference programs, including the UA. He said the Razorbacks are worth $332 million, good enough for No. 14 on the list of 69 schools. That ranks Arkansas No. 6 in the SEC.

Texas is No. 1 at $761.7 million. National championship game participants Notre Dame and Alabama are both ranked in the Top 10. The Fighting Irish are No. 4 at $597.4 million and the Crimson Tide are No. 8 at $476.0 million.

How did Brewer arrive at these values?

[Brewer] calculated the intrinsic valuations for 115 of the teams in the top-tier Football Bowl Subdivision. Among other factors, the study looked at each program’s revenues and expenses and made cash-flow adjustments, risk assessments and growth projections for each school. The resulting figures represent what the teams might fetch if they could be bought and sold like pro franchises. (As a point of reference, the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars sold in late 2011 for about $760 million.)

Additional rankings can be found online at Wall Street Journal.