How much is Mississippi State's football program worth?

With everything that’s happened, happening right now or will happen in the future with college sports, is it really crazy to think college football teams will be bought and sold like a professional sports franchise?

Yes. Yes, it is. But when has a crazy idea stopped the media from writing stories about? Especially in the summer when there are fewer games being played.

In a hypothetical world where teams are bought and sold like professional franchises, the teams would be given a valuation and that’s what The Athletic’s Matt Baker has done.

The Athletic published an article Monday morning ranking every Power 4 conference football team by how much the team would sell for. The top teams aren’t surprising, but where Mississippi State landed was.

The Bulldogs’ program came in at No. 57 with a valuation of $250 million. That’s behind other teams like Syracuse (No. 46, $329 million), Maryland (No. 52, $288 million) Indiana (No. 38, $386 million), Purdue (No. 41, $367 million), Georgia Tech (No. 43, $340 million) and BYU (No. 50, $306 million). It’s also the same amount as the expansion fee for a WNBA franchise.

Perhaps the only face-saving part for Mississippi State is that it wasn’t the lowest ranked SEC team. That honor goes to Vanderbilt, who is ranked one spot behind the Bulldogs with a $228 million valuation. The SEC has 12 of the top 30 ranked teams.

Here’s how The Athletic arrived at its rankings:

“We approached the hypothetical question with a methodology that was part art, part science. We used real-life pro transactions to gauge purchase prices relative to a team’s revenue over the past three available years of data. NFL and NBA sales guided our ratios in the SEC and Big Ten, while the MLB and NHL were our rough benchmarks in the ACC and Big 12. For each school in a Power 4 conference (plus Notre Dame), we factored in everything from prestige and championships to facility renovations, population trends and realignment scenarios. That means treating Notre Dame more like the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston College more like the Kansas City Royals.

“What a team sells for (our objective with this story) is not the same as a team’s actual value (a story for another day). Buyers routinely pay a premium because there are only so many opportunities to own a sports team.

“That sentiment would be even stronger in college football, where pre-established allegiances and irrational decisions already run deeper. Though Texas A&M just missed our $1 billion club, it’s easy to envision a few Aggies boosters artificially boosting the price to brag about spending 10 figures on their team. Or some Michigan fan paying extra to make sure the Wolverines out-priced Ohio State.”