College Athletics’ Forgotten Assets

As the doors close on the 46th National Sports Collectors Convention in Rosemont, Ill., this weekend, the immense scale of the modern memorabilia industry is impossible to ignore. Over the past five days, more than 100,000 fans, collectors, auction houses, and investors have packed a space six times larger than the NACDA vendor hall to buy, sell, and trade millions of dollars in alternative assets, proving that sports collectibles have evolved far beyond a niche hobby.

As college athletic departments search for new revenue opportunities, the booming market on display exposes a major blind spot for our industry: without a deliberate collectibles strategy, universities are leaving significant revenue on the table.

The appetite for authentic sports history has never been larger, yet many programs have never evaluated the assets sitting right down the hall. Walk into the storage rooms of almost any athletic department, and you will likely find shelves lined with boxes that haven’t been opened in years. Inside are decades of institutional history like stacks of unused ticket stock, media guides, publicity photographs, press credentials, and championship decorations.

To most people, they are simply old boxes. To fans and collectors, they represent a highly valuable piece of sports history.

From Nerdy Hobby to Mainstream Investment

The collectibles industry is experiencing unprecedented expansion, with a current global market estimated between $320 billion and $600 billion. In 2025, eBay alone reported over $10 billion in collectibles Gross Merchandise Value (GMV), with trading cards driving growth for nine consecutive quarters. Beyond cards, the market for original vintage sports photography and authenticated ticket stubs from milestone games has exploded, with highly graded, one-of-a-kind pieces routinely fetching tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars at premier auction houses.

This surge hasn’t gone unnoticed by savvy investors. Serial entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk recently called collecting the “next lifestyle genre,” noting that younger demographics, raised in the digital era, are helping drive the growth of the industry through their desire to own tangible items. Simultaneously, high-net-worth buyers are redirecting funds previously earmarked for contemporary art toward six- and seven-figure historical memorabilia. Vaynerchuk anticipates this behavior will become so ingrained that Fortune 500 brands will soon require dedicated “collectibles marketing strategies.”

This represents a true paradigm shift, as items once viewed as nerdy niche hobbies firmly cross into mainstream pop culture and high-end alternative investing.

The Opportunity for College Athletics

As someone who spent more than 20 years working in D1 college athletics, most recently as Assistant AD for Communications at Marquette University, I came to realize that many departments are sitting on an overlooked asset. While universities have become increasingly creative in developing new revenue streams, responsibly monetizing portions of their historical collections remains largely unexplored.

Schools that once printed thousands of physical items each season have transitioned almost entirely to digital platforms. As a result, older physical artifacts are becoming increasingly scarce, thus driving the value in the collectibles market. What sits in storage today represents a finite supply that will never be recreated.

A standard athletic department storage room often holds a wide variety of catalogable assets:

• Original negatives and Type I publicity photographs
• Game tickets, unused ticket stock, and event credentials
• Locker room signage and championship memorabilia
• Warm-up apparel and team-issued gear
• Game management and coach/player equipment
• Event programs, press kits, media guides, and original scorebooks

Departments would be wise to start assessing two of the most frequently overlooked materials, tickets and photographs, which often carry immense value:

Type I Photographs: A ‘Type I’ publicity photograph, produced within two years of being captured from the original negative and printed on photographic paper from the era, can be worth thousands of dollars once authenticated. Because newsrooms frequently destroyed publicity photos due to storage costs or fire hazards, surviving prints are exceptionally rare. For example, Marquette’s most successful student-athlete, Ralph Metcalfe, was a 4×100 relay teammate of Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Indelible, authentic publicity photographs of the duo at NCAA Championship meets hold international cultural significance and immense collector value.

Intact Tickets from Milestone Events: Because many stadiums historically ripped tickets upon entry, fully intact items hold significant premiums. Bulk boxes of tickets can hide extraordinary moments. If someone at the University of Kansas sorted through old tickets from their 1997 home football schedule, they might find intact stubs from the Sept. 6 season opener against TCU. While that game might seem ordinary, it featured the collegiate debut of future Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee LaDainian Tomlinson, a detail that a collector would instantly recognize and value highly.

While Marquette is fortunate to possess one of the nation’s premier university archives, many athletic departments lack the resources to manage their own history. In the corporate sector, leading brands rely on dedicated archivists to determine which historical assets to preserve and which to leverage. College athletics needs similar stewards to protect its shared cultural heritage and unlock its hidden value.

A Blueprint for Action

The first step should be taking inventory. Many departments simply don’t know what they own and that means conducting a comprehensive inventory, not unlike what museums do with their collections.

Over decades, physical materials accumulate as coaches, administrators and staffers retire, offices move, and technology evolves. There are often duplicate or non-essential materials that could be authenticated, cataloged, and made available to alumni and fans through team stores, online marketplaces, fundraising auctions, or donor appreciation programs.

Crucially, this isn’t an argument for totally liquidating institutional history. Quite the opposite. The most historically significant artifacts belong in museums, archives, and permanent displays. Responsible stewardship means knowing the difference between irreplaceable artifacts and duplicate or non-essential materials that can strengthen community while generating revenue.

Sports information professionals, university archivists, marketing departments, and equipment personnel all possess pieces of the puzzle. In particular, many schools are fortunate to have one or multiple long-time SIDs who serve as walking encyclopedias of program history. These individuals possess invaluable institutional knowledge, knowing exactly which games were milestones, which collegiate debuts went on to become historic, and the rich context behind seemingly ordinary artifacts. Tapping into this knowledge presents a unique opportunity for veteran SIDs to shift from traditional media relations into a direct revenue-generation role, leveraging their decades of experience to identify and contextualize the most valuable assets hidden in storage.

Not every department is sitting on millions of dollars of potential revenue. But virtually all have underinvested in the creation of a new source of alumni engagement while responsibly generating incremental revenue from materials that might otherwise remain forgotten.

College athletics has spent generations creating unforgettable moments. The next opportunity is recognizing the value of the history that’s already been preserved. The departments that take inventory today will be best positioned to preserve their legacy, deepen alumni engagement and thoughtfully unlock new revenue opportunities tomorrow.