The Rich Get Richer, College Edition

As college athletics trundle blindfolded and barefoot through the furniture-filled, Lego-littered room of athlete empowerment and conference upheaval, questions often arise. Among them: Will major college sports look different? And, Is it really all about money? 

The answers, respectively, are ‘yes’ and ‘hell yes.’ The next installment of oversized collectives and “Our team has to go where?” commences in the fall when the two alphas – the Big Ten and Southeastern conferences – and the mid-alphabet, reactionary Big 12 and Atlantic Coast conferences re-open for business. The majority of Division I programs will see little difference in how they conduct their affairs, except as witnesses to the yawning financial disparities in the system. 

The latest example comes in the form of the College Football Playoff, which expands to 12 teams next season and whose rewards and payouts are heavily tilted toward the SEC and Big Ten. College snoop Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports dropped a well sourced, deep dive into the origins of the new playoff structure. Read it for yourself, but a couple of key takeaways are that the arrangement might not have been so one-sided had all parties been able to agree on a playoff format as recently as a couple of years ago, and the SEC and Big Ten went full brinksmanship and aren’t shy about displaying who’s in charge. 

Did I include this image of Greg
Sankey and Ted Cruz to damn by
association? Hard to say.

SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said that his conference would have walked away from the playoff and figured out something on its own. “When we ended that set of meetings in January 2022 without a decision, I was clear: If you are going to walk away from this opportunity, we are going to reevaluate our position on format, revenue sharing and governance,” he said in Dellenger’s piece. Tony Petitti, commissioner of the Big Ten, said that “if we couldn’t craft a deal, we’d look at other options. We would have started over. Without seeing better alignment, we weren’t going to sign. We were 100 percent confident and made it clear that we were only going to do a deal that worked for us.” 

The Big Ten and SEC already distance themselves financially from the rest of Division I due to their massive football TV contracts. Both are expected to distribute in the neighborhood of $70 million annually to each member school going forward. The ACC and Big 12 will pay out approximately $40-45 million annually to their schools, under terms of their own TV contracts. Now add the new playoff deal, which will pay out an average of about $1.3 billion per year for six years. The SEC and Big Ten each will receive 29 percent of the revenue, the ACC 17.1 percent, and the Big 12 14.7 percent. Notre Dame will receive one percent, and the 64 schools in the so-called Group of Five will split the remaining nine percent, with a few extra nuggets and sweeteners thrown in. 

In terms of actual dollars, SEC and Big Ten schools will receive more than $20 million apiece, while ACC and Big 12 schools get $10-12 million each. Totaling it up, the discrepancy between the Big Two and the second two grows from $30-35 million per year to between $40 and $50 million annually. My public school arithmetic skills suggest that means a $200 million gap between first- and second-tier athletic departments inside five years. 

The Big Ten and SEC Bigfooted the discussions a) because they reasoned that they were the most successful participants in the playoff historically and brought more value to the table, and b) because they could. Sankey even disclosed that the 29 percent figure in the new deal was a compromise, that the initial proposal was an even greater cut but came down as part of negotiations. That, boys and girls, is leverage. 

In any case, upper tier college football will begin to look more like European pro soccer and the English Premier League, excepting things such as relegation and stoppage time and foreign financing – for now, anyway. Everybody’s playing the same game, but there are a handful of deep-pocketed franchises that can afford the best players, the best facilities and simply outspend the competition. It’s already that way to an extent, but the funding gap will make it even more pronounced. 

The SEC and Big Ten also reason that they and their schools need more money because their expenses will be greater. Travel ain’t cheap when your league stretches from New Jersey to southern California and the Pacific Northwest, or from central Florida to Oklahoma. Though the newly constituted Big 12 and ACC say: Tell me about it. 

The greatest expense, however, will be athlete compensation and whatever form that takes. Toward that end, the SEC and Big Ten have begun preliminary research into areas such as collective bargaining and athletes-as-employee status. Many figure that’s how it will play out in the effort to avoid out-and-out bidding wars, to get a handle on costs, and to produce something resembling consistent spread sheets in the event that private equity firms want to partner up with leagues or schools. What, you thought hedge funds and the mega-wealthy wouldn’t be interested in eight- and nine-figure revenue streams because the company letterhead is attached to college sports? You thought that college presidents and governing boards would decline access to that kind of cash, given those groups' possible mercenary practices? You’re new around here, aren’t you? 

Bemoan the fact that money has forever changed the college athletics that we grew up with and get all misty about. Though it’s worth noting that the old system was a charade in many ways – an underground economy hidden behind the mantel of amateurism and the glow of youth. Nine- and ten-figure deals disrupted and distended the system but also brought the entire enterprise into the light and revealed actions and motives. Most important, it gave the primary participants, athletes, additional freedom and a long overdue cut, as the old structure was both unfair and, as courts have repeatedly ruled of late, illegal. Change is afoot, and if we don’t know about the how, at least we have a pretty good idea about the why.