Money and College Football

A breakdown of how much money conferences and schools make from Division 1-A football.

Under the BCS, each BCS conference was given a total of $27.5 million to distribute out to its member schools. With the new College Football Playoff, and the dying of the Big East, has lead to each conference receivng $50 million in revenue each season. Additional money is given to conferences based on New Years Day Bowl Games and tickets to the College Football Playoff final four matchup. For a complete breakdown of how the money is awarded to each conference, go to this article.

Power Five Conference Payouts*:

ACC — $83.5 million — $5.96 per school

Big Twelve — $58 million — $5.8 per school

Big Ten — $60 million — $4.2 per school

Pac-12 — $60 million — $5 per school

SEC — $87.5 million — $6.25 per school**

Group of Five (non power-5 conferences) and Independents

$60 Million divided evenly across the American, C-USA, MWC, Sun Belt, and MAC ($12 million to each conference).

Boise State making the Fiesta Bowl gives the MWC an additional $4 million.

Notre Dame — $2.3 million base

BYU, Navy, Army — split $933,000 across the board (roughly $311,000 each)

If you ask me, the Power Five conferences were very methodical about poaching members of the Big East. Because its top teams joined other conferences, it eliminated what used to be six automatic BCS qualifying conferences to five Power Conferences. The BCS gave 27 million to each of the six ($162 million total). This year, each conference makes $50 million ($250 total). If the six power conferences were still in place, the $250 million would be split to only $41.6 million each.

If you happen to land on this blog post and you don’t care much about college football, I would suggest to stop reading at this point. The information below will be boring observations I have made about college football and what sense can be made for the numbers listed above.

Observation #1

BYU needs to find a conference home. I get it, being independent gives the university a certain amount of freedom with scheduling. I just don’t see that great of an advantage by having freedom in scheduling and losing out on a conference share. If you look at the numbers, BYU could make nearly triple the amount they made in 2014 if they go back to the Mountain West. For the foreseeable future, BYU and Boise State could be battling it out each year to see who will represent the non-Power 5 conferences in a New Year’s Day bowl game, which as we have seen, will give the conference an additional $4 million. If they could somehow squeeze into the Big 12, they would generate major ratings. In 2013, BYU played Texas on ESPN2, which had a viewership of 1.2 million. This is pretty significant because 1) it wasn’t on national television and 2) there was a rain delay which drove many viewers away. Put this game towards the beginning of the season, and you have a opening day conference game that almost compares to South Carolina vs. Georgia.

Observation #2

The Big Twelve is in no hurry to expand. Look at the numbers. Even though the conference didn’t get a bonus for a team playing in the 4-team playoff, each member of the conference is getting nearly the same amount as the members from the SEC and ACC. I bet many schools in the Big 12 would rather have $50 million cut 10 ways instead of $87 million cut 14 ways. Keep this in mind: two of the contract bowls between Power 5 conferences are being used as playoff games this season; next season the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl will be freed up, which will give the Big 12 approximately $40 million additional to the $50 million base pay. At the very least, the Big 12 will be sharing around $90 million dollars among 10 schools next season. Compare that to what the SEC did this year: $87.5 million divided by 14 schools is $6.25 million dollars per school. On a per school basis, the Big Twelve will benefit from keeping its membership at 10, even if it keeps them from winning national championships. And this year shows, it isn’t out of the realm of possibility for a Big Twelve school to make it into the 4-team playoff.

For the past year, the Big Twelve has been working to appeal the NCAA regulation that states a conference must have twelve members before establishing a conference championship game. If this appeal goes through, it will be a major shame. The Big Ten added members to get to a championship game, even at the cost of splitting allotted money amongst more members. The reason teams left the Big Twelve had to do with the way they were improperly splitting the revenue. They can only blame themselves for feeding everything to Texas and Oklahoma, and now their poor business decisions have come back to haunt them. So instead of playing by the rules, they are going to challenge the rules to where it benefits them and nobody else.

Observation #3

I’m going to humor the possibility that the Big Twelve will start looking to expand to twelve members. I have a list of four teams, in order of likelihood of joining the conference:

1. BYU
2. Boise State
3. Houston
4. Notre Dame
5. BYU makes too much sense because of the reasons explained above. The school is making way less money than it should be based on the level of competitiveness it brings to the league. They have the academic standards, the football culture, and the right viewership to make it into a top-tier conference. BYU vs. Texas would be an excellent annual tradition.
6. It is time a big conference takes a risk on Boise State. Their dominance of the Group of Five has gone on long enough. If the Big Twelve makes a play for Boise State, they will instantly gain two conference rivals: TCU and Oklahoma. Could you imagine the build-up to a revenge game at Norman? Boise doesn’t have an extremely strong following, and I know the Blue Field may repulse other AD’s, but the university is growing and its other sports offer a decent level of competion.

3. Houston makes a great case because they already have a strong number of games showing on national television (though all of them were broadcasted on ESPN networks and not by any major national provider). Houston’s seven games on national television averaged a viewership of 0.5 million per game. Not bad, considering ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU and ESPNEWS programs all average a viewership of 1.8 million. Take out ABC and ESPN, that average drops significantly. Houston’s geographic location and history of a winning program makes them just as goof of a fit for the Big Twelve as Boise Sate.

4. This would be a major play. Notre Dame is college football royalty. It is the Mewtwo of college athletics. Take everything I said about BYU and multiply it by about 10. The fact that Notre Dame can make $2.3 million on its own, with no conference affiliation, is appalling. If Notre Dame makes its way into a major conference, that $2.3 million should either go to the other independents (who are getting royally screwed) or to the Group of Five. Notre Dame going to the Big Twelve would be hard to pull off because of its basketball program being a member of the ACC. I do think, however, that the ACC cannot handle a 15th football member. I don’t see an ACC team making it to the playoffs for the next several seasons, so the money being distributed to the ACC will be decreasing (especially with the loss of the Orange Bowl next year). The ACC made some great moves to build up its basketball conference, but in the world of college football (where all the money is) they have almost spread themselves too thin.